1. Hazarding chance: a history of eighteenth-century danger

Note that the realities of the dangers are not at issue. The dangers are only too horribly real, in both case, modern and pre-modern.¹

There is no doubt, to borrow the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s phrasing, that the dangers of the Grand Tour were ‘only too horribly real’. All of the Grand Tourists studied here survived their travels, but some of those who journeyed with them were not so lucky. At least three companions of the Tourists considered in this book died during their travels.² At least ten Tourists and companions experienced severe, and in some cases life-threatening, illnesses;³ a further three sustained serious injuries while attempting physically dangerous activities,⁴ and all encountered at least one accident on the road. At least two Grand Tourists became entangled in love affairs that were terminated by forceful outside intervention.⁵ Upon his return to England, one Tourist – the Common Room club member, William Windham – incurred large legal costs to extract himself from a marriage contract with Elizabeth de Chapeaurouge, daughter of a former syndic of Geneva in the 1740s.⁶

These statistics are sometimes verified through doctors’ reports, apothecaries’ bills and legal paraphernalia but they are more commonly extracted from letters, diaries and memoirs. Such sources further record a whole gamut of perils and near misses that cannot easily be conveyed numerically. In 1707, during the War of Spanish Succession, James Hay, tutor to James Compton, later 5th earl of Northampton, described his reluctance to ‘risqué my Ld Compton’s person’ to plundering ‘malcontents’.⁷ A poem by John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey of Ickworth, from 1729 described his fear during the ‘dangerous’ ‘Hardship of his Alpine crossing’.⁸ In the 1740s, at the start of the War of Austrian Succession, Henry Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, 9th earl of Lincoln scorned his uncle (foreign minister, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st duke of Newcastle) for his ‘uneasy’ ‘apprehension’ that he would be caught up in an imminent Spanish invasion of Italy. In October 1744, Common Room member, Richard Aldworth Neville, and his companions came so close to one military front that they were warned about the dangers of cannon fire.⁹ They then went straight on to the Alpine roads, where they ‘risk’d breaking our Necks 60 Times’.¹⁰ In December 1754, George Simon Harcourt, Viscount Nuneham, George Bussy Villiers and their tutor, William Whitehead, were in ‘great danger’ of being frozen to death in a sleigh.¹¹ Nine years later John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield, decided that avalanches were ‘the dangerous part’ of his Alpine crossing, and was horrified to learn that a German nobleman had been killed while jumping out of his carriage on the road to Naples. He had been trying to escape from the ‘danger’ either of bolting horses or a drunken postilion.¹² During the 1770s, the Revd William Coxe, tutor to George, Lord Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke, revelled in his party’s ‘extremely hazardous’ voyage down the Limmar River, while William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth congratulated his heir, George Legge, Viscount Lewisham, on overcoming the ‘dangers’ and ‘difficulties’ of the Alps.¹³

Society seemingly posed as many hazards as war, mountains and roads. The fashion-conscious Nuneham fretted in 1754 about the ‘danger’ of English customs officials seizing his clothes and goods.¹⁴ In 1741, Robert Price told the rest of the Common Room how he refused to ‘run less risqué’ by falsely flattering a well-respected Parisian artist.¹⁵ Lord Herbert ‘thought I might risk’ financially assisting an unknown debt-ridden ‘Brother Officer in the Sea Service’ in Marseilles in 1780.¹⁶ He was never repaid. The possibility of moral corruption generated a particular intensity of alarm and fear. Lewisham’s tutor, David Stevenson, for example, viewed these particular dangers with ‘uneasiness’, ‘dread’ and a great ‘apprehension of Danger’ throughout the first part of their 1770s Tour.¹⁷ The threat of illness could generate similar levels of alarm. In August–November 1779, Herbert acted against all accepted wisdom and visited Rome and Naples during the height of the malaria season. His father, Henry Herbert, the erratic 10th earl of Pembroke, reacted with almost hysterical fear: ‘[I] am uneasy abt it to a degree I can not express. How can you be so mad, as to go into Malaria? For God’s sake, write me a line the instant you are safe at Florence’.¹⁸ Herbert’s mother was similarly distraught when he was taken ill with ague fits in Strasbourg: ‘I was really in an agony … felt terrified to death & undone to be with him’.¹⁹ Friends also expressed voluble fears. When Horace Walpole fell severely ill in Reggio in 1741, his cousin, Henry Seymour Conway, and Etonian friend, Thomas Ashton, recounted their ‘alarm’, ‘torment’, ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ as they waited for news.²⁰

