Robert Southwell left Kinsale, Co. Cork, for France, Italy, Bohemia, Germany, and the Low Countries in March 1659, undertaking educational travel relatively late at twenty-four. He considered his early twenties as ‘blankes wherein I could write nothing’, but his three years abroad were ‘of a better edition’.Footnote 1 Historians of travel have tended to agree. From John Stoye's classic to Jeremy Black's prolific output, studies begin as undifferentiated ‘Englishmen’ or ‘Britons’ arrive on the French or Dutch coast.Footnote 2 They convey a valuable sense of national experience, but cannot explore the possibility that preparations and family backgrounds shaped continental encounters. Scholars return with increasing sophistication to the theme of ‘travel as education’, examining journeys as gendered rites of passage, but they rarely consider how voyages fitted within broader upbringing.Footnote 3 Once abroad, young men are often isolated from fellow travellers, expatriates, and hosts: even outside their eighteenth-century comfort zone, traditional studies of the Grand Tour continue to prioritize art and architecture over interactions with people and places.Footnote 4 The company and contexts in which travellers encountered Europe remain blanks wherein historians have written little.
Recent studies have broadened the scope of work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel. Ilaria Bignamini has urged historians to pay more attention to Italian hosts and Rosemary Sweet has drawn on the evidence of British women and men to explore their engagement with Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice. Gerrit Verhoeven has suggested, in a Dutch and Flemish context, that shorter ‘pleasure trips’ to northerly cities represent a distinct form of ‘travel behaviour’. These developments contribute to a nuanced understanding of destinations, but most historians still have little to say on where travellers came from.Footnote 5 ‘English’ or ‘British’ national studies are often interested in the artistic and architectural inspiration that travellers brought home, rather than the backgrounds, preparations, and networks that shaped foreign experiences. These aspects emerge more clearly from a group of families, making it possible to relate travel, often a stand-alone subject, to broader social and cultural questions of identity, family strategy, and elite formation.
I
Robert Southwell's travels have received little attention, like most voyages from Britain and Ireland between the royalist exile and the mid-eighteenth-century heyday of the Grand Tour, but they began a lifetime of continental engagement. Southwell took diplomatic postings to Lisbon in the mid-1660s, to Brussels in 1671, and to Brandenburg in 1680. His voyage of 1659–62 also initiated generations of educational travel by young men in his family. His nephew, Sir Philip Perceval, travelled to France and Italy between 1676 and 1679. Southwell's son, Edward, toured the Low Countries in 1691 and 1696. Sir John Perceval, Sir Philip's nephew, travelled to France, Italy, Geneva, and the Low Countries between 1705 and 1707. Edward Southwell accompanied his son, also Edward, to France and Lorraine in 1723. Two years later, the twenty-year-old returned on a tour of France, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. The Southwells and the Percevals were ‘a family whose sense of itself and whose wider relationships were shaped and reshaped by frequent travel’, but they will also demonstrate that outlooks, identifications, and connections from home shaped European encounters.Footnote 6
Southwells and Percevals travelled as part of a wider network. Robert King, the young second Baron Kingston and a neighbouring Cork landowner, joined Sir Philip Perceval in the Loire Valley in 1677. Ties of patronage linked Southwells and Percevals to the magnates of the Munster plantation, the Boyles, and the longer-established Butlers. Robert Southwell shared advice and contacts with James Butler, the first duke of Ormond and a prominent royalist exile during the 1650s.Footnote 7 Young Butlers ventured abroad in the following decades. James, the future second duke, travelled from the age of ten in the 1670s. Charles, the teenage future second earl of Arran, toured France, the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy over two voyages in the late 1680s. He undertook the second journey with Samuel Waring, a young Ulster squire. The Butlers rubbed shoulders abroad with their Irish rivals, the Boyles, whose continental experience stretched back to the 1630s.Footnote 8 Most evidence survives for Lionel Boyle, the teenage third earl of Orrery, who travelled to France, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy between 1685 and 1689.
Robert Southwell, president of the Royal Society between 1690 and 1695, pursued natural-philosophical interests that connected him to other travellers. He discussed education and travel with William Petty, who had studied in France and the United Provinces in the 1640s and sent his son, Charles, to The Hague in 1686.Footnote 9 The Molyneux brothers, William and Thomas, travelled through the Low Countries and northern France in the mid-1680s and William's son, Samuel, ventured to Hanover via Amsterdam and Antwerp in 1712–14. St George Ashe made separate trips to Paris and Vienna during the 1680s. His teenage son, also St George, travelled to Italy between 1717 and 1720 under the supervision of George Berkeley, who had undertaken Italian travel three years previously and corresponded with Sir John Perceval.Footnote 10 The Molyneuxs, the Ashes, and Berkeley shared natural-philosophical enthusiasm and a Trinity College Dublin education with Robert Molesworth, who visited the Low Countries, France, and Italy between 1684 and 1688.Footnote 11 On a subsequent diplomatic posting to Copenhagen, Molesworth wrote an Account of Denmark that proved controversial for its thinly veiled criticism of the English constitution. His son, John, travelled to Italy in 1703–4 and visited Hanover and Berlin in an ambassadorial retinue the following year, preparing for Italian diplomatic postings that allowed further family travel.Footnote 12
This group coalesced around the expertise of Robert Southwell, Robert Molesworth, and William King, the Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin. The first two claimed first-hand experience. Southwell's travels complemented his ‘peculiar art in directing the education of youth’ and, in conversation and correspondence, he imparted ‘my owne practice when I was in Travell’ to generations of relatives and acquaintances.Footnote 13 Molesworth similarly drew on his ‘Experience and view of the varityes of the world’ to advise friends and family, but his thoughts on educational travel spread to a wider readership in the preface to his Account of Denmark.Footnote 14 King, by contrast, never ventured further than London, but he shared prominence in Dublin society and enthusiasm for natural philosophy with this well-travelled circle. The archbishop wrote letters of advice to Samuel Molyneux and Edward Southwell, imparting knowledge gathered in his extensive library and through avid questioning of returning travellers. He recognized the premium placed on first-hand experience in the formation of expertise.Footnote 15
An examination of these families will enhance understandings of educational travel, but it should also illuminate aspects of Irish elite formation. The decades after the Restoration were transformative, as power gathered in the hands of Church of Ireland landowners who marginalized Catholics, Presbyterians, and the poor, but historians have only recently begun to explore the European dimensions of this process. Though studies draw parallels between the nascent ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ and other European anciens régimes, continental connections have more usually featured in explanations of ‘how Catholic Ireland survived’.Footnote 16 The ‘Irish in Europe’ project, which traces links forged by merchants, seminarians, soldiers, and exiles, has produced several edited collections that focus, with isolated exceptions, on the Catholic majority. Contributions reattach an Irish history ‘severed from its European context’, turning ‘away from purely national issues and the obsession with England, to European questions’, but they risk overlooking the continental entanglements of Protestant families who maintained ties across the Irish Sea.Footnote 17 Louis Cullen has long charted both Protestant and Catholic mercantile networks, while Toby Barnard, Patrick Little, and Raymond Gillespie have begun to explore the specific question of Protestant travel, but these valuable contributions remain isolated: the ‘Irish in Europe’ continue to be overwhelmingly Catholic.Footnote 18 This article adds to developing scholarship, most evident in recent surveys by Jane Ohlmeyer and Nicholas Canny, on cross-confessional interactions between Irish and continental elites.Footnote 19
