De groote tour

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In defence of the ‘groote tour’
A protest and a plea
(In lieu of a summary)^*

‘The chief End of their Breeding, is to make them fit for the service of their Countrey...’¹

What possible purpose - English readers well versed in the subject may ask - can be served by yet another book on the Grand Tour? Monographs abound, from the beginning of the present century when E.S. Bates wrote his amusing Touring in 1600 and Clare Howard drew her ‘clear outline’ of ‘a particular phase of Renaissance travel’, down to the sixties when C. Hibbert and G. Trease wrote a survey of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, the list being rounded off by A. Burgess and F. Haskell with their lavishly illustrated coffee-table book (chapter I). These books presented their readers with a detailed picture of the kind of educational travel fashionable from about the middle of the sixteenth century down to Napoleonic times. Their authors implied, if they did not say it in as many words, that the Grand Tour was an exclusively English phenomenon. Even J.W. Stoye in his excellent English Travellers Abroad seems to have unwittingly confirmed this notion. The Grand Tour - one feels - has been overwritten.

A Dutch study of the subject, then, either has nothing new to say or is a contradiction in terms. Did not Sir William Temple, that astute observer of the Dutch people in 1672, write that Dutch young men ‘journeyed chiefly into England and France’? And has not Charles Wilson in more recent years told his readers, somewhat patronizingly - and perhaps on Sir William's authority - that the Dutch travelled abroad ‘on something like a Grand Tour’?²

There is no denying that Temple's statement (but for the ‘chiefly’) was correct. Dutch youth, even if it did not flock to England, did go over in fair numbers, among them Johan de Witt (who in later life became a personal friend of ambassador Temple's). Together with his brother Cornelis, the future Grand Pensionary made the Grand Tour of France and a ‘tourkien’, a little tour, of England. Almost all the sons of the prominent Van Aerssen van Sommelsdyck family travelled in France, while some of them also crossed the Channel to visit

* For full titles the reader is referred to p. 345 ff of the ‘Overzicht’.

1 Temple, ed. Clark, 84.

2 Ibid.; Wilson 48.

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London and England's chief seats of learning. The same goes for the Huygens family. The very first journey abroad made by Sir Constantine - poet, diplomat and secretary to three successive Stadtholders - took him to England. Of his four sons, the brilliant Christiaan and a younger brother were to follow in their father's footsteps, while both young men travelled in France, as had their elder brother Constantijn (who was also to circle Italy) before them.

These are a few, if telling, examples. The actual list of young Dutch people visiting England to acquaint themselves with the men and manners, sights and language of Albion was a much longer one indeed.

Temple was right again when he wrote that the ‘Gentlemen and Nobles’ in the United Provinces strove to imitate the French in ‘their Meen, their Clothes, their way of Talk...’ But, despite this, the erstwhile English ambassador was only telling part of the story.³ Since young people from the Dutch Republic did not confine their journeys to England and France, they also crossed the Brenner or Mt. Cenis to tour Italy. It is of course impossible to tell how many they numbered over the years, but there is irrefutable evidence that in 1650 the sons of Dutch regents crowded the churches of Rome, the piazzas of Florence and the Lido in Venice alongside German princelings, English milords, French vicomtes and a considerable number of the aristocracy of other European countries, come together to witness the pomp and splendour of the Jubilee festivities. And again, as the seventeenth century wore on, the ‘Heeren’ from Amsterdam and The Hague, Delft, Hoorn and Leyden, from the province of Zeeland in the south-west to Groningen in the north-east of the Republic, all circled Italy just as leisurely and extensively as their opposite numbers from the other countries of Europe.

My protest against ambassador Temple's and Professor Wilson's incomplete assertions will be voiced from here on as a defence of the Groote Tour and a plea for the admittance of the Dutch traveller to that exclusive international set of Grand Tourists.⁴ The arguments advanced in favour of full membership include, of course, weightier and more substantial matter than mere geographical evidence.

In Dutch the term ‘educatiereis’ stood for a common enough notion until the end of the last century, an equivalent of the German ‘Bildungsreise’, both words expressing precisely what the Groote Tour and the Kavaliersreise represented (chapter I). Moreover, and exactly as in seventeenth-century England, the French term ‘grand tour’ was widely used by Dutch tourists when referring to the round trip of France. In this respect Dutch travellers even went one better than the English, for they incorporated this notion into their own language and wrote about ‘den toer van Vranckryck’.