When reading this bombardment of perils and fears, the challenges of considering danger on the Grand Tour becomes apparent. Brought together, and devoid of their context, these examples paint an alarming picture of a world rife with peril, but the majority of evidence comes from subjective, constructed sources. As Edward Gibbon wryly pointed out to his father in October 1764, ‘The concern you and Mrs Gibbon express in her last letter [over the sickness in Naples] make it my duty to avoid the appearance as well as the reality of danger’.²¹ This subjectivity makes it difficult to establish which accounts are accurate, rhetorically exaggerated or underplayed. These examples also demonstrate a rich eighteenth-century terminology surrounding danger, which predominantly centred around four terms: ‘danger’, ‘risque’, ‘hazard’ and ‘peril’. Other terms, like ‘difficulty’, ‘trouble’, ‘menace’ and ‘threat’, also appear alongside quantifiers (‘great’, ‘extremely’ and ‘less’), and an emotional terminology that, when used outside of a sublime commentary, appears resoundingly negative (‘fear’, ‘dread’, ‘fright’, ‘alarm’, ‘trepidation’, ‘consternation’, ‘unease’ and so on). Yet simply collating key words provides little insight into how danger was culturally understood and emotionally experienced. Furthermore, narrowly focusing on the most obvious terms does not account for unreported experiences, more cryptic narratives, or accounts in which danger was considered welcome, useful or pleasurable.

Daniel Martin observed that the nebulous, highly abstract nature of risk means that historians have often ‘resisted stating clearly what we mean when we write about risk’.²² This chapter reflects on how to navigate these challenges when discussing danger on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour and explores how risk studies – a field informed by anthropology and strongly shaped by the sociologist Ulrich Beck’s theory of reflexive modernization – can refine perceptions of this topic as a field of historical enquiry. This entails reflecting on how contemporary understandings of risk have affected scholarship dealing with historical danger, and examining how the principal theories and approaches of risk studies and the history of emotions can be applied in more historically sensitive analyses.

Eighteenth-century risk and danger need to be analysed in light of how these concepts were understood by elite society. This involves considering how perceptions of individual dangers, such as crime, illness and immoral behaviour, were influenced by factors like stereotyping, methods of information-gathering, shared culture and practice between Britain and the continent, social networks of support, and the varied perceptions of different social groups. It also entails establishing an understanding of the period’s more abstract conceptualizations of danger, risk and hazard. Examining danger in relation to eighteenth-century understandings of chance, probability, providence and honour reveals how the Grand Tour was fundamentally shaped by an eighteenth-century elite mentality that entwined the notions of chance, hazard, danger, risk and honour. Elite families viewed the Grand Tour and its hazards as a jeux de societé, an enormous gamble in which risk and danger held as much chance of a positively gainful outcome as a negatively harmful one. This, entangled with the elite male impetus to prove, defend and maintain one’s honour, had significant ramifications for how young elite Grand Tourists responded to danger throughout their travels.

Theories of risk

The concept of danger comprises three areas. Danger is first a physical reality. To be in danger is a scenario located in the present moment, which can have highly concrete, deeply unpleasant consequences to humans, objects and environments. This can be analysed as an empirical reality.²³ Second, anthropologists and sociologists have emphasized how danger and risk intersect with perception. Defined by Catherine Althanus as a ‘virtue of judgements made under conditions of uncertainty’, this element of danger attempts to forecast future hazards through a process of judging and assessing the degree of risk.²⁴ Third, the topic encompasses how individuals and societies react to experiences and perceptions of danger, and how they subsequently process and communicate these emotional and physical reactions. This element is retrospective, making sense of past experiences, judgements and emotions. Unlike the first area, these second and third elements are subject to social definition and construction.²⁵ Mary Douglas contends that while risk perception might be a response to objectively ‘real’ dangers, it is constructed through ‘culturally learnt assumptions and weightings’ shaped by ‘political, moral and aesthetic’ agendas, and by the individual and their social network.²⁶ In emphasizing the exchanges between communal and individualist notions of risk, the role of mutual obligations and expectations comes to the fore. Risk judgements are not made on aversion alone, but on elements of choice and preference shaped by an individual’s interactions with and responsibilities to others.²⁷ The second and third categories of risk and danger are therefore often placed in an epistemological, rather than empirical, category and subjected to cultural analysis.

These frameworks provide extremely useful clarification, but historians nevertheless need to be wary of how they are used. Danger and the accompanying set of conceptualizations, perceptions and reactions are subject to cultural relativity and require careful historicization. As Deborah Lupton summarized, ‘What is deemed a “danger” or “hazard” in one historical or cultural context may not be so identified in another, and this has implications for how knowledge and understandings about risk are developed’.²⁸ While this is accepted in theory, in practice discussions of historical dangers have often retained very modern conceptualizations.