Church of Ireland landowners traditionally described themselves as ‘the English interest in Ireland’. The view that Protestants might constitute the ‘Irish nation’, for which Archbishop King and William Molyneux were progenitors, only took hold after our period.Footnote 20 Within this elite, however, Barnard distinguishes between locally rooted ‘Irish Protestants’ and ‘the Anglo-Irish’, who also enjoyed parallel lives in England.Footnote 21 The Southwells were ‘Kinsale Protestants’ before the 1670s but, while the town remained their main source of income, Robert secured a Whitehall career and a house outside Bristol. His son, Edward, was a ‘little Irish man’ during his Cork childhood but, after a life mostly spent in London and Gloucestershire, family mourned simply ‘a friend of Ireland’.Footnote 22 Molesworth outlooks were similarly informed by possessions in Co. Dublin and Yorkshire, while Boyles, Butlers, and Percevals moved among an Anglo-Irish nobility. On the other hand, Waring and the Molyneuxs were, despite English contacts and experience, respectively rooted in Ulster and Dublin society. These families cannot offer an escape from ‘the obsession with England’, yet Anglicization fails to tell the whole story. Ohlmeyer ultimately describes seventeenth-century elite formation as a process of ‘making Ireland English’, despite her attention to European parallels and connections, but families sought prestige through continental encounters.Footnote 23 This sample demonstrates triangular interactions between Ireland, England, and Europe.
Many histories of travel are more accurately studies of published travel literature, while pioneering archival work has sometimes risked slipping into anecdote, but these families offer the chance to incorporate manuscript journals, letters, and financial accounts into a contextualized study that relates several generations of personal experience to broader questions. The preparations that young men undertook, the advice that they received, and their different forms of educational travel were all shaped by family circumstances. Once abroad, backgrounds and identifications informed interactions with fellow travellers, expatriate communities, and hosts, whose neglected perspectives are more easily recovered under a narrow focus. That focus highlights engagement with particular people and places rather than a monolithic continent, as travellers returned with objects and accomplishments that contributed to Irish elite formation. By concentrating on a group of families, this article returns young men to the networks and contexts in which they understood and experienced educational travel. It begins the process of reattaching travel to social, as well as cultural, history.
II
Family circumstances and strategies shaped educational travel, affecting the possibility, nature, and timing of voyages, but they are overlooked by studies that prioritize and isolate familiar Grand Tours. This circle of Protestants from Ireland reveals the contexts and range of options within which family-level decisions institutionalized educational travel over several generations, as continental experience afforded further sway to paternal figures like Robert Southwell and Robert Molesworth.Footnote 24 Families adapted the ideal French and Italian voyage, presented in publications by job-seeking tutors like Jean Gailhard and François Maximilien Misson, according to their financial means and social ambitions.
Income might dictate whether or not families sanctioned travel through France and Italy. Between October 1676 and June 1679, Sir Philip Perceval spent £915 on tuition, servants, accommodation, supplies, travel, entertainment, and souvenirs.Footnote 25 Orrery accounted for £1,985 between April 1685 and June 1689.Footnote 26 Such sums were no obstacle to the Butlers, since Ormond's annual income of £24,000 dwarfed others from Ireland, but neither the Percevals nor the Barons Kingston struggled to finance long periods abroad on roughly £4,000 a year. The earls of Orrery enjoyed a similar income, but had gathered vast debts by the time of Lionel's travels.Footnote 27 Senior relatives advised relocations and economies in order to ‘live cheaper’ abroad, as a lavish voyage to Italy stretched the Orrery budget.Footnote 28 Almeric de Courcy, twenty-third Baron Kingsale, and Sir Thomas (later first Baron) Southwell, of the family's Limerick branch, required similar ostentation but their fortunes were ‘too small’ to travel ‘with any advantage’.Footnote 29
Various strategies allowed travellers of lesser means, and lower expectations, to reach Italy more cheaply. Some relied on patrons. William Waring's £600 a year would not have carried his son to Rome, but Samuel's achievements at Trinity College Dublin persuaded Ormond to fund him as a suitable companion for Charles Butler.Footnote 30 Others lowered costs by delaying voyages, avoiding the expensive tutors, servants, and instruction required by teenagers like Orrery. The threshold of independence was around twenty-one, when Sir Philip Perceval and his uncle agreed that he was ‘no child now’ and might ‘govern himself’.Footnote 31 Twenty-four-year-old Robert Southwell, whose father received £1,014 a year, embarked with a servant in 1659.Footnote 32 Robert Molesworth was twenty-eight in 1684, returning four years later to an annual income of £2,800. He advocated travel by ‘Men’ rather than ‘great Boys’, who gained little ‘for the Expences laid out by their Parents’.Footnote 33
Closer destinations offered more accessible experiences to those who lacked the time or the funds for Italian travel. Twenty-two-year-old Thomas Molyneux saw Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Haarlem, and Utrecht before medical study at Leiden in 1683, which he broke to visit The Hague. He and his elder brother William also undertook a three-month journey through the Low Countries and the Rhineland to Paris in the summer of 1685. Thomas hoped to cross the Alps the following year but his father dissuaded him on financial grounds.Footnote 34 Revolution denied a comprehensive tour to the elder Edward Southwell, who joined Williamite forces at seventeen in 1688 and subsequently assisted his father, the wartime secretary of state for Ireland.Footnote 35 Edward gathered piecemeal European experience in later decades, following government officials to the Low Countries in 1691 and 1696, visiting Paris in 1714 and 1718, and accompanying his son through France and Lorraine in 1723. The ideal remained, as Archbishop King noted that Southwell needed only ‘Italy and Spain to compleat yr. Travells’, but family circumstances forced adaptations.Footnote 36
Within families, educational strategies shaped varying engagements with travel. Although Sir Philip, Robert, and John Perceval all left Ireland for Oxford or Cambridge and Lincoln's Inn during the 1670s, the brothers undertook further travel according to their ‘different estates’. While the heir headed for Italy, Robert kept a travel diary in southern Wales and John followed Sir Philip ‘on ye globe & Mapps’. John regretted that neither ‘quality nor calling’ allowed him ‘a harmless ramble about some parts of ye World’, recognizing ‘an accomplishment butt onely fitt for elder Brothers’.Footnote 37 Molesworths travelled further under a similarly stratified approach. John enjoyed an extensive Italian voyage as the eldest son, but later held diplomatic posts that allowed younger brothers to see ‘the most remarkable towns in Italy’ without ‘a large allowance’. He employed Coote and Bysse as secretaries, arranging sight-seeing trips on which they need not ‘appear fine’; Robert Molesworth sent Bysse well-enough equipped ‘for my 7th Son’.Footnote 38 While heirs in the wealthiest families might undertake recognizable ‘Grand Tours’, younger brothers and families of more limited means pursued adapted forms of educational travel.