3 Temple 85.

4 It is typical that at the Wolfenbütteler Symposion on ‘Reiseberichte als Quellen europäischer Kulturgeschichte’ (June 1981), the ‘Groote Tour’ was not mentioned once.

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My plea is further bolstered by a historical argument. The written history of the Groote Tour can be traced back to the latter part of the sixteenth century, to the very same decades when in England Sir Philip Sidney and his contemporaries were venting their enthusiasm for educational travel (chapter II). The oldest surviving journal dates from 1572 when squire Frederik Coenders, a native of Groningen, took his young nephews to France ‘ad linguam discendam et regiones perlustrandas.’ By his own account, though, Coenders in his day was but one of a multitude of travellers. Moreover, jonker Frederik and his two charges were probably second generation tourists: biographical details about numerous ancestors of Johan de Witt point to an older tradition of ‘the younger sort's travel as a means of education.’⁵

At that time humanists, parents and politicians in many European countries were preoccupied with the problem of the proper education for young men of ‘gentle and noble birth’, destined for ‘Publique Charges’. For a number of reasons it was felt that the chivalrous education that had served so well for centuries now, in the sixteenth, no longer provided adequately for young people destined in later life to serve their prince at home and abroad. In England Sir Thomas Elyot - like many others looking to Italy for inspiration - was among the first to propose a new programme of studies endeavouring to mould the ‘compleat gentleman’, that Renaissance paragon of chivalry and learning. As times changed and England's commitment to the Continent grew, there was a shift of emphasis away from scholarly to more practical knowledge. A command of languages and a knowledge of ‘such thinges as maie be serviceable to [one's] Countriee’ were now considered imperative. As ‘such thinges’ were best learned abroad, young people took off for the Continent in ‘a greate nomber’.⁶

In France too there was general agreement among responsible people as to the need for reform of the educational programme, but there was no consensus on the matter of foreign travel as an integral part of education. Montaigne wrote his essay on L'institution des enfans as a firm protagonist of travel at an early age. The Huguenot soldier François de la Noue, on the other hand, looked upon ‘promenades’ abroad as an experience more detrimental to a man's morale than beneficial to his intellectual gain. Instead he proposed the establishment in France of four Academies where ‘le jeune gentilhomme’ was to have the ‘bonne nourriture’ that would enable him to ‘servir à sa patrie’.

In the Low Countries, at a time when they were fighting to rid themselves of their Spanish overlord, the necessity of training a capable cadre to hold ‘Publicke Charges’ was even more urgently felt than in the two established monarchies of England and France. It is therefore not surprising that the man to come up with

5 Francis Bacon, in his essay ‘On travel’.

6 Philip Sidney, in a letter to his younger brother Robert, Correspondence, 125.

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an appropriate programme of education should be one of the closest advisers to Prince William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch revolt. In his Ratio Philip Marnix of St Aldegonde unfolded a programme of studies in which he intertwined the best of traditional schooling in the classics with tuition in the mother tongue and modern languages, with an overall emphasis on religious and moral training. The curriculum was adorned, moreover, with lessons in chivalrous exercises and the social graces, befitting the education of the nobility and gentry. It was only after their graduation that Marnix considered his students ready for foreign travel, albeit with certain restrictions as to the countries worth visiting. That Marnix's ‘Nobileion’, like La Noue's academies, did not in the end materialize, is perhaps regrettable but in the present context it is of secondary importance. What is significant, however, is the concern for proper education that both La Noue - for some time the Prince's field-marshal - and Marnix, together with Hubert Languet, diplomat, scholar, Sir Philip Sidney's mentor during his continental tour and yet another member of the Prince's entourage, should express their ideas on ‘institutio’ in their writings and actions.

The most spectacular tribute to education in the Low Countries came from the Prince himself, when with admirable prudence and providence he endowed Holland and Zeeland with a seat of learning of their own. From 1574 onwards there was no need to go off to foreign parts: students could read classics or law and train for the medical profession or the church at home, at their own university.

