Sometime after the Act of Union in 1707, Sir John Clerk II (1649/50–1722), 1st baronet of Penicuik, sat down to compile the ‘signal providences’ of his life. Like his father, Clerk was a devout Presbyterian, raised within the Scottish Kirk to see manifestations of divine providence and his place among the elect not only in his daily surroundings, but buried within the story of his life.Footnote 1 To this end, Clerk reached back into the deep memories of his childhood to chart his relation to God and, in so doing, set his spiritual life in order. He noted that, at the age of four, he had overheard his ‘good uncle’ Andrew Gray, a Glasgow minister, speaking ‘affectionately and rapturously’ to his mother about the joys of heaven. Young John wept at not being able to go with his uncle to this wondrous place. Unable to sleep and ‘melancholious’, he was finally taken to his uncle and advised to ‘go to scoole & learn my Catechisme’, which he then pursued cheerfully.Footnote 2 Stranger events were also read into the narrative: for instance, he noted that, sometime after his marriage to Elisabeth Hendersone in 1674, while lying alone in his bedchamber, he ‘dreamd some witches were moveing me’. Clerk struggled to break free of them only to find himself nearly tumbling out of a fourth-storey window. His life was spared through the efforts of his nearby servant and, of course, the intervention of providence (though he acknowledged that the dream may also have been the ‘effect probably of a late & copious supper’).Footnote 3 Even the expansion of his book collection was understood in such light: the arrival later in his life of ‘Luther on ye Galatians & [John] Bunians works to [his] hands’ gave Clerk pause to reflect on God's providential movements.Footnote 4 Here, the bizarre and the banal fused as Clerk traced the paths of his life to anticipate the life to come.
The majority of Clerk's ‘signal providences’, however, were interwoven with a longer narrative of European travel and its role in shaping his spiritual life. The volume into which they were written was, in itself, divided with these apparent priorities in mind: the initial pages of the small book are devoted to what he termed ‘an account of my travels anno 1676’. These were drawn from ‘26 letters which I wrote to my dear wife…in my absence from her’, while the opposite end of the diary contains the ‘signal providences’. Some of these letters survive; however, for the aged Clerk, this was now an act of synthesis, extracting his travels to serve the immediate purpose of spiritual understanding.Footnote 5 He was notably brief in this reconstruction, adding that much of what he now narrated was ‘in my journal’, and thus his remarks were ‘industriously superceded [sic] here’. The continental tour which he recounted here was – at least according to his later recollections – not remarkable for the prospect of enlightened engagement with the rest of Europe, or even for the artistic and architectural sights which would later be a formative influence on Clerk's legacy in Scotland and gradually became a hallmark of tourism in the ‘long’ eighteenth century.Footnote 6 The ‘rarities’ of London and Paris appear to have been seen in a whirlwind. Paris and its surrounds are noted, in an almost boastful tone, as having been seen in their entirety in only ‘46 days’, including ‘all ye fine houses within 12 myles’.Footnote 7 Both cities brought unspecified purchases ‘for my wife & house’. Names of acquaintances made along the way, and in particular those with whom Clerk covenanted, take precedent in the aged Clerk's remarks: carriages shared with Sir George McKenzie and Sir Andrew Ramsay; introductions in London to the duke of Lauderdale and, through him, Charles II; covenanting (i.e. engaging in common religious observance and reiterating their covenant with God) with fellow Scots in Paris and Rotterdam.Footnote 8 Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man at the height of his influence and gladly threading between personal success and divine providence, such meetings, and in particular the devotional perseverance in foreign countries which they represented, had become the more important part of his movements.
This brevity, and the remembrance of such sights and encounters as banal – almost unremarkable – makes Clerk's focus on one particular event all the more interesting, both for historians of travel and early modern mentalities generally. The event, as Clerk subsequently described it, was a traumatic near-drowning in the Seine – recalled as ‘a clear effect of my pride[,] ignorance & follie’. Jumping from a boat near the Pont Neuf, Clerk exhausted himself after ten minutes of attempting to swim upriver, and was subsequently carried off. Clerk ‘either forgot’ or ‘thro[ugh] shame did forbear to cry’ to his governor; losing strength, he made for a stone wall at the side of the river and, sinking, offered ‘sincere fervent prayer for pardon of sin’. Only then did his foot touch ground, and he found himself saved in an affirmative, essentially baptismal experience. His governor arrived soon after with a boat and took him ashore, where Clerk collapsed in exhaustion. As if to emphasize the real danger the river had posed, Clerk notes that, while attending a ‘cabaret’ (or inn) that night, he was informed that two Germans had drowned in the Seine at the same place on the previous day. Switching to the present tense, Clerk then takes time to thank God for this ‘signal deliverance & for all his mercies to me’.Footnote 9 More than thirty years removed from this event, John Clerk II evidently felt that this near-drowning had been much more formative than the broader experience of travel.
Certainly, much of what Clerk ‘took home’ from these travels aligns neatly with recent historiographical debate about the importance of travel in accumulating networks and languages which informed the later practice of power and influence on their return.Footnote 10 The extent to which Clerk returned from these travels as a more recognizably ‘cosmopolitan’ or outward-looking individual is – at least insofar as his subsequent reflections suggest – also questionable. While historians might look to Clerk's assemblage of foreign goods, patronage of architects, or even engagement with ‘foreign’ ideas as a measure of this, such terms are inherently loaded with modern connotations, tending to seek the origins of liberal values and models of tolerance. These risk narrowing the historical experience by ignoring the relational and cognitive factors which variously narrowed or widened the cosmopolitan ‘lens’ in question.Footnote 11 Such narrative arcs also offer little help in comprehending either the apparent sense of peril felt at the time or the deeply personal purpose of recalling those travels alongside other ‘providences’ decades later. Rather, Clerk's recollections point instead to an uneasy integration of foreign travel into an internal life which understood these ‘cosmopolitan’ engagements with the world on a plane much larger than immediate cultural encounter or comprehension of the foreign ‘other’.Footnote 12 By looking across Clerk's life and charting the place of travel as he aged, remembered, and found differing uses for these travels, I will not only seek to recover what Clerk himself ‘did’ with travel, but also try to understand what it subsequently meant.
