John Evelyn and the Art of Travel

Abstract

JOHN EVELYN'S Bildungsreise marks a new stage in the history of English travel abroad, and especially in the history of English travel to Italy. The Middle Ages saw Englishmen in Italy in the role of cleric or pilgrim, soldier or diplomat or student. The Reformation suppressed most of the earlier interests, leaving as the principal role that of student. The student traveler of the Renaissance was devoted not alone to law or medicine or the new learning. Beginning with William Thomas, the author of the first English book on Italy (I549), English students paid special devotion to the art of political inquiry; that is, to such study of foreign nations, their peoples and their polities, as would profit a statesman. Like Roger Ascham in Germany, in Italy Thomas Hoby, Philip Sidney, Fynes Moryson, and, most of all, Henry Wotton worked seriously at their study of statesmanship. Ascham's Report on Germany, Moryson's elaborate Itinerary (too ample to be published in full), and Henry Wotton's State of Christendom illustrate this political education. Evelyn's The State of France (i652) represents his gesture of compliance with this tradition; but it was his only one. He affected scorn in the moment of compliance. I was least of all inquisitive, he wrote in the dedication of the book, how others were governed, finding it so difficult a province to regulate my self.' This sounds like a boutade, as does a gibe at another supposed essential of travel, the learning of languages. Mere philologicall peregrinations, he wrote, yielded onely a parrot-virtue . . . one of the shels of travel.2 If we were to count full value for these remarks, we might be further led astray by Evelyn's advice in i658 to the Earl of Northumberland, who was sending his son abroad. Evelyn warned against sending Lord Percy in the company of a mere pedant, who could