The historiographical discussion of danger and risk in eighteenth-century travel is a typical example. In one of the first studies devoted to the topic, The Grand Tour (1914), W. E. Mead stated ‘We need to know the times when peace prevailed, for, obviously, while there is war the average man will not undertake a tour, but will remain safely at home’.²⁹ Mead was imposing an ahistorical understanding of the incompatible relationship between war and travel which rested on a contemporary understanding based around modern war. In his discussion of travel’s other dangers and discomforts, he further emphasized that these were negative annoyances that halted, or at the very least disrupted, the Tour.³⁰ This argument has often been uncritically repeated throughout Grand Tour scholarship. Throughout the process of my research, I have regularly been asked about the reality of the dangers faced on the Grand Tour. What was the actual degree of peril? Often the question was phrased around whether or not I could trust Tourists to tell the truth: they may have been exaggerating or blind to the perils before them. While such questions correctly emphasize that reports of danger cannot be disentangled from perception and rhetoric, they are also underpinned by a deep-seated belief that it is possible to quantify danger.

Defining risk as negative and seeking to qualify, verify and, ultimately, minimize the risks involved is an inherently modern response to danger. Since the 1980s, sociologists have advanced theoretical arguments for understanding the role of risk in modernity. The highly influential concept of ‘risk society’, as proposed by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, offers a macrosociological approach. This argues that the advent and development of modernization itself introduced increased levels of economic, industrial and environmental hazards. The result, from the twentieth century onwards, is an anxiety regarding the future of industrial progress and expansion of democratic freedom, a process that Beck labelled ‘reflexive modernisation’. A ‘risk society’, from Giddens’s point of view, was one ‘increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety)’, whereas Beck viewed it as a ‘systematic way’ of dealing with these dangers.³¹ In both cases, the notion of risk is generated out of fears surrounding modernity and a desire to mitigate or control the potential outcomes. In yoking concepts of risk to modernity and industrialization, sociologists have argued that this profound shift of view – in which danger became exclusively negative – began during the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. Here, it was also optimistically believed that the ‘technical calculations of probability’ could be used to create an environment of ‘health and safety’, and that ‘risks of all kind could be eliminated, or at the very least mitigated’.³² Thus, in focusing on quantifiable realities and in emphasizing a mentality of avoidance and containment, historians have often instinctively approached the eighteenth-century pre-industrial dangers of the Grand Tour through conceptualizations of risk and danger that had been shaped by post-industrial society and culture.

This post-industrial understanding also imbues the conceptual and methodological approach of risk studies. For example, in understanding danger as ‘risk’, the emphasis is placed on understanding how future dangers are anticipated, planned for, avoided and controlled. In prioritizing this, risk studies have often subsumed the third area of danger (how it is experienced), within the second (how it is perceived).³³ The assessment, perception, experience and communication of danger and risk come with a wider variety of physical and emotional reactions, including fear, anxiety and exhilaration. Despite this, emotional and physical reactions have been investigated primarily in terms of a linear understanding of how emotion affects risk assessments; as a result, the retrospective experience of processing danger has been granted relatively less importance within risk studies.

In contrast, historians are proving rather more alert to reaction and response as they have become increasingly interested in studying the history of emotions. In particular, fear and anxiety have been the subject of careful historical contextualization. Joanna Bourke not only traced the shifting basis for fear between the early Victorian and post-Cold War eras, but also highlighted how cultural frameworks shaped the way in which people talked about fear. Second World War soldiers, for instance, drew on evolutionary notions when they described their emotions as primal instincts.³⁴ Henry French and Mark Rothery offered a highly specific, contextualized analysis of anxiety that explored this emotion in relation to the younger sons of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gentry families. In this context, anxiety was a persistent product of the patriarchal system that owed much to the precarious, emotional and materially subordinate position of younger sons who used the rhetoric and expression of anxiety as a means of dealing with their feelings, achieving their objectives and establishing themselves in the world.³⁵ Historians of emotion have sought to situate how emotions manifested within the wider mentalities, cultures and social conventions of a period. In doing so, they placed emphasis on the ways in which emotional utterances, the culturally constructed act of speaking or writing about emotion, have a unique capacity to alter the subjective experience and memory of danger.³⁶ In combining the approaches from risk studies and the history of emotions, I hope to attain a more in-depth, historically nuanced understanding of how danger on the Grand Tour was conceptualized, anticipated and experienced in eighteenth-century elite society.