In doing so, this article will integrate the expanding historiography of early modern travel with wider cultural histories of subjectivity, emotion, and generational change. As Eva Johanna Holmberg has recently argued, notions of interiority and, more broadly, critical approaches to records of individual or collective travel have been late arrivals to early modern historical writing.Footnote 13 The predominance of the ‘Grand Tour’, particularly in tracing the origins of a reified, top-down ‘Enlightenment’ process in action, has tended to foreground the acquisition and (assumed) absorption of continental culture(s) at the expense of situating travel within wider lives, emphasizing moments of novelty at the expense of the quotidian and long term. Such narratives often leave the Grand Tour – indeed, the history of travel in general – as a collection of success stories rather than an experience to be reconciled with the familiar. As John Gallagher has recently observed, a more acute focus on the experience of return from travel – the ‘view from inside’ – helps to avoid the assumed triumph of cosmopolitan self-fashioning within frictionless spaces.Footnote 14 The travels of John Clerk II, however, suggest that the ‘view from the inside’ must also be read alongside important dynamics both during his lifetime and surrounding it. Even the brief glimpse of Clerk's inner life afforded by his ‘signal providences’ suggests that the ‘inner life’ of travel intertwined with questions of emotionally laden memory and the hindsight (or amnesia) of age. Like the Grand Tour narrative devices of fear and masculine culture described in later periods by Sarah Goldsmith, Clerk's recollections are best understood alongside concurrent anxieties and potential mnemonic purposes – in effect, not only what Clerk recalled, but why it was important to recall it, and its subsequent uses and resonances.Footnote 15 As Rosemary Sweet has recently noted, aides-mémoire were central to travel in this period, giving rise to valuable diaries and providing the foundation to later, published narratives; what Clerk's example suggests, and I will assess in this article, is that the afterlives of such memories help to expand historical understanding of the place of travel in early modern lives beyond the confines of the act itself.Footnote 16
The shifting place of travel in Clerk's life will be further elucidated by gauging Clerk's response to the travels of his eldest son, John Clerk III (1676–1755), during his continental education and impromptu Italian tour in the late 1690s. Here, the patriarch's advice, proscriptions, and anxieties inform a longer-term understanding of the shifting roles of travel within a family dynamic, whereby the purposes (and threats) of travel alternated between pragmatism, curiosity, self-indulgence, spiritual corruption, and even boredom within the wider category of masculine youth.Footnote 17 Crucially, this will be read as a broader, discursive process within the family as fathers and sons variously articulated, comprehended, and rejected ideas of the functions and dangers of travel. Building on Michèle Cohen's focus on the anxieties of language and masculinity which permeated discourses around the Grand Tour, I will draw together the Clerk family's broader experience of travel in order to consider the role of memory and internality in understanding what such travel meant across time.Footnote 18 With consideration of Alexandra Walsham's recent case for the role of generational change during the Reformation, I will read Clerk II's anxieties about travel together alongside questions of age and expectation: of travel as both conformity and resistance not only without, but also within as the Clerk family adjusted its internal and external relationship with the wider world.Footnote 19
I
In attempting to read both alongside and beyond John Clerk II's reflections on the place of travel in his formation, it is essential that we both take him at his word – principally, that the experience of travel was precisely as valuable and memorable as he later recalled – and look for notable omissions and absences within the wider family record. While the sort of introspection evident in Clerk's ‘signal providences’ does not necessarily run through the entirety of the Clerk family's extensive archive, the family's fastidious record-keeping and broad correspondence provide a means of employing the deeper record as they archived their own travel experience, lending both form and meaning in the process. As will be shown, successive generations remembered and internalized travel not only in their written expressions and what can only loosely be called ‘ego-documents’ such as Clerk's signal providences, but also through the careful archiving of travel in various forms with future generations in mind.Footnote 20 Travel was not, in such instances, confined to the physical act – encompassing preparation, observation, reportage, and other elements of ‘touring’ – but also the subsequent incorporation of those travels into a wider individual and familial narrative of time and meaning: what became formative, forgettable, or even shameful as individuals looked both ahead and behind.
For example, through the lens of the family archive, Clerk II's brief travels of 1676 change from a moment of curiosity-turned-confirmation into the product of years of complex interactions with his father and a familial legacy of functional, if cautious, engagement with the continent. His father, John Clerk (1611–74), had made his and subsequently his son's fortune through an extended period of first apprenticeship and then residence in Paris as both a merchant and acquirer par excellence for Scotland's rising and established elite.Footnote 21 The elder Clerk's surviving ledgers and letter-books suggest a noticeable, perhaps practised, ease in terms of travel and activity. He employed his frequent travels between London, Edinburgh, and Paris to material and social ends: ‘2 pair off silk hose and 4 pair off [sic] gloves for Doctor Davisons wife’ from London in February 1645;Footnote 22 petticoats and gowns for Anne Gray, Lady Pittendrum, from Paris in April 1645.Footnote 23 Clerk wove calm attestations of his industry into his correspondence, carefully balancing a sense of concerted effort with trustworthy knowledge and ease-of-access. To the same Lady Pittendrum, he wrote that he had ‘run over all the shops in Paris’ in pursuit of fashionable cloth having found ‘great difficultie to content myself’. He was left to ‘repent’ when he was convinced the ‘cullor would not pleas[e]’ her.Footnote 24 Likewise, only the ‘miserie off the tyme…& not neglect in me’ prevented him from supplying Margaret Gray with a packet of shears and bodkins.Footnote 25 Material acquisition and spiritual concern combined in the supplying of a bible to the lawyer William Rires in fine binding which Clerk professed to ‘love best’, and imagined ‘ye wold lyke it best also’.Footnote 26 Clerk also traded in the rare and exotic, acquiring medieval manuscripts, silver-mounted coconuts, and the snouts of swordfish for interested parties.Footnote 27 The sense of ease and familiarity which he projected in the course of doing so helped to cement his position as a competent intermediary in these transactions: while Clerk professed to more intimate correspondents that travel between Scotland and France wore him down, airs of frictionless acquisition and constant industry in his cosmopolitan life became a currency in which he traded.Footnote 28
Such constant travel, and the connections trade brought, also afforded the elder Clerk the opportunity to fashion himself as a valued, trustworthy adviser on the subject. His knowledge became, in itself, a commodity to be pursued. When, in 1645, the same Lady Pittendrum asked Clerk for advice regarding her son Robert's travels in Italy, Clerk counselled strongly against prolonging what he called a ‘neidles voyadge’. With Lady Pittendrum's worries piqued, Clerk wrote urgently and repeatedly to Robert calling for his swift return to avoid travel's ill-effects.Footnote 29 Anxieties about the confessional threat posed to youths by foreign travel were expressed by Clerk, warning Lady Pittendrum that ‘A youth is not verie sound in his religion’, adding that ‘evill counsell and necessitie brings often tymes disorder’.Footnote 30 Disobedience to God and family overlapped in Clerk's estimations: Robert Gray's careless exercise of ‘his own libertie’ had resulted in giving ‘offence’ to his parents and throwing the entire family into disorder.Footnote 31 Clerk himself became the intermediary through whom the young Robert was eventually lured away from Rome, and thus the temptations of ‘popery’. Gray was remitted 600 livres in Rome through Clerk's creditors to support him and facilitate his return to Paris. Adopting a temporary guardianship of the young man, Clerk reported back to Gray's anxious parents regarding the youth's emotional state and his own role in trying to restrain further temptation. He later lamented of the returned Robert that ‘Thairs nothing in his head at present bot [sic] Constantinople and Jerusalem’, implicitly positioning himself between the young man and the perceived dangers of the East.Footnote 32 Such fancies aside, the quotidian familiarities of Clerk's mercantile world had served a clear social purpose, helping to quarantine a vulnerable youth from the perceived threats of unadulterated travel while proving his own worth beyond the purveyance of material goods.