And it was at Leyden university that Marnix's idea of incorporating foreign travel into the education of the aristocracy was taken up again. Justus Lipsius, eminent scholar and newly appointed to the chair of history and law, reviewed the matter of educational travel in an essay on the merits of a visit to Italy. Travel for young people, he averred, has a threefold aim: to amass knowledge, to steel the character and to acquire prudentia, an essential perquisite for future civil servants and administrators of the ‘publike weale’. Though in his day Lipsius was not the only one, nor the first, to hold forth on the merits of travel, his essay, carrying as it did the prestige of his name, was widely published and translated into a variety of modern languages, English and Dutch among them. Together, Marnix's insistence on the individual's duty to the res publica and Lipsius's exposition of the intrinsic value of educational travel, coupled with the Prince's endowment of Leyden university, perfectly matched the royal patronage of Oxford and Cambridge in England, the exhortations of statesmen to young men during their years of travel and the treatises of pragmatists on the proper education for those of gentle and noble birth. This firm promotion of adequate schooling on both sides of the North Sea is yet another argument to lend force to my main plea.

At first, Dutch tourists venturing abroad were left to their own devices in their endeavours to master foreign languages and acquire knowledge (chapter V). The only guideline was a diagram, printed in many a guidebook, showing what to take particular note of on the way. Once again it was Leyden university that provided

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the remedy, when in 1624 Thomas Erpenius, professor of oriental languages, wrote his concise and eminently practical De peregrinatione gallica utiliter instituenda tractatus, a methodical exposition of how best to prepare for the journey, what to read, how to master French grammar, what to study in matters of religion, history and government, which learned men to approach and what cities to visit. The Tractatus was written with France in mind, but Erpenius's method was also applicable to Italy, just as, conversely, Lipsius's Epistola was relevant to France. From 1631 on, when the Tractatus was published - in one volume with the Epistola! - Dutch tourists were well equipped indeed to make a success of the ‘Groote Tour’.

These introductory paragraphs take the story up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, to a period in which the volume of documentary evidence - letters and journals - increases to allow one to fit the rest of the story together with somewhat greater coherence and accuracy. Among the papers I have examined (some thirty all told) are the journals of the poet P.C. Hooft, the future statesman Johan de Witt, future magistrates like Johan Huydecoper and Coenraad Ruysch (burgomasters of Amsterdam and Leyden respectively), directors of the East and West India Companies, and sons of the gentry and landed nobility. These ‘travelogues’ represent more or less identical experiences of scores of their writers' compatriots, many of whom are mentioned as friends on tour or sightseeing companions. And throughout the century there is a considerable body of secondary material with which to pencil in the details. This ranges from inscriptions in alba amicorum, poems, letters and estimates of costs to religious tracts and a medical report on the victim of a duel. Since the present study is the first attempt to write the history of the Dutch Grand Tour, it seemed prudent to emphasize the breadth and variety of the tourists' experiences and activities on the way, rather than comment in depth on the peregrinations of a select few.

The ensuing result is, in true Dutch seventeenth-century fashion, a lesson in anatomy. The tourist is diligently taken apart and only put together again right at the end. The overall aim is to draw the tourist's likeness, to sketch in his background and define the underlying principles of this particular kind of educational travel (chapter I). To distinguish between travellers bent on training for the service of their country and those wishing to move in the European res publica literaria, it has been necessary to draw some dividing-lines, and for practical reasons the study has been restricted to the seventeenth century only.

Whereas the first chapters of this book may hold some fresh information for the English reader, at this point, where the story proper of the peregrinations of the Dutch across Europe begins to unfold, his interest may well begin to flag with his increasing sense of covering familiar ground. Actually, in a sense I should find such boredom most gratifying, and indeed it would be my most convincing argument in favour of Dutch participation in the Grand Tour.

Be that as it may, apart from a plea these pages are supposed to contain a

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summary and readers other than well-read Englishmen are also entitled to a cursory survey of the contents of my thesis.

To begin with, I examine the tourist's and his parents' preoccupations before his departure on tour (chapter III). Here, the will of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (the Republic's Landsadvocaat early in the seventeenth century), drawn up in 1592, provides an ideal starting point, with provisions for his two baby sons' education. Points covered include the appropriate time of year and political climate in which to travel, routes to be followed, countries to be visited or at all costs avoided, and the programme of studies to be tackled. There is the irksome problem of whether to travel in company, to join a diplomatic suite, to suffer guidance from a tutor, or to join forces with a fellow tourist. Apart from all that, there is much haggling between parents and sons over allowances and whether the latter should be issued with letters of credit or bills of exchange. Estimates of tour expenses are hard to give and of course vary with period, purse and length of time spent on tour. But it is safe to say - on his own testimony - that in 1648 Johan Huydecoper (son of a wealthy Amsterdam burgomaster), travelling with a servant and two horses, spent 10 guilders a day. Finally, it was up to the tourist himself to make preparations, to leaf through one of the many tomes on the ars peregrinandi and to choose from the multitude of guidebooks.