Perceiving eighteenth-century hazard abroad

The eighteenth-century traveller was vulnerable to criminal activity while abroad. This threat could be manifested via highwaymen, banditti and pirates, or through swindles, robbery, violent attacks and murder in towns and cities. Yet while crime abroad certainly did occur throughout the century, Tourists’ correspondence and diary entries often conveyed an anticipation of threat that did not correlate to the possibility of harm.³⁷ This was particularly noticeable in relation to perceptions of Italy. The ‘Triumvirate’ of Herbert and his tutors the Revd William Coxe and Captain John Floyd, for example, travelled across France, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Russia and the Baltic with remarkably little concern regarding crime. This, however, changed abruptly as they approached the Italian border through Styria in 1779. Floyd related how ‘Lord Herbert and I walked on before the carriage in order to lighten it. A shot was fired close by us, by whom or for what purpose we could not make out. To avoid a Gil Blas event, I took my sabre under my arm and we continued unmolested’.³⁸

Floyd’s reference to The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane (1715), Alain-René Lesage’s picaresque coming-of-age tale of kidnap, indicated his escalating expectation that they might encounter bandits. These concerns did not ease throughout Herbert’s time in Italy. Having left the Tour early to re-join his regiment, Floyd wrote in September 1779 to remind Herbert always to travel with two servants, ‘& keep your pistols loaded & doors locked at Night – there are dammed Scoundrels in Italy’.³⁹ Upon leaving Rome in October, Herbert also obliquely referred to banditti on the road from Vico to Osteria: ‘there was a Guard placed to accompany Travellers through the wood, but I begged they would not take the trouble to accompany me’.⁴⁰

At no point did Herbert and his party actually encounter any danger of this kind. The ‘shot’ in Styria was an unverified noise, Herbert passed through the woods unharmed, and his loaded pistols and locked doors went untested. This disparity between verified and anticipated experiences of violence perpetrated by Italian individuals or states has been observed by Rosemary Sweet: ‘for all the rumoured paranoia of [Venice’s] Council of Ten, no visitor ever claimed to have been the victim of oppression, or even the direct object of the government’s suspicions’.⁴¹ A similar observation can be made of Naples, a city reputed to be populous and restless, allegedly rife with pickpocketing, theft and interpersonal violence.⁴² Sociological studies of risk analysis have concluded that ‘knowledge and perceptual accuracy bear only weak (that is statistically insignificant) relation to … perceived risks’.⁴³ In other words, ‘knowledge of safety is not necessarily connected to feelings of safety’ or the feeling of fear to knowledge of danger.⁴⁴ Violent crime did occur in eighteenth-century Italy, but Tourists’ perceptions and judgements regarding this danger were only loosely related to the likelihood of experiencing it directly. Instead, they were influenced by a variety of other complex discourses and factors.

Foremost among these was the enduring power of prejudice and xenophobia, which substantially shaped the British view of the continent.⁴⁵ It was generally accepted that alongside being irrational, effeminate and Catholic, Italians were hot-blooded, lawless and violent. Grand Tourists actively sought to maintain this view, even when they could not personally confirm this to be the case or were presented with direct evidence to the contrary. During his time in Naples in 1765, John Holroyd claimed that ‘Assassinations are only frequent at present among the lower sort of People throughout Italy’, but ‘It is not an uncommon sight to see a person stabbed in the street even in the day time’. Despite recounting plenty of lurid rumours in support of this, Holroyd had to admit that ‘I have not been an Eye witness’. In fact, the most serious crime to which he was exposed was the theft of a fellow diner’s laced hat during Sir William Stanhope’s dinner.⁴⁶ A few years later in 1773, George Finch, 9th earl of Winchilsea, was simultaneously impressed and disappointed to discover that it had been twenty-five years since Siena’s last murder. Even so he clung to the stereotype of the violent Italian in anticipating that the Neapolitans would confirm ‘my former Ideas as they say they are the Vilest people existing’.⁴⁷ Like Holroyd, Winchilsea did not witness this vileness himself, but nevertheless sought out stories that confirmed his expectations. His antiquarian tour guide bragged about having killed three people and injured more, although ‘The Calash man [coachman] coming home told me in confidence that what that man had said was only Bragging, for of the three only one had died’.⁴⁸

The calashman’s and antiquarian’s tales are worth pausing over. These individuals may have been telling the truth, but they also represented a group of Neapolitan locals who depended on a tourist-based trade. They therefore had an interest in dramatically confirming the stereotypes that Tourists expected to encounter.⁴⁹ This touristic demand suggests a certain ghoulish relish that had less to do with fear and more to do with a romanticized imagining of these crimes. This imagining was shaped by the cultural representation of the south and the banditti through, for example, Salvator Rosa’s artwork, which depicted a Neapolitan landscape populated by ruffians, and, as already noted, Lesage’s picaresque tales of kidnap.⁵⁰