This knowledge of the world helped John Clerk I return to Scotland with, according the memoirs of John Clerk III, £10,000 to his name, purchasing the Penicuik estate.Footnote 33 The formative role of travel in this advancement became part of family memory. Clerk III later interwove his grandfather's return to Scotland with these French travels, casting their settlement in Scotland as a reluctant removal from the wider world: Clerk I married Mary Gray, whose family he had so busily provisioned during the 1640s, and was only prevented from returning to France – ‘so near was the family of being French’ – by a contrary wind in Leith harbour.Footnote 34 Apparently ‘defeated’ by what may have been subsequently recalled as a providential wind, Clerk proceeded to decorate the newly acquired estate with outward symbols of his cultural cultivation. He became the ‘artistic progenitor of the family’ and a renowned connoisseur, supposedly functioning as the intermediary through whom the first Rembrandt collected in Scotland was purchased.Footnote 35
For all of this gain through his mercantile activities on the continent, however, the anxieties about foreign travel which pervaded Clerk's advice to his fellow Scots during the 1640s had clearly not been shaken by the offerings of worldly gain; indeed, these travels appear to have only further entrenched Clerk in his convictions. Years of profitable and, clearly, edifying time spent in France did not translate to a sort of openness with regard to the travels of John Clerk II, instead appearing in hindsight as a pragmatic, constrained cosmopolitan stance.Footnote 36 Again, family memory appears at first blush to have spun a positive impression of the francophile father: to his son at the time of the ‘signal providences’, John Clerk I was a ‘sober temperat[e] father’ who restrained him from ‘all my vain projects’.Footnote 37 However, by the time of his grandson's memoirs, familial understanding of the patriarch's motives had changed. John Clerk III noted that his father had been ‘detained at home by his father’ on grounds that, while his grandfather had been a merchant in Paris, he had arrived at the conviction that ‘foreign education…tend[ed] to corrupt their morals’.Footnote 38 Such an impression of fatherly prohibition, as will later become clear, evidently came to Clerk III from his own father's reckoning of his youth; in the short term, however, Francophilia did not translate into freedom. Rather, settlement in Scotland again appeared to be the unavoidable result: educated at home, Clerk II married the aforementioned Elisabeth Hendersone in 1674. His first son, John, was born two years later.
For John Clerk II, travel was instigated not by his father's permission or initiative, but rather by the latter's death. His marriage coincided with his father's death that same year; his travel to France followed on the birth of his first son. The broader context of what was later written of in his ‘signal providences’ was, as such, not a structured trip under the strict gaze of a father who, as he had done with the young Pittendrum decades earlier, could warn of dangers and temptations. Rather, it was akin to an act of rebellion in the absence of restrictive authority, in pursuit of unrealized aspirations. Here, Clerk already differed from the majority of ‘Grand Tourists’ (a term with ever-expanding historiographical connotations), having only a personal sense of travel's value rather than the stern advice or warnings of his parents to circumscribe his movements.Footnote 39 Beyond later recollections, little evidence survives to suggest how the trip took form. Letters from his brother James while John was in Paris suggest that he sought and was given advice on how to avoid being swindled, including tips on where to buy goods in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.Footnote 40 The material gains to be had while in France, especially, were clearly not lost on him: an account book compiled after his travels notes £125 spent on textiles such as taffeta and serge de Nîmes; viol and lute strings; silver; ‘bulliard bouls’; ribbons of various types, a cabinet (priced at £55), ‘2 hats at £52’, a music book, and snuff boxes, among other things.Footnote 41 Letters received from his wife, while providing updates on the outfitting of their homes, further emphasized the material gains to be had while John was abroad, including requests for muffs, picture frames, and other items in accordance with a broader shift towards French and Netherlandish textiles among the Scottish gentry.Footnote 42 The remainder of the journey can be accessed only through the digested version of his journal which he produced in old age, admitting in the process of doing so that he ‘can't fall upon it this long time’ though acknowledging it had ‘many more things narrated in it’.Footnote 43 We are only afforded an overview of his schedule – Edinburgh to London; Rye to Rouen; Rouen to Paris (via Fontainebleau and Versailles); Paris to Calais; Calais through the Low Countries – but vast distances are shortened to single lines, denoting only places with ‘rarities’ and rendezvous points with fellow Presbyterians.Footnote 44 Even the details of material consumption – clearly driven, at least contemporaneously, by an interest in what was fashionable and desirable – are stripped down to a laconic vocabulary of ‘things’ and ‘furniture’.
It is tempting to see Clerk's admission of having lost his journal, especially in light of the far more plain recollections of his ‘signal providences’, as a sort of erasure, deliberate or otherwise. That his son later commented on the many journals and writings which his father had left to ‘bear testimony for the regard he always had for religion, vertue [sic] and Honesty’ clashes with the apparent loss of such a formative memento.Footnote 45 Rather, for a family remarkably careful in their curation of an individual and family archive, the misplacing of the journal suggests a certain amount of emotional distance and revision. It may ultimately have fallen victim to either careless curation or obsolescence within the patriarch's self-fashioning process, but in the absence of details about the material life of the journal, this remains loose speculation.Footnote 46 Tellingly, however, among the remaining documents in the Clerk archive attesting to or recounting John Clerk II's travels, the aforementioned near-drowning in the Seine is the dominant memory, re-told at a level of detail which unquestionably places it at the centre of the wider story which Clerk chose to recall and record.