III
By the time that travellers set off, the lenses through which they would view destinations were supposed to be in place. Robert Southwell was judged ‘very ingenious and well inclined, apt to make good use of travelling’ in 1659, but how did young men acquire this aptitude?Footnote 39 The question should be central to studies of continental experience, but it has received little attention. Many of these families, so embedded in natural-philosophical circles, prized observational techniques laid out by Francis Bacon and their own Robert Boyle.Footnote 40 Southwells and Molesworths practised them at an early age, writing descriptions of Cirencester, Portsmouth, or Bartholomew Fair.Footnote 41 William Petty undertook a trip through Britain and Ireland in 1679, introducing his seven-year-old son, Charles, to the discomforts of travel and encouraging him to ‘give a good account of all that is remarkable in the 3 kingdomes’.Footnote 42 Alongside training for physical hardships and epistolary duties, future travellers prepared to converse abroad. Children as young as five learned French, the most privileged from live-in ‘Frenchmen’. Families also took advantage of the Huguenot Refuge, sending pupils to new French-speaking schools in London or, by the early eighteenth century, in Dublin and at Portarlington, Queen's County.Footnote 43 Proficiency in French offered cultural prestige, particularly into the eighteenth century, but its ubiquity in European courts and learned circles meant that it also represented essential preparation for travel.
Time at university offered knowledge and contacts that further shaped travelling experiences. Though little survives of the formal curriculum at Trinity College Dublin, acquaintances and interests developed at the university and in the Dublin Philosophical Society, often inextricable from Trinity circles, introduced possible companions, established networks of advice, and advocated observational approaches. More evidence survives of the well-born few who attended university in England.Footnote 44 Though modern languages were not yet on the Oxford curriculum, students read French with their tutors and spoke with expatriate Frenchmen in order to avoid wasting time abroad ‘only at Schoole’.Footnote 45 They also read and conversed about travel. The year before his voyage, Robert Southwell compiled advice from printed sources like Bacon's ‘Of travel’, Peacham's Compleat gentleman, and Osborne's Advice to a son, distilling reading undertaken at Queen's College, Oxford, and Lincoln's Inn.Footnote 46 Soon after his return, Southwell stood ‘obleiged unto’ a Queen's contemporary ‘to write something concerning my travaile abrode, and the improovemts to be acquired in such an Enterprise’.Footnote 47 By the 1670s, as Magdalen and Merton students debated ‘whither travelling be good for English Gentlmn’, Southwell recommended maps and globes to nephews at Oxford and Cambridge from a position of expertise.Footnote 48 Not all travel followed university, especially among the nobility, but networks and approaches first encountered there might shape European voyages.
Preparations continued in London, which attracted many from Ireland as an educational centre.Footnote 49 Robert Southwell and Sir Philip Perceval both attended Lincoln's Inn between university and foreign travel but Huguenot refugees added new metropolitan preparatory options where ‘there was formerly the Inns of Court alone’. Solomon Foubert, for instance, relocated his Parisian academy to Westminster in 1679 with the explicit aim of preparing young men for foreign voyages. A grounding in ‘riding, ffrench, Mathematicks, & all exercises…which are usually learnt in Travell’ allowed families to shorten expensive periods of settlement abroad. Southwell steered his kinsman, Sir Thomas, towards Foubert, with whom he might ‘passe 6 Monthes in as many Englishmen doe, ye better to prepare them for the improovemt. of Travell’.Footnote 50 Molesworths similarly attended London Huguenot establishments ‘to qualify’ them ‘for going abroad’.Footnote 51 Archipelagic educational mobility was bound up, in these families, with journeys further afield.
Travel through Britain and Ireland represented a final method of preparation. Domestic travel, which historians rarely link with foreign voyages, in fact offered frames of reference for continental experience. Southwells and Percevals judged that knowledge of England demonstrated readiness for Europe, an approach they shared with Richard Lassels's influential guidebook and English acquaintances like the Blathwayts, but Irish residents had to acquire this familiarity.Footnote 52 Born and raised in Cork before adolescent education in London and Oxford, Sir Philip Perceval travelled through the West Country in 1676. Perceval and his Huguenot tutor, Jean Gailhard, visited Stonehenge and explored towns with paid guides, treating the countryside as a network of noble seats. The journey tested the rapport between Gailhard and his charge but, most importantly, it furnished Perceval with ‘some Standard in your mind for the like things, when you observe them abroad’.Footnote 53 Seven-year-old Charles Petty pursued an extreme course, but Perceval took a more common approach by seeking domestic knowledge immediately before foreign travel.
Preparatory English journeys became a family tradition. Cork-born Sir John Perceval ‘quitted the University with design to travel’ in 1701, but first made ‘a progress round England, that after seeing what was most remarkable at home in arts and natural curiosities, he might be better qualified to make observations abroad, and more welcome to the conversation of foreigners’. Perceval travelled over four months with William Byrd II, a twenty-seven-year-old Virginian planter known to Robert Southwell through the Royal Society. From London, the pair headed up the east coast, where the antiquary Peter Le Neve indicated opportunities to reconnect with the Norfolk roots of the Southwell family. After a brief foray into Scotland, they returned via the west coast and the Midlands. Perceval and Byrd read histories by Thomas Smith and William Camden alongside John Brome's travels, comparing accounts with their own observations. They also kept one eye on continental plans, practising French on the road.Footnote 54 The younger Edward Southwell similarly saw ‘every thing between London & Yorke’ because his father thought it ‘necessary to be acquainted with his own Country’ before foreign travel, though by 1724 changed residence had united ideal and reality.Footnote 55
Families disagreed over the correct frames of reference for European travel. The tradition of preparatory travel through England, embraced by the Southwells and Percevals, implied that one could not see ‘the like things’ in Ireland. When Robert Southwell returned from the continent in 1662, he found Dublin and Kinsale ‘most insipid and voyd of Curiosity’.Footnote 56 This perception began the family transition from Irish Protestants to Anglo-Irish landowners: Southwell looked to London, where Whitehall offered career prospects and the Royal Society promised intellectual stimulation. Archbishop King and the Molyneuxs alternatively sought comparisons between Ireland and Europe, echoing their firmly Irish residence but also, perhaps, their early ‘colonial nationalist’ politics. William Molyneux began a natural history of Ireland as a contribution to Moses Pitt's ill-fated English atlas, pursuing lines of inquiry that might suit ‘any other Country whatsoever’. His son, Samuel, resumed the project. In 1708 and 1709, during studies at Trinity College Dublin, Samuel travelled through the north and west of Ireland. His accounts, which record ‘any thing Remarkable’, note sights that ‘Equal the English’. By the time that Molyneux ventured abroad in 1712–14, he was well-equipped to follow King's advice ‘to compare wt you observe with what we have at home’ in Ireland.Footnote 57 The ‘home’ that travellers left behind was never automatically defined, reflecting and informing broader outlooks.