Prejudice, stereotypes and romanticized cultural influences all contributed to a potentially warped perception of danger. This unreliable perception led in turn to expressions of heightened anxiety, fear or expectation that were not necessarily anchored to actual situations of danger. The role of unsubstantiated rumour played a crucial part in this by offering a passing semblance of anecdotal evidence. Yet while rumour reinforced false perceptions, it was also a vital part of a process of information gathering that also used reports, news and gossip – communicated via newspapers, correspondence and conversation – to make practical decisions during travel.⁵¹

When directly considering their personal safety, Tourists and their wider networks entered into a more critical process of informed decision-making by attempting to separate rumour from fact. While Lord Herbert was in northern Italy in May 1779, his mother wrote from London with news received via Lady Lucan who was then in Florence. Apparently, a ‘want of rain’ had created ‘so bad a Malaria’ at Venice that ‘the people Italians & all, who were going there for the Ascension, have stopt’. Lady Pembroke was deploying her international network of correspondence to gather rumour and news that was potentially relevant to her son’s safety. However, she also recommended that he should confirm these rumours by gathering information via ‘enquiries on the road’. Only then, should he ‘turn off, if it is really so’.⁵² Writing to his Etonian friend, Ashton, from Rome in May 1740, Horace Walpole likewise feared, ‘we shall not see Naples … we are prevented by a great body of banditti, soldiers deserted from the King of Naples, who have taken possession of the roads, and not only murdered several passengers, but some sbirri [law enforcers] who were sent against them’.⁵³

Walpole’s initial willingness to believe this news was rooted in cultural and xenophobic stereotypes, but it was also heightened by an ongoing political situation in which Spain was manoeuvring to regain Italian territories that had been lost after the War of Spanish Succession. A week later, Walpole acknowledged that the news was in fact a rumour: ‘there had been no murders, the courtier was robbed, but there are soldiers patrolling the roads’.⁵⁴ Armed with more accurate information, he and his travelling companion and friend, Thomas Gray, ventured (unmolested) onwards to Naples. Walpole’s reassessment was directly shaped by his privileged status. As an aristocratic traveller and the son of the British prime minister, gaining access to Roman officials with useful knowledge was easy. During his rounds of socializing with the Roman political elite, Walpole had met the monsignor responsible for the road who provided him with detailed, reliable knowledge.

Walpole’s social networks of foreign officials and Britons aboard were not just useful in de-escalating fears. They also saved his life. By May 1740, he had quarrelled and parted company with Gray and was now travelling alone. In Reggio, where he had no connection with the local elite, he fell ill with quinsy, an abscess on the tonsils. Unable to speak or call for a doctor, and without any companions to care for him, he was in an extremely isolated and dangerous situation. By good fortune, Lord Lincoln and his tutor, Joseph Spence, came to Reggio on a whim and found Walpole by chance. As an experienced tutor who was leading his third Grand Tour, Spence later reflected, ‘You see what luck one has sometimes in going out of one’s way: if Lord Lincoln had [not] wandered to Reggio, Mr Walpole … would in all probability have been now under the cold earth’.⁵⁵ Spence immediately took charge of Walpole’s medical care. He sent for the best local doctor in Reggio and for the Florentine Dr Antonio Cocchi, whom he described as ‘a very good [physician] and my particular friend’.⁵⁶

In his analysis of ill health and fatality on the Grand Tour, Jeremy Black argued that experiences like Walpole’s were typical. The continent was ‘an alien and to some extent a dangerous environment’, that ‘contrasted so sharply with [Tourists’] experiences of life in Britain’. The Grand Tour therefore isolated its participants from their normal frameworks of medical care and exposed them to continental physicians who were difficult to access and trust, limited in knowledge and skill, and who turned ‘minor ailments into killers’.⁵⁷ Suffering a serious illness alone in a foreign country was undoubtedly a frightening experience. However, it was also a highly unusual situation for a Grand Tourist to be in. Historians of medicine have emphasized that eighteenth-century illness was an often communal affair.⁵⁸ Families, for example, were part of a three-way medical relationship with the patient and doctor, and had set obligations in monitoring, treating and physically caring for the patient.⁵⁹ These medical responsibilities were not left behind when Grand Tourists travelled to the continent. Families sought to remain involved in their children’s medical lives by asking probing questions, consulting fashionable physicians on their sons’ behalf, and by sending lengthy advice and trusted British medicines.

The principal duty for care, however, was transferred to the accompanying travelling party. Servants undertook much of the physical caring while tutors fulfilled the duties of selecting the best physicians and deciding medical treatments. Travelling companions remained answerable to the families who employed them, but emergencies left little leisure for consultation. When, for example, Viscount Lewisham’s younger brother, Charles, fell ill with jaundice in Brussels in June 1776, their tutor David Stevenson only consulted the boy’s father, the earl of Dartmouth, when Stevenson’s opinion directly conflicted with the physician’s. Had this conflict not arisen, Stevenson assured Dartmouth he ‘should not have troubled’ him with any decisions.⁶⁰ When Tourists travelled with friends and without tutors, there is evidence that they also shouldered these responsibilities as circumstance demanded. For example, both Herbert and Holroyd took on caring responsibilities during the illness and, in Herbert’s case, the death of travelling companions.⁶¹ Had Walpole and Gray continued to travel together, Gray would have undoubtedly done the same.