Subsequent revision of his travels, and care for the journal itself, may also be explained by the shifting confessional geographies which the travel journal came to embody. The ease with which Clerk apparently disregarded his father's fears for the effects of French corruption in undertaking his travels was dramatically called into question within only a few years of his return to Scotland as, by early 1679, his brother James had openly converted to Catholicism. James, like his father, was embedded in the family's French trading enterprise, and resident in Paris when he wrote to his brother in Edinburgh of the ‘gift from God’ he saw made manifest in his conversion.Footnote 47 James's conversion seems to have been born of the deepening Jansenist influence in Paris: he spoke to his brother of the role that grace, rather than ‘force of will, or human industrie’, had played in his conversion.Footnote 48 John was dismayed by this news, in no small part due to the role which travel had played in effecting this change in his brother's inner life. While he praised James for preferring the salvation of his soul to ‘your honour, credit, & estate in ye world’, he questioned the Catholic church as the route to doing so. In a scolding but caring letter to his brother, John lectured on the supposed falsities of Catholicism, citing scripture at length and entreating James to provide any ‘rational account’ in favour of the ‘Church of Rome’. But travel also lay at the foundations of their confessional divergence: John hoped to array the wisdom of fellow Protestant travellers in the cause of bringing James back into the fold, noting ‘I could evidence…the very solemn testimonies of many learned travellers’ who had seen divisions and abuses of the Catholic church. Indeed, he begged James to draw upon his own experiences asking that he ‘appeall [sic] to your own self who have travelled a little amongst [Catholics]’.Footnote 49 For John, this was an attempt to put to use the narratives of other travellers who read the wider world which they encountered, and about which they then wrote, as a means of confirming their confessional allegiance rather than broadening or questioning received wisdom; it was also an appeal to what he assumed to be James's own empirical observations.Footnote 50 His efforts evidently failed, and the relationship collapsed. When James wrote to John of their brother Alexander's death of fever in Paris the following year, memory of the past year's traumas hung between them. John reminded James of how he had ‘shamelesslie revolted fra ye faith’ while expressing relief that Sandie had not succumbed to ‘any bad example he saw in you’. Rather, John lamented that, ‘for my innumerable sins’, he now had the ‘great sorrow’ of ‘2 dear brethren…ye younger is dead & ye elder buried alyve for you can be no otherways to me’.Footnote 51
For the purpose of travel, however, this incident would become far more significant for the role it played in John Clerk II's conscience. In the enthusiasm of youth and in the liberty of his father's death, travel had afforded the exercise of newly acquired freedoms and – to the extent that the veils of posterity permit – a measure of indulgence; however, the corrupting and destabilizing threat of the wider world had found immediate embodiment in James. This gave Clerk incentive to revise his opinions on travel only a few years removed from his own rebellious actions, and a new cause for caution when it came to the world into which his eldest son would venture.
II
Fatherhood would repeatedly test John Clerk II's anxieties about the influence of the wider world and, in the process, reassessment of the lingering influences of his own travels within it. While he and his father had evidently reached an impasse regarding his hopes for foreign travel and settled on the virtues of staying in Scotland, the shifting expectations of later generations and, in particular, the increasingly international planes on which notions of both masculinity and worldly ambition were set pushed at Clerk's emotional limits. This first became manifest when the question of education once again arose, this time with regard to his eldest son, John Clerk III. For many Scots – more so than their English Protestant neighbours – formal education in continental Europe, and in particular the Dutch Republic, had become ‘an essential part of [their] education, whether practical, professional or academic’.Footnote 52 As Esther Mijers has noted, some 1,500 Scots matriculated from Dutch universities – Leiden, Franeker, Groningen, and Utrecht – in the century between 1650 and 1750.Footnote 53 This trend effectively framed the lifespan of John Clerk II, paralleling a decided shift away from domestic education of the kind he had undertaken (at his father's insistence) and towards foreign education as a necessary, formative engagement with the outside world for the sake of advancement.
John Clerk III's travel to study law at the University of Leiden in 1695 was, it seems, an arrangement born of grudging compromise. Even the fond recollections of later years were emotionally laden: having apparently arrived at the conclusion that study already undertaken at Glasgow had been a waste, the father saw the son off at the port of Leith on 24 October 1694 ‘with tears’. Bound for Rotterdam, Clerk III later claimed his enthusiasm for the voyage meant that he had ‘very little regard to the distress’ in which he left his father.Footnote 54 Such memories, and in particular the emotional performances embedded in them, later helped to valorize Clerk III's boldness in pursuing foreign education and engaging with the world, his father embodying the old Scotland left at the shore.Footnote 55 However, they obscure the apparent conditions set down in permitting the travel in the first place. Like some other Presbyterians (Scottish and English), Clerk III drew up a covenant prior to his departure, asking that God preserve him from ‘spiritual and bodily dangers’ and vowing to ‘depart from my lusts and close with thee’.Footnote 56 That this covenant was perhaps made as much with his father as with God is suggested by directions given to him for his spiritual upkeep while away. Prior to his son's departure, John Clerk II advised the keeping of a spiritual journal, ‘exactly marking down dayly befor[e] you sleep wt you have done’. This, he noted, would seem ‘ane intollerable labour’, but he cited his own example as a motive for doing so and God's providence in instructing him in it.Footnote 57 Within only months of his arrival at Leiden, Clerk III was informing his father that he had ‘followed exactly the way of keeping a jurnall of my life and conversation heer; so that if it be Gods will that I never come home again; it…will give you ane exact account of both the good and ill spent time I have had heer [sic]’.Footnote 58 This met with his father's clear approval, who added ‘you'll find it of singular use all the days of your life’.Footnote 59 Once again, the journal in question has not survived: if it did, in the end, make it back to Scotland, it may have fallen victim to the same fire which engulfed Penicuik House in 1899 and claimed Clerk III's 1697–9 travel journals.Footnote 60 Nevertheless, it remains clear that, from the outset, father and son had agreed to set the wider occasion of travel within very strict boundaries, tying the prospect of improvement through travel directly to the protection of the son's inner life and the easing of the father's persistent anxieties.