IV
Concentration on a group of families reveals the hopes and fears with which relatives and friends sent young men abroad. Robert Southwell described educational travel as a ‘Crisis’ and a ‘great Tryall and experiment’ because travellers, removed from the family, should return as adult men. He regretted that illness had confined his own travels to a ‘Lower sphere and somewhat more feminine’, but journeys ideally provided ‘materials to enter into Manly Conversation’.Footnote 58 Many who travelled in their late teens or early twenties married and, if appropriate, entered parliament within months of their return. Voyages were formative experiences, which families sought to shape through advice, but priorities often diverged from the aesthetic concerns that dominate traditional studies of the Grand Tour. Parents and friends obsessed over conversation, simultaneously a font of improvement and a source of corruption. Richard Lingard, sometime lecturer in divinity at Trinity College Dublin, warned that ‘the mouth is the Fountaine of Our Weal or our Woe’.Footnote 59
Interactions abroad were supposed to be conducted according to ideas of civil conversation, imported from sixteenth-century Italian and seventeenth-century French texts. These ideas had attracted humanists, but seventeenth-century population growth and political instability renewed the ‘question of how best to live together successfully as a society’.Footnote 60 Irish upheaval had been profound. If the uncertainties of the Interregnum, the Restoration, and the Williamite Wars forced Protestants in Ireland to consider ‘how best to live together’, the legislative and social rise of the Ascendancy suggests a resolution to live apart from the Catholic majority. Developing notions of polite conversation and long-established ideas of civility helped to police the divide.Footnote 61 Ironically, though, the wealthiest Protestant landowners sought these markers of prestige in conversation with foreign Catholics. In France and Italy, Orrery pursued ‘such companies where he may learn good breeding & good manners… those things which can make him an accomplished gentleman’.Footnote 62
Travellers sought ‘improving’ conversation in courtly and intellectual circles, the ‘beau monde’. Sir John Perceval held that ‘men should fix at Courts, and not loose their time in lesser towns where nothing but the outside of Houses and inside of Churches is to be seen’.Footnote 63 Friends, relatives, and tutors provided the necessary introductions. John Molesworth offered his brother Coote ‘the Advantage of this Winter's frequenting a refin'd Court’ in Turin. In Italy, Sir Philip Perceval would ‘converse with that wise, subtle and dexterous nation’; his mother encouraged ‘as much french Company’ as possible in Paris.Footnote 64 Conversation supposedly countered parochial origins. Robert Southwell found that ‘the Sight of ye World (I meane some neerer parts, well civiliz'd, and of polite practice) does very much open a man's head, and take him off from a narrow dotage on his owne spott’, particularly if travellers extended their ‘view and practice to ye Conversation of Men’. Archbishop King similarly encouraged interaction ‘with men of different sentiments’, counting this among ‘the greatest advantages of Travelling’.Footnote 65 Travel lessened what the first earl of Cork called ‘the leaven of Ireland’.Footnote 66
In order to encourage foreign engagement, advice recommended minimal contact with expatriates and fellow travellers. Sir Philip Perceval acknowledged that his uncle Southwell had ‘very often tould mee, how unnescessary is the acquaintance of our owne countrymen while wee are abroad’. Perceval avoided Saumur and Blois, which had ‘att present to[o] many English and Scotch’, judging such company suitable ‘rather at Whitehall than in France’.Footnote 67 Avoidance of countrymen ensured exposure to ‘different sentiments’ but also improved linguistic skills. Thomas Molyneux confessed that English company in Leiden had hampered his Dutch.Footnote 68 Beyond speech, however, travellers learned gestures and comportment. Perceval sought the ‘language and manners’ of France, which James Butler practised ‘because they are undeniably the most gracefull’.Footnote 69 The avoidance of countrymen would allow unhindered acquisition of these social accomplishments.
Foreign conversation was perilous, for all its advantages, as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fears of continental corruption persisted.Footnote 70 Archbishop King warned Samuel Molyneux and the younger Edward Southwell, in identical terms, to choose ‘such company as will neither cheat you of your money nor go about to corrupt you in your principles of religion or morality’.Footnote 71 Fears were often sexual. Robert Molesworth worried that his son, Bysse, was ‘a sightly lad & must be well watched to keep him in the innocence’ with which he headed for Italy; ill-prepared travellers might return with ‘a filthy Disease, for which they sometimes exchange their Religion’.Footnote 72 Travellers prepared for encounters by sharing stereotypes, even in tabulated form: observations on the general character of Frenchmen or Italians were passed on as products of experience, ‘Lights and Directions’ for ‘how to behave’.Footnote 73
The religious dangers of conversation most concerned family and friends. Robert Southwell warned Sir Philip Perceval, entering Italy in 1678, that ‘the more oppertunity you have of Conversation in that Country the more Vigilant must you bee of a mighty guard upon that highest Jewel of your Religion’. Catholics would twist sociable conversation in order ‘to pervert strangers, first gaining upon their Affections with all the Arts of Civillity and pretence of Candor imaginable’.Footnote 74 Almeric de Courcy, a precariously Protestant ward, was denied travel not only on account of family finances, but also because ‘splendid sights, & seeming mortifications of Popish churches & churchmen’ threatened ‘pervertion in Religion’.Footnote 75 Travellers should avoid religious discussion, ‘But decently put by, whatever of that kind is began by others.’ ‘Patience and evasion’, Southwell noted, ‘are as necessary for a traveller as his passport.’Footnote 76
The parents and guardians of younger travellers employed tutors to reinforce advice from day to day. These men governed ‘the course of … Travels; As where to goe, how long to stay; what things to learne; what acquaintance to make; and how to keep the Ballance of Expences even’.Footnote 77 Families turned to reliable acquaintances: Kingston and various Boyles travelled with their domestic tutors and St George Ashe entrusted his son to a friend, George Berkeley, with previous experience of Italian travel.Footnote 78 Practical expertise was paramount, demonstrated by references and often publications. When Robert Southwell engaged Gailhard ‘upon recommendation of our friends’, the Huguenot boasted a back-catalogue of writings on Italy, a conduct manual circulating in manuscript, and recent experience of guiding Englishmen through much of Europe.Footnote 79 For tutors, as for family authorities, first-hand knowledge conferred expertise.