The eighteenth-century culture of care expanded beyond the immediate ties of kinship and employment to a wider network of social acquaintances. This was absolutely vital for effective caregiving and survival on the Grand Tour. Within a British context, trust in physicians and their treatments rested upon a shared social network of recommendation in which familial and communal relationships maintained and reinforced credibility.⁶² This was replicated on the continent, where the Tour’s social dimension ensured Tourists remained within a substitute supportive network. When illness struck, these communities recommended trusted physicians and provided practical aid and emotional support. For example, Stevenson’s and Lewisham’s letters from 1776 were dominated by grateful references to the kindness received from members of Brussels’ elite society and from the British minister, William Nedham, during Charles’s illness.⁶³ Likewise, Philip Yorke, later 3rd earl of Hardwicke, was shaken when his tutor, Colonel Wettstein, fell during a stag hunt at Anspach in August 1779; however, Yorke was much reassured by the kindness and care shown by members of the Margrave of Anspach’s court.⁶⁴ Walpole’s social isolation in Reggio was therefore what made his experience so unusual and so dangerous. Had he fallen ill at Florence where he and Gray spent several months and were well known, he would have received help far earlier. As it happened, the arrival of Lincoln and Spence in Reggio reconnected him to the typical means of accessing care. They immediately took on the role of ‘family’ in overseeing Walpole’s diagnosis and treatment, and they placed him back within the safety of a wider trusted network of British-Florentine support. Walpole remained with Lincoln and Spence throughout the rest of his travels, a circumstance which no doubt pleased his father and the duke of Newcastle who were close political allies.

The social set up of the Grand Tour meant that participants were not typically isolated when ill. Furthermore, the view that the medical world of the continent was ‘alien’ to the British traveller also requires some revision. As recent research on eighteenth-century medical care and culture has made clear, the professional and lay medical cultures of Britain and the rest of Europe were not very different and ‘proved by and large to transcend state borders’.⁶⁵ British physicians trained at Leiden, Marseilles, Parisian and German universities, and they admired, corresponded and worked with leading continental medical thinkers and practitioners, including Herman Boerhaave, Friedrich Hoffmann, Albrecht von Haller and Henri François Le Dran.⁶⁶ Edinburgh’s and London’s professional medical scenes were therefore firmly ensconced within a wider European one.⁶⁷ The British medical profession’s respect for its continental medical counterparts was evident in the ever-growing practice of prescribing travel and salubrious destinations, such as Spa, Aachen, Montpellier, Nice and Scheveningen, as treatments for ill health.⁶⁸ Likewise, on a highly practical level, this meant that medical practitioners and patients across Britain and Europe shared the same understandings of the body, disease and treatment, shaped by nervous, mechanical, humoral, non-natural and climatic theories. Even language barriers were negated for the educated as medical reports were typically written in Latin.

Grand Tourists, tutors and their families appeared to be well aware of this context. Their accounts of ill health recorded the consistent encounter of familiar diagnoses, treatments and attitudes. For example, during Herbert’s illness with ague in the winter of 1775–6, a Strasbourg physician – whom Coxe and Floyd described as ‘a sensible Man … Lord Herbert cannot be in better hands’ – and the British Dr Fothergill prescribed exactly the same remedies: namely, a change in location to Colmar; the rebalancing of various non-natural factors, via a strict regime of drinking Hungarian mineral water; and the taking of purgatives such as the bark, a commonly accepted fever remedy, and an emetic. The only trifling difference was over how exactly Herbert should ingest the bark.⁶⁹ Likewise, during Charles Legge’s period of illness in Brussels in 1776, Stevenson approvingly reported that the court physician had ‘a high Reputation’, had diagnosed Charles effectively with jaundice, and advised a course of treatment that would leave him ‘even better than when he left England’.⁷⁰

