Introduction

“If this world be a great booke, as St. Augustine calls it, none study this ‘ great booke ’ so much as the Traveller.” In the early years of the seventeenth century, travel abroad was unusual “ except to merchants, and such gentlemen who resolved to be soldiers”, or ambassadors and their suites. The State maintained a close supervision over those individuals who did venture upon private travel, and Salisbury was gravely concerned in case they should return infected by Popery. Clarendon remarks that in his father’s time travel in Italy “ was very dangerous to all the English nation who did not profess themselves Roman Catholics ”, and goes on to say “ the wisdom and frugality of that time being such, that few gentlemen made journeys to London, or any other expensive journeys, but upon important business, and their wives never ”. Yet of his own times he writes “ now very few stay at home, or think they are fit for good company if they have not been beyond the seas ”.

This striking change in the attitude of Englishmen to foreign travel owed much to the cultured atmosphere of the court of Charles I, which contrasted strongly with the homespun amusements of the previous reign. Gentlemen hoping for preferement had to conform to the new standard of politeness. The marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria eased relations with the Papacy, and after 1630 England was at peace with France for the greater part of the century. Travel in France was facilitated by the new roads, bridges and canals constructed under Sully’s direction, and by the comparative peace and order of that kingdom, disturbed only temporarily by the Fronde. The growth of the diplomatic service and of commerce meant that more persons travelled on necessary business, while others went abroad to gain military experience in the campaigns of the Thirty Years War. In spite of the Civil War, there seems to have been a steady growth in the affluence of the English merchants and gentry during the century, and the “ frugality ” of former times gave place to more luxurious and leisurely ways of life.