Many families turned to Huguenot tutors. Gailhard and, later, Alexandre de Rasigade accompanied Sir Philip Perceval; James Butler was supervised by De L'Angle, Ste-Hélène, and Peter Drelincourt, all of whom came recommended by Ormond's correspondents; Charles Petty travelled with Mesnil, his domestic tutor; Charles Butler undertook two voyages with François Maximilien Misson; Germain Colladon accompanied Orrery.Footnote 80 Huguenots were most fashionable under the restored monarchy, though Boyles had employed French Protestants since the 1630s, but they proved controversial.Footnote 81 Lassels argued that parents should engage Englishmen like himself, presenting a series of horror stories starring ‘Governours that were Strangers.’Footnote 82 Soon there would be no choice, as the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes eroded French Protestant networks and reduced the mobility of Huguenot tutors. Such problems drove Orrery and Charles Butler from France, which Butler and Misson avoided two years later on a famous tour of the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy.Footnote 83 The employment of French Protestants deepened links with a community that provided soldiers and settlers for late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Ireland, but it was not particular to Irish-resident landowners.Footnote 84 Perceval's companions, for instance, also led English gentlemen abroad.Footnote 85 In the employment of tutors, as in broader approaches to the opportunities and dangers of foreign experience, family circumstances and Irish residence conditioned participation in a shared English-speaking culture of educational travel.
V
Families knew that people shaped foreign experiences, praising good conversation, warning against bad company, and employing trusted guides, but personal interactions are rarely prominent in aesthetically focused studies of the Grand Tour. This tendency is unfortunate, because encounters with fellow travellers, expatriate communities, and foreign hosts offer some of the clearest evidence for the ways in which origins, identifications, and family contexts shaped experiences of travel. Sir John Perceval recalled ‘the pleasure that persons of the same Country have to meet in foreign Countrys’, revealing that travellers ignored a cornerstone of advice, but what did Protestants from Ireland mean by their ‘countrymen’?Footnote 86 They might employ the early modern sense of common regional origin, as when Percevals met others from Cork, or speak in broader terms of Protestants and Catholics from Ireland. Tellingly, however, calls to avoid ‘countrymen’ usually prioritized linguistic improvement. Conversations with hosts were rarely conducted in English, so the creation of a familiar ‘speech-domain’ was a significant consequence when English-speakers gathered abroad. These domains were inclusive and exclusive. Robert Southwell's companion on the road to Paris called their coachman ‘a Crosse old Rogue’, saying so ‘to his face, speaking English’.Footnote 87 The language served as a social cement for travellers from Britain and Ireland.
Protestants from Ireland sometimes travelled together, but their numbers were few. John St John, an Irish resident of ‘English extraction’, claimed that Sir Philip Perceval was ‘the first Person of quality’ whom he had ‘mett wth of our countrey’ during four years in Florence.Footnote 88 Travellers from Ireland moved among larger bodies of wealthy young Englishmen, disdaining those who were not ‘men of quality’ or ‘note’. In the company of ‘about thirty English gentlemen and noblemen’, George Berkeley found Rome ‘as agreeable as it is possible to be out of England’. Travellers congregated in ‘partys agreeable to younger Persons’, of which forty-two-year-old Sir John Perceval had ‘no more notion than the man in the moon’.Footnote 89 Letters home advertised the orthodoxy of companions, but company included a range of opinion. The royalist Robert Southwell, for instance, explored Rome with the exiled republican, Algernon Sidney.Footnote 90 Irish origins rarely complicated engagement with Englishmen abroad. Contemporaries at Oxford had teased Percevals with Irish stereotypes, which increasingly assigned supposedly native traits to Protestant landowners, but tensions subsided in stranger environments.Footnote 91
Early modern travel was primarily an urban experience.Footnote 92 Young men and their tutors planned itineraries to coincide with local festivities, whether the Venetian Carnival or Roman Holy Week. They particularly gathered around the accommodation and coffee houses of the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, where clubs of ‘curious observers’ shared the cost of antiquarian guides. A routine of social occasions and classical explorations altered little between the Restoration and the early eighteenth century, though English-speaking company rose in number.Footnote 93 Gatherings created social pressures, as Robert Southwell worried how fellow travellers would interpret his eagerness to swap their company for that of Florentine academics.Footnote 94 Sir Philip Perceval's behaviour in Rome, ‘one of ye mallincollyest cittys I have ever ben in’, attracted criticism from one Englishman, who suspected that Perceval thought ‘alle other men asses, and fools’ because he ‘sayeth very little’ and ‘loveth resarvednesse and solitarinesse’.Footnote 95 Orrery took social obligations more seriously, spending on suits and haircuts upon arrival in new cities, but he complained that ‘some English gentlemen’ made ‘a better figure then he can doe whether it be for cloathes or for money’.Footnote 96 Brian Dolan argues that travel allowed eighteenth-century women to escape social pressures, but the opposite seems true for these earlier young men.Footnote 97
English-speaking travellers found community in everyday contexts, conversing and sharing books.Footnote 98 Orrery, Waring, and Charles Butler attended dinners held by the Livorno merchant John Horsey, Cardinal Thomas Howard, and Sir John Litcott, James II's representative in Rome. Hosts served variations on roast beef and plum pudding, ‘a plentifull English dinner’.Footnote 99 In Catholic countries, private worship reinforced reformed community: on Easter Sunday 1688, Waring visited Englishmen in Rome ‘after reading prayers att my Lord Orreries’.Footnote 100 Questionable behaviour rarely appears in letters home, intended to demonstrate improvement, while journals are shrouded in euphemism. When relations broke down between Sir Philip Perceval and his tutor, however, it emerged that Perceval and Kingston had fought duels and entertained ‘even the hard drincking germans’ over months in the Loire Valley. Though post-Restoration travellers leave less evidence, they no doubt foreshadowed later vices listed by Jeremy Black.Footnote 101
Protestants from Ireland met hosts within these larger English-speaking groups, as Anglophiles offered hospitality throughout Europe. Cardinal Pietro Sforza Pallavicino declared ‘a particular passion for the English’, adding to Robert Southwell's impression that ‘the Italians hig[h]ly prefer ye English man’.Footnote 102 Orrery and Edward Southwell both partook of the ‘universall Civility’ shown to ‘the English Nation’ in Amsterdam by Alvaro da Fonseca, a Sephardic diamond merchant.Footnote 103 Treatment of Irish residents often relied upon an ‘understanding that I was an Englishman’, which Thomas Molyneux encountered on his visit to Constantijn Huygens in The Hague. Molyneux noted that the telescope-maker ‘beyond my expectation, talked to me in my own language, and pretty well’.Footnote 104 Letters, meanwhile, are almost always addressed to ‘Gentilhomme Anglois’ or ‘Gentilhuomo Inglese’. Hosts drew on company and language, attributes apparent on fleeting visits, to describe Irish residents as uncomplicated Englishmen.