Stevenson did disagree with the physician’s view that Charles needed the Aix and Spa waters.⁷¹ However, disagreements and dual consultations were typically not indicative of an unusual degree of distrust. Instead, they were a common feature of the eighteenth-century ‘medical market’. Unregulated by any central body, medical practice formed an ‘open market’ in which patients with money had ‘the relative freedom to choose the medical practitioners they liked’, according to their estimation of effectiveness, cost or manners.⁷² Consulting other practitioners, questioning and even challenging the physician’s orders was normal, particularly as the cognitive distance between medical and lay knowledge was much smaller in the eighteenth century than it is today.⁷³ At points, British travellers even rejected British medical advice in favour of that of continental physicians. For example, when caring for a severely ill companion who eventually died in Turin in 1780, Lord Herbert praised the Savoyard physicians, Apiotti, Arnulfi, Ranzoni and Alioni, as ‘the four wise Men’, and rejected British advice and medicines in favour of theirs.⁷⁴ The quality of eighteenth-century continental medical professionals varied as much as those in Britain. Wherever based, they could be guilty of turning minor ailments into fatal ones. Nevertheless, Grand Tourists, tutors and families frequently perceived the medical faculty of the continent as sound, reliable and talented. Even the unnamed Savoyard physician covertly selected by Lincoln to remove a pimple from his face in February 1740 was described by Newcastle as ‘a very honest man [who] would not try any tricks’.⁷⁵

Travelling on the continent did mean exposing oneself to the possibility of contracting diseases that were less common in Britain, such as malaria, smallpox or, more rarely, leprosy and plague. The threat of malaria engendered great alarm among British travellers, of which horrified responses like Pembroke’s at his son’s foolhardy decision to brave the height of the malaria season in the summer of 1779 were typical. He had good reason to be fearful. A few months earlier, Herbert’s old school fellow, Philip Yorke became dangerously ill when he contracted malaria in Rome. His was a protracted, slow recovery that required him to divert to Spa to receive further treatment.⁷⁶ Yet the other three continental diseases – smallpox, leprosy and plague – and the steps taken by European governments to halt the spread of epidemics, did not seem to trouble Tourists and families as much. They are often only glimpsed through brief references to presenting certificates of health at the island of Lido as a prerequisite to entering Venice.⁷⁷ This lack of concern over leprosy and plague probably reflected the fact that neither were endemic in Europe any more; at the same time, given that smallpox remained a likely threat, some more alarm might have been expected in relation to this illness.⁷⁸

Falling ill was a common occurrence and the extended nature of the Grand Tour made it highly unlikely that it would take place without any call for medical attention. True, families and friends did respond to the news of the ill health of distant Grand Tourists with agitation and alarm, but they also commented with equal distress on news of illnesses in the same country, town or even the same house within Britain. Equally, not all families responded the same way. For example, when Lord George Herbert fell ill with ague in Strasbourg in 1775 and Charles, the younger brother of Lord Lewisham, contracted jaundice in Brussels in 1776, their illnesses were of comparable severity and took place in locations well supplied with competent physicians. Both young men were of similar age, social status and supported by tutors, brothers and servants they had known throughout their lives. Despite this, their parents reacted with vastly different levels of fear and anxiety. Lady Pembroke was distraught with ‘agony’ and ‘terrified to death’ throughout Herbert’s illness. By contrast, Lord and Lady Dartmouth received the news calmly.⁷⁹

To understand this range of emotional responses, it is necessary to look beyond the unifying factors of distance, separation and sickness to consider the different situations and emotional cultures of individuals and their families. On a purely clinical level, there may have been more alarm in response to Herbert’s illness because he was the heir and only son, whereas Charles was the second son. Yet the different marital circumstances of the Pembrokes and Dartmouths were also influential. Lord and Lady Dartmouth were happily married and therefore able to receive emotional support from each other and their other children, whereas Lady Pembroke endured a loveless marriage, separated from her husband and placed in a situation where her emotional investment lay almost entirely in her only son. Already distressed at his departure, she also suffered from a melancholic disorder and used an epistolary style that embraced the highly emotional language of sensibility. Comparisons like these demonstrate that while evidence of emotional distress, fear and anxiety are important markers in discerning attitudes to and experiences of danger, they need to be carefully contextualized against their particular familial and cultural settings.

Any history of danger requires careful consideration of how individuals from specific social groups identified what was dangerous and the required response. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the mentalities surrounding the so-called risks to personal morality. Drawing on the vociferous contemporary printed criticisms of the Grand Tour, historians have tended to view foreign travel as a hazardous minefield of moral dangers that exposed participants to gambling, drinking and sex. By covertly or openly engaging in these vices, Grand Tourists such as the diarist James Boswell failed to maintain the high moral standards set by their parents.⁸⁰ There are certainly many Grand Tours in which parents and tutors wrote disapprovingly about young men’s spending habits, laziness, and in response to more severe moral shortcomings. Nevertheless, historians have presumed a homogeneous elite morality in which all families were unanimous in their disapproval, and have discerned this morality from a published literature that more typically reflected the moral codes of middling sorts. This is problematic for several reasons. As Margaret Hunt observed, ‘Middling moralists obsessively identified traits that were alleged to be aristocratic’, and depicted luxury, a love of the foreign and moral laxity as conjoined.⁸¹ This was a discourse that actually intended to make a broader critique on elite culture, rather than depict its moral standard. Assessing the aristocracy and gentry according to the standards of middling morality risks making their behaviour incomprehensible, particularly as these social groups did not conceptualize moral behaviour in the same way.