Correspondence between father and son in the months to come – exhaustively detailed but often subject to the delays and inconsistencies of the post system – reveals the pains, both mental and physical, undertaken by Clerk III to convince his father of this inner fortitude in the face of temptation, even as such distances and delays amplified the same anxieties. The broad curriculum which Clerk subsequently followed combined humanist and civic principles, prioritizing Roman law and resisting Cartesian innovations.Footnote 61 In the course of communication with his father, however, the subject of his studies mattered less to Clerk III than projecting a sense of studious, restrained activity and frugality at a quotidian level. Notice of the ‘colledges’ for which he had paid – most of them more or less ‘private’ with tutors – were interspersed with details of the books he kept with him and the intensity of his studies.Footnote 62 Thus, even in the middle of summer when ‘all the Scottsmen at Leyden [were] e[i]ther gone home or gone to Flanders’, Clerk reassured his father that he ‘went throw Titus Livius befor[e] I came heer so the books I have with me are Tacitus and Suetonius the novells, and Institutes in Greek and 3 other law books’.Footnote 63 Advice sought from trusted contacts, including his lawyer uncle David Forbes and Sir John Gilmore, directed his book purchases and prevented time being wasted. Memories of having perused his father's collection framed his purchases while abroad: recalling having read his father's catalogue, he added ‘I buy nothing which you have already’, but nevertheless aimed to update those which he maintained were now outdated in their translations (for instance, his father's ‘more than 60-years since’ editions of Livy, Virgil, and Ovid).Footnote 64 Singular devotion to study and deference to those with greater wisdom and experience (his father as much as Leiden scholars) allowed Clerk III to boast to his father by September 1695 that he had been ‘one of the greatest students heer’.Footnote 65
Studiousness, however, proved only a small part of the wider moral concerns which filled the correspondence between father and son. The wider geography of the younger John's activity, the moral landscape in which he placed himself, and the company he kept were all read into the contained cosmopolitan world he presented to his father. Cultural encounter was reported by the younger John with a mix of cautious curiosity and, on occasion, disapproval. Learning foreign languages was strongly encouraged by his father, but with clear advice on efficacy and purpose: Clerk advised his son to learn Dutch from one ‘plying his bussiness [sic]’ in order to ensure knowledge of ‘ye fields & laws & customs & curiosities of ye place best’; to learn French, he should hire a ‘French Master’ to teach him for a half-hour after dinner.Footnote 66 Regular church attendance was to be noted, with the expectation that Clerk III would inform his father which he had joined and its quality.Footnote 67 The conversation of Clerk's own ‘countrimen’ was to be ‘shun[ned]’ in order to facilitate fluency in foreign languages and avoid immoral influence.Footnote 68 Frugality and emotional distance were to be the norm: ‘intimacie’ with any but ‘ye trewly godly’ was to be avoided, ‘complements’ of food and drink seen as ‘snares’, and moderation in consumption recommended, with the axiom ‘a sedentary lyfe requyres little feeding’. This advice was provided with the warning that ‘one of the greatest trips of your lyfe’ could be ‘hon[ora]ble & advantagious [sic] or disgracefull & ruining’, with the weight of ‘advyse…fra your father’ tipping the balance.Footnote 69
At least in initial correspondence, Clerk III wrote to ease his father's anxieties, adopting the language of self-denial and cultural quarantine his father had advised. His daily routine, he noted, consisted of rising ‘half frozen before I get one my cloathes’ and studying until midnight or later. As such, he had ‘no time for much idlenesse’. While he confessed himself ‘obliged sometimes’ to be with fellow Scots, he maintained he had ‘no time for debauching’.Footnote 70 Of the spiritual tone of the country, Clerk reported with disapproval that ‘the sab[b]aths of the Lord are verie ill keaped heer for it is the Dutch play day’, adding that they had only ‘a Dutch Lutherann [sic] whom we can no understand he speakes English so ill’.Footnote 71 His father was reassured that the Sabbath would remain observed, responding that ‘if you have attained to any smack of the French you'll be able to understand the French protestant ministers…[until] the Lord send an English one’.Footnote 72 Wishing there were ‘no Scotsmen here at all and far lesse any of my frinds [sic]’, Clerk assiduously made note of keeping the company of his French and Dutch hosts instead.Footnote 73 Those whom he might have claimed as friends were kept at a noticeable distance. For instance, Clerk's fellow Scottish student Alexander Preston was revealed in September 1695 as having impregnated ‘a t[e]nniskeepers daughter (who was a whore) with child’. The elder Clerk's anxieties over Preston's ‘sad pickle’ (he added that ‘I never had a good opinion of him, whatever others had’) produced reassurances from his son that he had ‘never concerned my self in his businesse’.Footnote 74 The resulting conversion of the Dutch mother to force the marriage – she being a ‘papist’ and looking for recommendations from the Scottish presbyters – surely reinforced the patriarch's long-standing anxieties about confessional lapses abroad, but his son rejected them both, knowing ‘not which of them is most in the wrong’.Footnote 75 In this way, Clerk III manufactured for his father an image of carefully balanced cosmopolitanism which appeared safe and conformed with his father's wishes. While absorbing knowledge and adding further currency to his position in Scotland upon his return, he also made a point to reject (at least in his letters) those influences and encounters which might cause concern. In this, as with so many others who travelled during this period, Clerk was clearly tailoring his reports to ease anxieties back home.Footnote 76
Yet, Clerk III's curiosity, like that of his father decades earlier, pushed at these boundaries. In February 1696, Clerk entreated his father to permit him to travel that summer, with Italy as the ideal destination. Clerk admitted that this was ‘not a new motion’ in him, having desired to do so for a year. Indeed, he had already (without informing his father) hired a master in Italian and, after fourteen days, was convinced he would come to understand it well, it being ‘all almost French or Latin’.Footnote 77 Preparations had also extended so far as gathering information and testimonials to array against his father's anxieties. Friends and scholars ‘who are da[i]ly advising all students to go’ had left the younger Clerk convinced that ‘a man who loves the Roman stories will have as great a Desaire to see its Monuments as a Jew would have if the temple of Solomon were standing’. While the near-devotional tone of such comparisons may have plucked at both the patriarch's antiquarian interests and spiritual concerns, Clerk also cast these travels as a step out of the ignorance risked by sedentary learning: ‘I know nothing