Most Protestants from Ireland apparently encouraged this ‘understanding that I was an Englishman’, since much of the preceding evidence emerges uncontested from travellers’ notebooks and letters. Robert Southwell unusually requested, while still abroad, that Italian correspondents address him as ‘Gentilhuomo Irelandesi’, but he engaged particularly closely with academic networks in Italy.Footnote 105 Most travellers projected the English ethnic identifications of home. Under the right political conditions, or encountering individual Anglophiles, an Irish resident like George Berkeley might find ‘his account in being an Englishman, that character alone being sufficient to gain respect’ in 1714 Turin.Footnote 106 Englishness was not simply a flag of convenience, however, as travellers from Ireland encountered anti-English sentiments. Thomas Molyneux judged that ‘there is not a people in Europe…whom the generality of the Dutch think worse of and hate more than the English’. He was astounded that ‘so manifest’ a prejudice did not appear in printed accounts, on which some recent studies of European engagement solely rely. In letters home, however, Molyneux recounted personal experiences ‘that sufficiently confirm me in the belief of this grudge they bear us’.Footnote 107 For good and ill, Colladon's verdict on Geneva seems to describe European encounters more broadly: here was ‘a world of English’.Footnote 108
Protestants from Ireland may have embraced English company and identifications abroad, but the use of Irish Catholic networks distinguished them from Englishmen. Southwells received hospitality from Catholic soldiers serving in northern France and the Low Countries, ‘for the Irish Natures sake’, but they particularly exploited the concentration of priests in Paris, Rome, and Prague.Footnote 109 John Creagh, the papal chaplain in Rome, and Gregory Fallon, a theological scholar at Bologna, forwarded correspondence for Robert Southwell. John Ponce, the Cork-born Franciscan theologian whom Southwell met on several occasions in Paris, introduced the traveller to learned society in Montpellier. Robert found one ‘Irish Priest’, Fr James, ‘more at the Beck’ than other potential guides to Rome but ‘not soe well verst as ye others in ye Antiquities’.Footnote 110 His son, Edward, however, was given an ecclesiastical tour of Paris by one Dean Maguire.Footnote 111 Waring was similarly shown Roman ‘curiosities’ by ‘two of our Irish fathers’.Footnote 112 These relationships promised mutual benefit: if, as Edward Chaney suggests for Scottish Jesuits, clergymen hoped to soften the attitudes of Protestant countrymen, travellers gained practical assistance.Footnote 113
Protestants regularly visited Irish Catholic colleges and seminaries, where shared origins encouraged familiar discussion.Footnote 114 Robert Southwell found that reminiscence of home ‘opened’ John Heslenan, a Connacht-born Franciscan of St Isidore's in Rome, to deeper conversation. Talk frequently turned to religion, despite warnings. Among anecdotes attributed to Ponce, Southwell devoted several pages of his notebook to ‘3 reasons why the Church of Rome maintaines her selfe soe free from scismes in matters of Religion’. The pair appear to have discussed religious orders, restricted access to scripture, and the Inquisition. John Young, an Irish Jesuit in Rome, joked with Southwell about drinking and its effect on Catholic/Protestant ratios in Ireland but talk soon turned to the mass and the immediacy of death, on which Young praised his visitor's ‘inspired’ thinking.Footnote 115 Waring also visited the Irish Franciscans of St Isidore's to hear ‘theire disputations’, taking copies of the theses away with him.Footnote 116 The cultural dislocation afforded by travel, alongside the drink with which priests smoothed encounters, encouraged a sense of commonality and an eagerness for theological debate.
The Irishmen of St Isidore's in Rome or the College of the Immaculate Conception in Prague offered, it probably seemed to Protestant travellers, more agreeable learned conversation than Catholics at home. Robert Southwell certainly recognized civility: a Dominican in Milan, Luke Tobin, was ‘decent officious and well bread’; Fallon was ‘one of ye worthyest and most Cordiall Gentman yt. belonges to Ireland’; Creagh was ‘a hearty old man’ who ‘discourses with some garb, and lives well’. Southwell even drafted a letter to one priest, hoping that ‘ye Amity wch. we have made here abrode in Italy, may be confirmed betweene us in Ireland’, but no evidence survives of fulfilment.Footnote 117 Confessional divides at home were ‘bridged by a range of contacts’, particularly among a diverse post-Restoration nobility united ‘as a community of honour’, but willingness to deal with Catholic priests, the presumed instigators of native resistance, only grew with Protestant self-assuredness after military victory in 1688–91.Footnote 118 As tensions eased and landowners began to consider the Catholic clergy ‘a vital instrument of social control’, a foreign seminarian education ironically helped priests to ‘pass muster in polite society’ at home.Footnote 119 Abroad, distanced from Protestant reliance on Catholic dispossession but united by common origins and the shared social capital of foreign education, reformed travellers and ‘popish’ priests interacted more easily and at an earlier date.Footnote 120 ‘Countrymen’, whether English-speaking fellow travellers or Irish Catholic expatriates, shaped encounters with continental Europe in ways that relied upon, but also altered, relationships from home.
VI
English identifications and Irish residence informed contact with ‘countrymen’ abroad, but how did travellers interact with hosts? Anglophone studies rarely pose this question, despite Bignamini's promptings, but Verhoeven uses Dutch examples to consider cross-confessional interactions on Protestant voyages to Catholic countries.Footnote 121 Beyond travel history, Tony Claydon and Stephen Conway present broad accounts of English or British engagement with Europe that assert the power of a Protestant ‘interest’ or ‘international’. Claydon, in particular, draws on printed travel books to argue that post-Restoration England embraced a ‘confessional geography’ that separated the continent into Catholic and Protestant lands.Footnote 122 Such notions unsurprisingly appear in manuscript accounts, since journals drew heavily on printed sources: Waring demonstrated ‘sensitivity to the religious geography’ of Germany and Sir John Perceval rejoiced in reaching the ‘Protestant ground’ of the United Provinces.Footnote 123 But identifying difference did not mean shunning the different. Claydon simultaneously explores unifying ideas of Christendom and Clare Haynes demonstrates, through similar published accounts, how Protestant travellers managed encounters with ‘popish’ art.Footnote 124 Manuscript evidence can take these cross-confessional conclusions further and extend Verhoeven's nuanced consideration of Dutch experience to his ‘abrasive and quarrelsome’ Anglicans, for whom he relies on ‘textbook wisdom’.Footnote 125 Travellers’ origins, identifications, and family backgrounds shaped interactions with Catholic hosts.