Next, the tourist is observed while actually en route (chapter IV). The various ways and means of travelling, by sea, inland waterway and road, are considered. The traveller's attitude to nature, especially the mountains, is illustrated by quotations from the Huygens family and others. There are passages on inns, travel documents and the Inquisition. I also give some expenditure figures and look at the traveller's problems with the bewildering variety of foreign currencies.

Once the tourist had arrived at his first destination and settled somewhere convenient, let us say in France, he would be ready to embark on his quest for knowledge (chapter V). Here he would do well to turn to Thomas Erpenius for guidance. The Leyden professor compresses the traveller's objective into a single sentence and from there on elaborates his sixfold theme. The tourist is emphatically advised not to pursue academic learning, but knowledge of men, manners and society. To be able to do so, the young man must first of all master the language. Erpenius discusses the choice of grammars, romances and poetry to read, whom to approach, what company to shun. His advice on other subjects of study is no less to the point, though rather more demanding. The student should seek information about matters pertaining to government, religion, the administration of justice, and the history and geography of the host country. He should closely observe prominent people and get in touch with homines docti. The second half of the chapter examines students' reactions to Erpenius's advice in all their ramifications. The tourists seem, straight away, to have flouted his admonition regarding academic studies. Matriculation at French and to a lesser extent Italian universities was a frequent occurrence, especially during the first half of the

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century, and tourists often put their names down - for various reasons, but not with any serious academic reading in mind. They did, however, covet an academic diploma (usually a doctorate or licentiate in civil and canon law), preferably one bearing the seal of a French university. A number of reports in diaries and letters testify to this common practice.

The student's most diligent efforts, it would appear, were directed towards learning languages. French came first, with Italian a good second and English a fair third. The results, of course, varied.

Evidence of study according to Erpenian precepts in other fields is not, on the whole, impressive. Essays on foreign government, religion, history and geography are few, there is a sprinkling of paragraphs on current political events, and there is ample evidence of great curiosity about ‘notable persons’. Even so, comment on laudable or indifferent work should not be too harsh, since the tourist can only be judged by his written record, material that has survived three or four centuries of spring-cleaning and careless handling.

The acquisition of knowledge was important, but so too was acquiring polish and sophistication in manners, apparel and social intercourse (chapter VI). On this point people in the Republic were unanimous: polite conversation was to be had only in Paris, and refinement was best learned in Parisian society. In short, where but in Paris might a young man model himself on the perfect gentleman, the honnête homme?

So off to Paris went the gauche youths of the Republic. An entrance into Parisian society had to be staged with care, and there are examples both of marvellous opportunities missed (by the two sons of Oldenbarnevelt) and of chances exploited to the full (by a number of young men from equally prominent families). Success was much more easily achieved, of course, by those who spoke the language. The majority however, perhaps because they were not so proficient, looked elsewhere than the Parisian salons to acquire their Gallic social polish. They put the emphasis of their grooming as an honnête homme on chivalrous accomplishments and entered a riding academy, one of the many finishing schools for gentlemen that Paris boasted at the time. Some Dutch pupils took the full curriculum, others only attended lessons in riding the great horse, or again, engaged private tutors in les exercices, music, dancing, fencing or languages.

For private tuition there was no necessity to stay in Paris. French provincial towns along the Loire also offered an abundant supply of maîtres d'exercices, as indeed did Geneva, where many tourists spent the winter.

‘Such thinges’, viz. polite conversation and exercises, were also to be enjoyed in Italy, though with a difference. As a rule Italian society did not welcome foreigners, the Grand Ducal family in Florence being the exception. Two of ambassador Van Aerssen's grandsons were received at court and so was the future burgomaster of Leyden, Coenraad Ruysch. But the latter equally enjoyed conversation with other people, including librarians at the Vaticana and Laurentiana,

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opera singers, painters, nuns in convent and the former queen of Sweden. These three young men all spoke Italian. Those who did not, turned for conversation to courtesans or their own compatriots. Tourists just loved getting together, and merrymaking in Dutch style was a very popular pastime.

Other forms of entertainment, of a more profitable nature, were in Paris the theatre and in Italy the opera and commedia dell' arte. Some of the tourists became veritable addicts, others went only occasionally. Whatever the performance, the eye was feasted even if the dialogue or libretto eluded a foreigner's understanding.