other then [sic] if I had bean keaping sheap’ he professed, thinking ‘nothing of any thing I have seen heer’. In contrast, Clerk maintained that ‘all the world are but imitations of the Italian masters’.Footnote 78 Still anticipating his father's refusal, Clerk then employed much of the language with which he had previously framed his obedience to ease his father towards leniency. He noted that he had not seen anyone return having converted or having been ‘set upon’ to do so, assuring his father ‘that need not be your fear of me’ as seeing ‘the superstition and cheatts [sic] of papists’ would only confirm him in his religion. More pointedly, generational knowledge of Italy among the ‘people of Scotland’ (and, by implication, his father) was outdated, with ‘old notions of Italy’ clouded by the idea that there was ‘po[x] ther[e]’ and ‘much temptation to turn Papist’. This, to an extent, echoed a wider shift towards perceptions of Louis XIV as the embodiment of Catholic threat to Protestantism rather than Rome; it also would have held emotional appeal in light of his father's own intergenerational struggles over travel.Footnote 79 The moral authority of his father's generation was arrayed against fears that this might be an innovation of youth, referencing the recent examples of fellow Scots Gilbert Burnet (then bishop of Salisbury) and secretary (James) Johnstone ‘with a hundred more’ others who had travelled to Italy and not been swayed in their faith.Footnote 80
Discussion of generational attitudes quickly brought familial memory back into the fray, circumscribing the boundaries of the proposed travel through personal knowledge where the attestations of others might have failed. The elder Clerk swiftly reminded his son of his duty while abroad to study the law – not ‘fiddling[,] nor to see curiosities’ – adding that he too had done what his father had ‘bred’ him to do by returning home rather than making himself a ‘slave to [his] passions’.Footnote 81 That travelling to Rome was, in itself, useless was self-evident to Clerk II, who dismissed his son's year spent thinking on it as ‘eleven months, thirty days and twenty-three hours’ too long. Learning anything beyond Rome's history was ‘mere distracting, diverting and useless’. That he had, himself, ‘looked that way’ in his youth was time wasted to the older Clerk, claiming that what was ‘truly worth the remembering [was] only to be had in historians’. Rather, his self-restraint in not indulging his inclinations towards travelling to ‘Italy and Jerusalem etc[.]’, even with ‘perhaps the same motives…and as great a desire’ as his son, took pride of place in his exercise of ‘virtue and holiness’. Confirmation as a Protestant – if that was, indeed, his son's intention – was better found through studying divinity and prayer than ‘100,000 journeys to Italy’.Footnote 82 Authority countered authority through revisions of character and intent: Burnet, for instance, was understood by Clerk II to have gone to Italy only to ‘divert melancholy’ after his wife's death (though he was, in fact, in exile), while Johnstone travelled with the aim of becoming a statesman, which Clerk expressly forbade of his son.Footnote 83 Rome itself was little more than a den of ‘buggery’ – ‘as rife as fornication is in Scotland’ – where sensuality dominated and ‘where Satan has set up his throne conspicuously’.Footnote 84 This already set the elder Clerk at odds with shifting perceptions of Rome (and Italy broadly) as a place in which taste was refined rather than pillars of faith shaken; instead, the ‘mortif[ication] of such lust’ for the ‘accomplishment of minds’ was the aim.Footnote 85 The younger Clerk responded in kind, drawing what he knew of his father's youth into the discussion, noting that ‘the same desaire may remaine with me to see Italy which you had to see France’. Rather, returning home would become ‘the beginning of [his] sorrowes’, where he would be nothing more than one of those ‘young fools’ left without ‘knowing ether the world or themselves’.Footnote 86 These exchanges fused familial memory with mutual, emotionally laden understanding of where cosmopolitan engagement with the world had led and might now lead.
Echoes of his father's struggles with his grandfather's intransigence on travel did little to make Clerk III's case, however, and a compromise was only reached by circumscribing his movements within a safely Protestant confessional space: initially suggesting a Presbyterian pilgrimage to Geneva as a gesture to his father, Clerk pressed for permission to travel through Germany towards Vienna.Footnote 87 Germany, he admitted to his uncle David Forbes, was not expressly permitted by his father, but ‘he doth not hinder me’. Already seizing upon ‘the least appearance of…permission’, Clerk blamed his ‘own evil heart’ and ‘too much of the Epicurean principle’ while insisting his plans were ‘absolutely right’.Footnote 88 Evidently assuming obedience, the elder Clerk reminded his son – in words essentially paralleling those of his ‘signal providences’ – that ‘In 14 days space I saw all yt was visible either at London or Paris’, and thus lingering in foreign places was unnecessary; all he would need along the way were ‘no books…but your bible, institutes, & journal’.Footnote 89 While correspondence between father and son suffered by virtue of the latter (as he explained it) never staying long enough in one place to receive return post, the continuance of spiritual introspection remained central to his letters of reassurance. From Vienna, where he moved in the circle of the (safely Protestant) English ambassador Robert Sutton, Lord Lexington, and spoke ‘Hollands’ and Italian with the elite, Clerk informed his father that ‘I do not forgett to keep a journal of what is remarkable…for I consider everye thing so narrowly, that I could almost paint it over exactly.’Footnote 90 Ostensibly, at least, the boundaries of Clerk's travels remained safely negotiated between the limits set by his father's anxieties.
III
Here, however, two silences in the Clerk family papers speak to ruptures in these carefully managed travels, signalling a shift from a loosely managed ‘tour’ to a more overt act of rebellion. First, correspondence between father and son effectively ceased following the aforementioned letter from Vienna, ending with notification that the younger Clerk intended to travel to Venice. Second, the absence of Clerk's travel diaries from the family archive leaves little with which to access his activities in this most controversial period. Two surviving collections, however, facilitate a reconstruction: Clerk's correspondence with other parties while in Italy (including account books and memoranda), and a later transcription of his travel diary, produced in the decades after his return. Both of these speak not only to Clerk's broader concerns beyond what is revealed by surviving familial correspondence, but also the archival afterlives of these travels and their role in shaping subsequent narratives.Footnote 91 These jar with the wider family relationship with travel while simultaneously revealing formative ways in which it shaped the younger Clerk's sense of self. They suggest, once again, a longer process of reconciling travel with individual priorities and anxieties during and after the act itself.