The Southwells and Percevals assembled diverse connections, as diplomatic missions built up a ‘stock of friends’ exploited by educational travellers, but their links with Florence particularly relied on personal contact, shared interests, and reciprocal obligations. Robert Southwell arrived in the summer of 1660, hoping to connect his patron, Robert Boyle, and the ‘experimenters’ of the Accademia del Cimento. Southwell impressed at meetings of ‘their virtuosi’ and studied with Vincenzio Viviani, the court mathematician and self-styled last disciple of Galileo.Footnote 126 Exploring the grand duke's gallery, he noticed Holbein's portrait of Sir Richard Southwell, the Tudor administrator and Norfolk client of the Howards, which the earl of Arundel had given to the Medici in 1621. The picture allowed Southwell to remind Bernard and Edward Howard, then fellow travellers in Italy, of their ‘past relation’.Footnote 127 Southwell left Florence for Rome in October but returned in April 1661 to ‘an Ocean of Talking’. On the way home, he delivered copies of Viviani's treatise, De Maximis et Minimis, and advertised it to booksellers. Fellow travellers jokingly called Southwell ‘a subject of the Grand Duke’, Ferdinando II, whom the young man prevailed upon for a ‘letter of recommendation’ to Charles II.Footnote 128
The Southwells maintained links with Florence. Robert waited on Cosimo III de’ Medici in Lisbon and Paris during the 1660s, when diplomatic missions coincided with the heir's travels.Footnote 129 Cosimo, blown off his course to England in 1669, even met Southwell's father and the Percevals at Kinsale. Two courtiers, the ‘experimenter’ Lorenzo Magalotti and the doctor Giovanni Battista Gornia, produced manuscript accounts that include their Irish landing. Both praise Southwell's father, ‘landlord of all the surrounding territory’, for his hospitality, wealth, and ‘very good appearance’. Magalotti and Gornia change their tone, however, when discussing local Catholics, who were ‘treated as slaves’ in ‘a conquered land’. They paid ‘their meagre earnings’ to the Southwells, living ‘miserably in burrows, begging and ill-treated’. Catholics in Kinsale avoided ‘harassment’ by worshipping ‘clandestinely’, their church ‘profanely used in the service of the Anglican sect’.Footnote 130 Tuscan courtiers recognized the Southwells’ civility, but also their harsh treatment of coreligionists.
In the following decades, reciprocal hospitality outweighed confessional division. Though Cosimo encouraged a ‘markedly religious court culture’, he remembered meeting Sir Philip Perceval as a child and lavished gifts upon him in 1678. The grand duke ‘talked a great while’ of Robert Southwell.Footnote 131 Connections were strong enough to outlive Southwell and Viviani, who corresponded for decades but died in 1702 and 1703.Footnote 132 In 1707, Sir John Perceval was received in Florence ‘with much curtesie’ because ‘the good Old Duke’ remembered ‘the civilities’ offered by ‘Old Mr. Southwell Sr. Roberts father’ at Kinsale.Footnote 133 Strong links died with Cosimo in 1723, however. The younger Edward Southwell visited Florence two years later, dutifully describing the portrait of Sir Richard. Like Sir Philip Perceval before him, he also noted its plates bearing the Southwell, Howard, and Medici arms. Edward lodged at an inn, however, and never met the last grand duke, Gian Gastone.Footnote 134 Over three generations, the Southwells, the Percevals, and the Florentine court demonstrate that civil conversation, shared interests, and reciprocal hospitality permitted cross-confessional interactions.
Travellers strengthened ties with hosts through gift-exchange. Robert Southwell dispatched two Irish wolfhounds, traditionally a flattering offering, to the Tuscan court.Footnote 135 Protestant landowners were also well placed to satisfy foreign curiosity in whiskey, known by the Irish uisce beatha. Noting the electress of Brandenburg's ‘desire of tasting what it was’, Edward Southwell asked his father to send ‘a dozen bottles of exellent good’ to Cleves.Footnote 136 Sir John Perceval similarly obliged Florentine requests for ‘some Usquebah when you are in Ireland’ and even sent one courtier ‘a little kerry stone to make a seal’. Cut with intaglios of the grand duke, the stone became ‘an eternal memory’ of Perceval connections to Florence.Footnote 137 Exchange encouraged cosmopolitan links but gifts emerged from networks, and perhaps even self-understandings, that reflected Irish residence. Protestants from Ireland encountered Anglophone fellow travellers, expatriate Irish Catholics, and indigenous hosts, drawing on a particular blend of English identifications, Irish origins, reformed faith, and civil behaviour. They did not travel as sponges: backgrounds shaped two-way interactions abroad.
VII
Finally, concentration on a cluster of families encourages historians to consider afresh the objects and knowledge that travellers brought home. Scholars often treat the topic only in relation to fine art, but acquisition surpassed the dazzling ‘cultural booty’ depicted in traditional studies of the Grand Tour.Footnote 138 Travellers collected smaller items that linked personal memories to specific destinations, documenting experiences alongside the notebooks and diaries embellished and circulated at home.Footnote 139 Families also hoped that sons would return with social and intellectual accomplishments, ‘those Improvements that are to be acquired by Travelling into Foreign Kingdoms’.Footnote 140 Neither an ‘invisible academy’ nor simply an ‘informal’ addition to ‘formal’ domestic education, travel allowed specific learning at carefully chosen destinations. Travellers engaged with particular people and places, rather than a monolithic continent, and turned interactions towards advancement at home.
