Richard Lassels and the establishment of the Grand Tour : Catholic cosmopolitans and royalists in exile, 1630-1660

• Main Author: Chaney, Edward
• Published: University of London 1982
• Subjects: 914.04
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.630504

If one includes Rome and Naples as essential ingredients in a 'Grand Tour' itinerary, as one should by eighteenth century definition of the term, then it is only after 1630, following England's peace treaties with France and Spain and the rapprochement with the papal court, that the Grand Tour can be said to have taken shape. The career of Richard Lassels, the Catholic priest and travelling tutor who first coined the expression Grand Tour, provides a good vehicle for observing the final stage in its progress towards establishment as a social convention. Between 1637 and the late 1660s, Lassels visited Italy five times and wrote at least four travel accounts on the basis of his reading and experience; one of these (Advocates' MS. 15.2.15 in the National Library of Scotland) is here transcribed for the first time (Appendix I). Lassels' biography is also of intrinsic historical interest. After 1640 he and his 'Catholic cosmopolitan' colleagues helped and influenced the exiles, for the most part moderate Protestants, who had so suddenly and unprecedentedly become dependent upon them. This was of great long-term significance for English history. Without the experience of exile it is doubtful whether the restored monarchy would have become, first secretly, and then openly and in the event disastrously Catholic. The transcript ot Lassels' recently identified Description of Italy (1654), serves to show one way in which influential help was given to a non-Catholic nobleman on a journey from Paris to Rome and Naples. This manuscript was also an important stage in the evolution of Lassels' posthumously published Voyage of Italy (1670), probably the best of all English seventeenth-century guidebooks.