What survives of Clerk III's correspondence during this period reflects a broad engagement with Italy which would undoubtedly have piqued his father's now-familiar concerns. While actions in contravention of parental will were by no means unusual among ‘Grand Tourists’, especially in the later eighteenth century, the collection as a whole suggests not only a wilful discarding of confessional façades, but a near-revelling in the newfound mixture of cosmopolitan chaos and opportunity.Footnote 92 Much of this correspondence passed through the hands of the tailor Charles Browne, a fellow Scot whose home was variously located by contemporary travellers – who typically referred to him as a ‘sartore inglese’ – near the Strada di Condotti in Rome. Browne proved to be not only a welcoming host for Clerk, but also a ready source for Italian fashion: one bill from 8 July 1698, incorporating clothing of fine calico and silver buttons, reached nearly £30, while letters after his travels from Browne still provided connections for gun locks, ‘stamps of the fountains’, and fine gloves to the tune of eighteen Roman crowns.Footnote 93 Music, for which Clerk would later be renowned as virtuoso violinist, was pursued across languages and geographies. Clerk's mementos from the trip include English canzonette sent, with expressions of devotion in Italian, from London by the Polish-born composer Jakob Kremberg (c. 1650–1715). Clerk had met Kremberg in Leiden along with the latter's student, the physician and lutenist Herman Boerhaave (1669–1738), with whom he gleefully composed music.Footnote 94 Correspondence and promises of cantate from the composer and violinist Giovanni Battista Bassani, who provided a forwarding address in Ferrara, also survive, along with letters from Alexander Preston (now returned to Edinburgh) expressing hopes that Clerk might return with ‘a shipfull of musick to them’ so they might ‘chuse you Maestro di Capella’.Footnote 95 Clerk's accounts of the time note the purchase of drawings (including works by Raphael), regular visits to coffee houses, and charitable offerings to ‘the poor of different houses’.Footnote 96 Friends from Edinburgh, drawing on their own travels, advised the purchase of gloves, fans, agate cameos, and fragrances – especially bergamot – not only for personal use but for their resale value at home.Footnote 97 Such purchases – reminiscent of his father's own expenses, though now likely to be repugnant to him – suggest that Clerk was eager to cultivate a cosmopolitan reputation for himself beyond the boundaries of his father's advices.
Clerk's correspondence also suggests that letters were later used as a way of revisiting his disobedience and revelling in Italian encounters. Brushes with Roman cardinals are suggested by letters arranging meetings with the Vatican librarian; others written by such esteemed figures as Alessandro Caprara of the Sacra Rota were clearly kept for posterity. These became a point of pride which Clerk later memorialized by writing ‘Monsignor Caprara was one of the judges of the Rota Romana’ on the letter itself.Footnote 98 More controversial mementos also survive with such annotations, including a supplication given to Clerk in Rome by a ‘girl of 18’ named Geltruda who had hoped to avoid the convent through Clerk's intervention with the Pamphili family. Writing afterwards on the Italian supplication in English, Clerk recorded that he had refused to aid the ‘girl’ for fear that she might be thought ‘my whore’, leaving Geltruda's sister Costanza to approach the Pamphili directly without success; nevertheless, Clerk kept the supplication, whether as a testimony to his virtue, his supposed status in Rome, or a combination thereof.Footnote 99 Such items could facilitate ‘display’ in the sense of showing accomplishment through travel, but also provide embodied, personal reminders of restraint, temptation, or even hidden memories to be revisited.Footnote 100
With this wider sense of ‘curiositie’ came an inducement to push at confessional boundaries previously thrown up by his father's oversight. Advice from young Scottish friends and knowledgeable tutors prior to his departure had already provided something of a framework for his travels in the absence (or ignorance) of fatherly guidance. It was assumed by at least one friend prior to Clerk's departure that he was already consulting the Huguenot Maximilien Misson's New voyage to Italy. This had been published in English only two years prior to Clerk's travels (though also accessible to him in one of two French editions) and already understood to be the authoritative guide to travel in Italy (at least, among Protestants).Footnote 101 Read alongside the accounts of other Protestant travellers such as Burnet (to whom Clerk had referred while reassuring his father), Misson's New voyage might well have provided Clerk with a Protestant bulwark equal to his father's anxieties. However, there is little in the surviving records of his travels to suggest that he adopted either Misson's itinerary or, for that matter, his confessional stance during these travels.Footnote 102 Indeed, beyond the aforementioned Charles Browne, Clerk's main intermediary while travelling was a Catholic family member: his ‘cousin’ Father Cosimo (Alexander) Clerk (OFM). In late correspondence with his father, Clerk noted that Father Cosimo had fled to Italy after the battle of Killiecrankie in 1689, adding cryptically that he was ‘a stranger to his old debauches’.Footnote 103 While his memoirs would describe Father Cosimo as having ‘never tr[o]ubled his head with Religion of any kind’ and operating as something of a guard against the conversion attempts of his co-religionists, correspondence between them during these travels suggests that Father Cosimo also helped in easing confessional boundaries.Footnote 104 It was Cosimo who facilitated meetings with the grand duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III de’ Medici, afterwards enquiring after accommodation in Florence among the Duke's palazzi, giving and receiving gifts (including a medicine box which Clerk later noted among his most prized possessions), and ultimately made way for Clerk's appointment as a gentleman of the bedchamber within the grand duke's household.Footnote 105 On his departure from Italy, Clerk wrote to Cosimo III with gratitude on behalf of ‘all his house’ as ‘fedelissimi servitori’.Footnote 106 Such connections provided the means by which Clerk was able to acquire many of the objects which would subsequently embody his memories of the trip: the seal which Cosimo III bestowed on him later lay ‘in Penicuik Charter Room’, and ‘very kind letters’ which he preserved in later life.Footnote 107
The second set of these surviving records of Clerk III's travels not only reinforces the thrill found in these new liberties, but also the subsequent importance of those memories: Clerk's later transcription of parts of his Italian travel diary. This was evidently not only worth creating and preserving nearly a decade afterwards, but something to be treasured (perhaps even shared), as Clerk noted that he had paid £1 9s to have it bound.Footnote 108 Like his father's revisiting of his own travels, a sense of sentiment and memorializing pervades the incomplete text: it is written in the first person and past tense, with the apparent benefit of hindsight elevating what was seen and done. His host in Rome, Browne, is remembered as Clerk's intermediary with Italian high society, being ‘the strangest fellow I ever knew’ but evidently lying openly about being Clerk's close relation, claiming the latter was from a ‘mightie noble familie’.Footnote 109 Attention to women and fashion permeate the account: in Naples, Clerk notes, one must ‘take care he do not notice any particulare woman to[o] much, for they are very jelouse’; during Carnevale, ‘ladys under ther[e] masks’ are noted as being closely watched by their husbands and servants; conversations with women in public must not involve ‘t[o]uching or taking any woman by the hand’, as the latter would signify ‘she will lett him lie with her to[o]’.Footnote 110 Among the broader ‘ceremonies of love’ in Italy, Clerk even details how they go about ‘mak[ing] love to a mans [sic] wife’ by seeking out the male servant whom the lady ‘keaps for her proper use’ and bribing him to facilitate an ‘interview’.Footnote 111 Titillation and corporeal temptation – his father's ‘sensuality’ – are here cast as part of the thrilling afterlife of adventurous youth, perhaps to be perused in advancing age.