Travellers acquired objects that situated experiences, preserving particular connections. Sir Philip Perceval bought local guidebooks or histories at Saint-Denis, Richelieu, La Rochelle, Rome, Naples, Loreto, and Geneva, documenting a trip to the Huguenot temple of Charenton with ‘a french new testament with the psalmes’.Footnote 141 Such purchases suggest an immediate intellectual engagement with destinations, often featuring alongside local maps as teaching aids for travelling tutors, but they also prolonged connections. A collection of ‘the best and most curious books’ from each destination would serve ‘to entertaine your selfe’ at home ‘and keepe your selfe from forgetting wt languages you learned in your travells’.Footnote 142 Prints and engravings similarly memorialized visits, from Robert Southwell's picture of the Pont du Gard, on which an English fellow traveller wrote a Latin description, to Waring's image of the Venetian tomb of Antenor, which he kept with his journals.Footnote 143 On a smaller budget, such items also offered a cheap method of displaying improved taste: Waring shopped among Roman engravers and framed his purchases at home.Footnote 144 A range of smaller objects, from Roman playing cards to stones collected in the catacombs, rooted in tangible evidence those ‘particulars to be recited by the fire's side’.Footnote 145 They contributed to the ‘travel-talk’ which, as Neil Kenny demonstrates in French and German contexts, offered shared touchstones to disparate elites.Footnote 146
Travellers brought home gifts that also accrued social power from connections to certain places. Robert Southwell sent the Percevals a Parmesan cheese, which found its way to the Butlers, and his son, Edward, planned to buy patrons ‘some good Tea or something of that kind’ from Dutch East India traders, a gift that would ‘shew I have been travelling’.Footnote 147 Friends and relatives requested renowned products, whether Flemish lace, Tuscan wines, or Roman razors (‘that being a famous place for ’em’).Footnote 148 Bibliophiles like Archbishop King and William Molyneux meanwhile prevailed upon travellers to seek rare works in Paris, Amsterdam, and Leiden.Footnote 149 Gifts and commissioned purchases allowed those at home to encounter particular destinations at first hand. St George Ashe sent home ‘Musick and other things’ from Vienna, hoping that Dublin friends would ‘consider the Country from whence they come, and the different genius, and on that score be satisfied, and gratefull for them’.Footnote 150 Travellers, like contemporary diplomats, allowed access to continental markets, ensuring that an educational voyage by a male heir might confer prestige on a circle of family, friends, and patrons.Footnote 151
Travellers similarly pursued social and intellectual accomplishments. Gailhard noted that, just as some bought ‘the Rarities of Towns and Countries…to shew and keep them when they are come home’, so ‘others learn what fine things are taught in such places’. His ideal tour involved several early months of ‘settlement’ at a noble academy, where young men practised the physical ‘exercises’ of riding, dancing, and fencing alongside languages, military mathematics (‘fortification’), and local specialities.Footnote 152 Paris and the Loire Valley supplanted Italy as centres of this kind of learning over the seventeenth century. Boyles attended French institutions in the 1630s but Sir Philip Perceval and Kingston, at Angers and Saumur in 1676–7, contributed to rising English-speaking numbers after the Restoration.Footnote 153
Travellers from Ireland also followed English, German, and Dutch trends by abandoning French options during the 1680s. The 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes reinforced suppression of popular Protestant academies and, from 1687, war rendered remaining institutions inaccessible.Footnote 154 Neighbouring lands attracted displaced ‘academists’ like Orrery, who left Blois for tuition in Utrecht, Brussels, and Geneva.Footnote 155 Sir John Perceval's studies in Utrecht over the winter of 1705/6 proved ‘of use’ in later travels, as physical training and linguistic improvement prepared young men to impress foreign hosts, but academy accomplishments also promised social success at home.Footnote 156 If Oxford would equip Charles Petty with verbal authority, ‘the Language which is spoken there’, academies offered something similar in terms of carriage and gesture: a period of exercises at The Hague would, his father hoped, ‘make fools believe he is more than he is’.Footnote 157
Academy learning, as an investment of funds intended to reap social rewards, featured prominently but selectively in family strategy. Such accomplishments were assumed of the eldest sons in wealthy families, as Orrery would have been ‘asshamed to return home without knowing my exercises’, but they proved negotiable for younger brothers.Footnote 158 John Perceval pleased his uncle and his Oxford tutors by rejecting his mother's suggestion of academy learning in Saumur or Montpellier. As a third son, he focused on the law at Lincoln's Inn.Footnote 159 Coote Molesworth, a sixth son, failed to persuade his parents to pay for the Accademia Reale in Turin, while he visited his brother in Italy, but he eventually secured permission to break medical studies at Leiden for six months of French and ‘Genteel Exercises’ in Geneva.Footnote 160 Sons evidently held some sway over forms of educational travel, but younger brothers tended to pursue vocational routes that left less room for ‘exercises’.Footnote 161
Academies exacerbated social divisions between, as well as within, families from Ireland. ‘Fencing dancing and ye like’ may have been ‘very necessary to know’ for a young man ‘of family’, but they demanded expenditure on tuition, servants, and equipment during a lengthy ‘settlement’.Footnote 162 Post-Cromwellian economic realities rendered such prestigious learning inaccessible to most Catholic families, whose foreign educational options instead included schooling, medical degrees, and seminarian training. Though some French-based Irish Catholic merchants sought ‘noble’ accomplishments for their sons by the mid-eighteenth century, in an earlier period exclusive access to academies added a new gloss to the social dominance of wealthy Church of Ireland landowners.Footnote 163 Just as they ‘were most likely to amass booty’ from foreign markets, so they most often gathered the ‘parts’ that built a ‘compleat gentleman’.Footnote 164 Wealthy travellers brought back objects and knowledge that strengthened the family position at home.
VIII
This network of Protestants from Ireland has illuminated understandings and experiences of educational travel, revealing the ways in which finances, social standings, identifications, and residence shaped voyages in a family context. Engagement with continental Europe was the product of trade-offs between means and ambitions, as family resources dictated the feasibility of journeys and influenced their format. For those who travelled, the years beforehand were not ‘blankes’ but a time of careful preparation during which various combinations of tuition, university, London academies, and domestic journeys readied young men for continental encounters. Preparatory advice, which stressed personal interactions abroad, meanwhile established travel as a shared experience across generations within families. Sir John Perceval, for instance, hoped that the younger Edward Southwell would ‘live to instruct my Grand Children how to travell advantageously’.Footnote 165 Backgrounds, identifications, and connections from home shaped interactions with ‘countrymen’, whether fellow travellers or expatriates, and informed cross-confessional relationships with indigenous hosts. Young men returned with objects and accomplishments, the renowned products of specific locations, that fed into strategies for advancement at home. Rather than following faceless travellers through the aesthetic pleasures of Europe, this study finds that family origins, intentions, and self-understandings shaped engagement with particular people and places.
Richly documented families like the Brodricks, Cork neighbours of the Southwells and Percevals, should allow further reconstruction of the relationship between travel, family strategy, and elite formation, but Protestants from Ireland clearly participated in the continental construction of the English gentleman.Footnote 166 Some travellers prepared for voyages by ‘learning of England’; all encountered destinations and hosts in English company.Footnote 167 To some extent, educational travel affirmed Irish Protestant and Anglo-Irish membership of an English elite on the threshold of adulthood. One kinsman even called on Sir Philip Perceval to return from France and Italy with ‘an English mind’.Footnote 168 At the same time, however, Irish backgrounds and networks secured sociability and assistance from Catholic expatriate communities. Many foreign hosts welcomed Protestants from Ireland as Englishmen, but travellers cemented relationships through gift-exchange that often drew on Irish roots. Identifications with England and connections to Ireland combined to produce distinctive experiences in the pursuit of continental prestige, suggesting that elite formation was not simply a question of ‘making Ireland English’. These families instead reveal triangular interactions between Ireland, England, and Europe. Historians have long drawn on continental connections to explain how Catholic Ireland survived the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but European encounters also contributed to Protestant hegemony.