For very many tourists the most enjoyable time on Tour was spent sightseeing (chapter VII). An inordinate amount of ink, time and energy went into the descriptions (no doubt often copied from the guidebook) of the marvels of the world. Buildings, paintings, sculptures, religious relics, objets d'art and curiosities were all faithfully recorded; whether for their artistic merit or their oddity value it is sometimes hard to tell.

A very few exceptions apart, tourists felt no rapport with anything Gothic. They appreciated Renaissance art - chiefly architecture - but praise and admiration were as a rule most lavishly heaped on anything that was ‘modern’ -architecture, painting and sculpture alike. Archaeological remains in the south of France and in Italy were, as the remnants of the venerated times of classical antiquity, in a class by themselves and were viewed as such.

In most cases, praise was tantamount to admiration for or stupefaction at costly materials or lavish display. The tourist expressed his feelings of disappointment, gratification, admiration or boundless enthusiasm by way of the judicious use of one of a range of admiring adjectives. The Tour mementoes they took home were nothing spectacular. Here again, in the purchase of books, prints, coins and medallions or the occasional drawing or cast they resembled the ordinary English tourist. And, indeed, the Dutch too had their portraits painted in France or Italy.

It is easy to write a list of the highlights of these young men's sightseeing tour. Again, it is not difficult to enumerate the marvels of the giro, though properly done it would take much longer. But this is hardly necessary, since it would be an exact copy of the description of the delights of France and the wonders of Italy given by tourists from other countries.

To be strictly fair to them, Germany and Geneva also deserve to be mentioned here, even if, on the sightseeing tour, they were of minor importance. Geneva was a suitable place to spend the winter and to rest between strenuous times in France and Italy. Germany, to put it baldly, was looked on as a transit country on the way home or, over the Brenner, on the way down into wonderful Italy. The charms of England - a visit to the capital and a number of royal palaces in the immediate surroundings, together with a tour of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge - have already been mentioned.

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But whether the list is short or the catalogue long, the English reader will learn precious little that he does not remember from his reading of Stoye, Howard, Bates or Trease. The English and the Dutch on tour not only marvelled at the same magnificent buildings, they also travelled the same routes, lodged at the same inns, swotted up their French in the same district, patronized the same riding establishments and had similar comments to make on political, juridical and religious aspects of the countries they visited. Yet all the while, with English and Dutch (and for that matter young people from every corner of Europe) rubbing shoulders constantly, there was still no fraternizing. In Italy Aernout Hooft (the poet's son) might dine with gentlemen from Denmark, Poland or France, and in Lyons Constantijn Huygens junior might have a game of tennis with Tom Killigrew, but as a rule the Dutch preferred their own company.⁷ No doubt the problem of verbal communication was largely responsible.

So far, it has been the similarities between Grand Tour and Groote Tour that have been played up to best advantage, but there are differences too which should not be glossed over. They concern the ages of the travellers and their social standing. In England it was not at all unusual for boys to be sent abroad at the age of fourteen or fifteen, accompanied by a tutor who supervised their studies and acted as general manager or guide. In the United Provinces young men did not as a rule travel until they had come of age. After grammar school or years of private tuition, a considerable number went up to university to read law (usually at Leyden), and it was only after they had gone down again - with or without a degree - that they were considered ready for foreign travel. And this implied that the services of a tutor could be dispensed with.

The second and more striking difference was in social standing. In England it was young men of the aristocracy who were the privileged ones who did the Tour. In the Republic their opposite numbers were sons of families which were ‘habituated as it were to the Magistracy of their Towns and Provinces’ or ‘employ'd in the Military or Civil Charges of the Province or States’, as Sir William Temple put it. In fact, they were the heirs of the burgher aristocracy that ruled the proud and prosperous Dutch Republic. And as such, as scions of their country's élite, the Dutch tourists considered themselves to be not one whit inferior to the German baron, the French gentilhomme or the English lord they might encounter in France or Italy.

Thus, in the final analysis, the similarities prevail. The young gentlemen from England and the Dutch regents' sons were pursuing one and the same goal. In order to fit themselves for their future station in life they went out into the world to gain knowledge, experience and sophistication.

7 C. Huygens jr, ‘Reisjournaal van 1649 en 1650’, 142.

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My plea is over; the defence rests. There is no more to do but patiently await the verdict in the next edition of Professor Wilson's The Dutch Republic. Should lines six to eight on page 48 read ‘[the regents' sons] travelled abroad on the Grand Tour...’ then all will be well.