Confessional boundaries also blurred in remembrance, with danger again taking on a primary role in the recasting. Thorough descriptions of Roman ceremony – including ‘every punchilio [sic]’ of papal procedure – are remembered alongside encounters with holy relics (including the Shroud of Turn or ‘Holy Napkin’) and visits to grand palazzi. Surviving letters to Cosimo III also suggest that conversations were had as to the health of Clerk's ‘poor soul’, with Clerk thanking the grand duke for offering to reveal to him the ‘true church of Christ’.Footnote 112 Tellingly, even brushes with death take on a decidedly different turn from his father's memorials of near-drowning: Clerk recalls having commended himself to God when, off the south coast of France, his ship struck a rock and threatened his life, but in the meantime ‘could not forget to take notice of a French man & two Spaniards with me…praying to Madonna de Soretta…the other to…the Virgin Mary of Loretto’, while he was left regretting his ‘stupidities that I did not roar & crie out my prayers’.Footnote 113 Where foreign waters affirmed his father's faith, Clerk's prayers remained unuttered in the face of danger, surrounded as he (says he) was by the Catholic ‘other’. Far from the confessional confidence and quarantined cultural spaces of his father's ‘signal providences’, Clerk's recollections project a certain revelry and cultural mixing which became formative, in defiance of his father. Danger not only evinces the masculine qualities of bravery and composure which would gain predominance in travel accounts across the eighteenth century, but a clear re-drawing by Clerk of his father's bleak confessional landscape into one of perilous, yet intriguing intermixture.Footnote 114
Where the pitfalls of travel itself may have offered fodder for survival tales after the fact, frequent illness while in Italy had a debilitating and mortifying effect, with regular bouts of ague and the looming threat of plague constant. Correspondence from his father once again resumed in August 1698 when the younger Clerk found himself living on credit and unable to pay physicians, now professing to his father that he daily saw ‘the vanieties of the Roman Clergie which makes me the mor[e] love the sinceritie of ours’.Footnote 115 The condition of aid was, unsurprisingly, his prompt return to Scotland within five months’ time via France and the Netherlands.Footnote 116 France, of course, dredged up further familial memories as Clerk III pushed for further liberties. While in Paris, Clerk hoped that, as his father had ‘once pleased to think France worth your while’, he should do the same; however, Father Cosimo himself anticipated familial fears, warning Clerk that, howsoever ‘charmed’ he was by Catholics in Genoa, French Catholics presented ‘a great deal off more danger’. Indeed, Cosimo applied family memory directly, warning ‘Remember your Uncle James his faite and lett that scare you.’Footnote 117 Bouts of illness on his return were swiftly cast by his father as purgation of ‘pride and vanitie’ and his ‘inordinate love, to y[ou]r world’, only spurring further comment that places like London offered ‘lit[t]le or nothing…worth your seeing’.Footnote 118 This was a dramatic curtailment of his son's ‘curiositie’ in order to offset the sins of self-indulgence and disobedience, demanding a recommitment on both a familial and spiritual level to those authorities which his son appeared to have rejected in the course of knowing the world.
IV
Reappraisals of Clerk's travels began almost as soon as he started the return trip to Edinburgh. In transit, Clerk told his father that the ‘cheife motive of my going to Italy’ was not, in fact, cultural or educational, but rather a desire to avoid an ‘old amour’ back in Scotland. Knowing his father would disapprove of the marriage and not wanting to do anything ‘contrarie to your commands’, he felt it best to delay his return and ‘give the young Lady time to mar[r]y’, thereby turning defiance into a form of obedience.Footnote 119 In the years that followed, however, these travels became central to Clerk's self-image as the Scottish cosmopolitan par excellence, producing memoirs in later life which further reduced the friction between himself and his father to having ‘spent at least 600 lib Str. more than my Father knew of’ and admitting that he might have done as much in ‘2 or 3 years’ rather than five. In exchange, he had ‘acquired a little more knowledge of the world’.Footnote 120 Correspondence with the wider world continued, spanning numerous languages and locations: the composer Jakob Kremberg, for instance, wrote to Clerk in a medley of Italian, French, and Dutch of address changes in Amsterdam while requesting music books.Footnote 121 Old friends from his days in Leiden continued to provide news of affairs in the Netherlands, ranging from the weather to the movements of William III and the latest musical trends.Footnote 122 Even in advanced age, Clerk wrote to his former musical companion in Leiden, the now-famous physician Herman Boerhaave, describing in Latin the lands and house of Penicuik, drawing parallels with Pliny's description of his villa in Tuscany.Footnote 123
Yet, while the endurance of such connections maintained links to the wider world of which the younger Clerk now esteemed himself a part, the conflict from which it had arisen clearly weighed heavily on the spiritual life of his father. Beyond providing the immediate context for his ‘signal providences’ – in which he also noted the safe return of John from his travels after ‘many dangers’ – the elder Clerk also read the indulgences of travel into the wider ills of the day.Footnote 124 One document, bearing the telling title Observations of mine as to the state of the nation in 1700 to be spoken of when occasion offers, made a case for improving education within Scotland so as to reduce the appeal of foreign travel among the youth. Likewise, Scottish tradesmen would not find themselves ‘starve[d] for want of employment’ if import of foreign furniture were barred.Footnote 125 Clerk was surely aware of the contradictions here, both within his own life and in those of his wider family; nevertheless, the certainties of age and the convenience of such an argument in his own life again called for both reassessment and forgetting. Not only the tensions between generations, but the inner tensions they precipitated in the course of life, made ‘carefully-studied acts of self-fashioning’ and deep-seated anxieties alike essential to the limits of the Clerks’ world.Footnote 126
While the experiences of these three generations of the Clerk family across this period are by no means exhaustive of wider Scottish or indeed European engagement with travel, they nevertheless pose important challenges to conventional historical approaches to the subject. Collectively, these examples suggest not only different modes of practising the ‘cosmopolitanism’ acquired through travel, but also projecting and internalizing it in ways which defy singular understandings of the term. For John Clerk I, travel was an almost wholly pragmatic undertaking, so apparently unremarkable as to not warrant later reflection in the manner of his son and grandson, but so dangerous as to later warrant warnings and circumscriptions. For subsequent generations, travel and its effects were given new meanings in accordance with the passage of time and the subjective role which it played within their wider lives: travel became self-realization, rebellion, trial, and even trauma as much as a straightforward way of life. Attention to the various iterations of travel as part of the inner lives of these individuals, and within the context of wider familial and social change, helps to situate travel within a longer life cycle, thereby expanding its historical resonances beyond the act itself and into a transformative undertaking across generations. Beyond the acquired signifiers of these varied ‘cosmopolitan’ lives – the trinkets, the languages, the networks – the example of the Clerks suggests that travel and its consequences were something that remained both alive and lived with long after the return home.
