Gascoigne's Grand Tours complemented his education in whetting his appetite to engage with the Anglican establishment. In the fifteen years between 1764 and 1779 Sir Thomas Gascoigne embarked upon two European Grand Tours, spending in total some five years abroad. There is a great contrast in the conduct and duration of the two tours. The second tour brings out well his growing maturity and the advantages of the Catholic gentleman abroad. But the first Grand Tour between September 1764 and April 1765 was taken despite the concerns of his guardians regarding his character and poor behaviour, and its outcomes provoked some critical comment from friends on his upbringing and education. This first tour might have involved him in serious criminal proceedings in Rome following the murder of a coachman and it was only the fact of his Catholicism and status as an English gentleman that helped him to evade an embarrassing prosecution, precipitating an early return to England. It was nearly ten years before he considered a second Grand Tour of the Continent. This second tour, undertaken in the company of the notable travel writer Henry Swinburne between the years 1774 and 1779, was much more extensive and covered more unusual territory than his previous tour which followed a more standard itinerary focused principally upon Italy. On his second tour he visited several states and cities spending time in, amongst other places, Marseilles, Paris, Bordeaux, Milan, Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice, Genoa, parts of the Two Sicilies, Vienna, Brussels in the Austrian Netherlands, Spa in the Bishopric of Liège, and much of Spain (see Map 2.1.). Gascoigne was clearly ambitious in his travels and some of the territories he visited, or attempted to visit – such as Morocco, Italy south of Naples, and Iberia – received few foreign visitors and, of those who travelled there, few could accurately be described as tourists.

For Gascoigne – who was ‘always best humoured and best in health when travelling’ – embarking upon an extensive European Grand Tour in 1774 was an important way to ‘fill up his leisure moments’.