This has been partially acknowledged. Correspondence between young men on the Grand Tour and with their peers at home often demonstrated an overt pride and pleasure in their drinking and sexual activities. Historians have accounted for this by arguing that age and homosocial peer groups were powerful factors in dictating moral standards and behaviour. Scholars initially argued that this youthful homosocial behaviour was an illicit, collective rebellion against the legitimate, higher moral standards held by older authority figures.⁸² French and Rothery have recently nuanced these arguments by exploring how the illicit behaviour undertaken by young gentry men at school, university and in apprenticeships was actually blended into acceptable forms and discourses of masculine sociability. Thus, alternative readings of codes of masculine behaviour validated interpersonal violence, sexual licence, alcoholic excess, gambling and rowdy sociability as ‘honourable’ self-defence and ‘courageous’ risk-taking.⁸³ This ‘sub-set’ of legitimate values was performed in the demi-monde spaces of brothels, backrooms, gambling hells and pleasure gardens, and were sometimes approved by parents. This interpretation matches assertions that the immoral excesses of the Tour were secretly accepted by elite male society and seen as a useful way of ‘letting people sow their wild oats abroad’ away from polite society.⁸⁴

By casting these youthful demi-monde codes as ‘subversive’ or ‘alternative’ value systems, French and Rothery stopped short of conferring full legitimacy on them. Yet this does not account for the fact that a significant proportion of young men continued their wild behaviour into adulthood. In seeking to further understand the unwritten rules of elite social boundaries, scholars like Jason Kelly and Hannah Greig have begun to move away from the binary of il/legitimate moral codes.⁸⁵ Kelly used the Society of the Dilettanti’s and the Medmenham Monks’ libertine behaviour to illustrate the elite concept of a ‘private realm within the public world’. In 1734/5, members of the Society of the Dilettante took part in an evening’s drinking in London that culminated in antagonizing a plebeian crowd and causing £100 in riot damage. The Calves’ Head incident, as it was known, was thoroughly enjoyed within the closed ranks of elite social circles, but not confirmed or discussed beyond this.⁸⁶ In contrast, Lord Sandwich’s 1763 house of lords’ condemnation of John Wilkes and the Medmenham Monks had a completely different reception. Elite society was far more appalled by Sandwich’s transgressive and (as a previous participant) deeply hypocritical decision to publicly acknowledge these acts in an inappropriate political and social setting than by the Monks’ actual libertine activities. These behaviours, like the Calves’ Head incident, were already well known within certain circles. In speaking up, Sandwich broke a fundamental elite societal ‘code of conduct, which did not make private activities a matter of political debate, as long as private activities did not corrupt public conduct’.⁸⁷

Greig’s examination of elite women excluded from the beau monde made a similar point. It was not the ‘simple fact of adultery’ that breached social codes of acceptance, but rather its overly public display in inappropriate social spheres.⁸⁸ Both Kelly and Greig highlighted the importance of distinguishing between codes of social behaviour and codes of acceptance. Fashionable society had a mercurial, unwritten but fundamental code of acceptance that could, particularly in the case of men, be considerably permissive in what it ‘privately’ allowed.⁸⁹ Thus, there was a persistent standard of moral behaviour that edged towards libertinism. The accompanying elite silence, refusal to validate rumours beyond their private circles, and refusal to punish participants should be read in similarly libertine terms: it did not necessarily signify shame or hidden illicitness, but rather formed a strategy through which elite society emphasized its position as self-referential, exclusive and aloof from the rest of British society. This particular moral code was perceived as deeply legitimate in aiming to establish a masculine authority that was similarly elite, self-referential and exclusive.

The actions of some Grand Tourists fell into this category of elite morality, rather than the category of illicit demi-monde rebellion. Identification of cases where seemingly immoral behaviour was explicitly encouraged and approved by authority figures is crucial in determining the difference between these two positions. Such elite behaviours could even be condoned and encouraged by well-respected clergymen, like the antiquarian and future bishop, Richard Pococke. In 1741, after spending several weeks in their company, Pococke viewed members of the Common Room group of Tourists as ‘very sober, men of parts & application’, while also being aware that they encouraged one another to ‘Stitch the pretty women’.⁹⁰ Indeed, various Grand Tourists had parental figures who stepped well beyond covert approbation to explicitly affirm, encourage and even order loose moral conduct. Philip Stanhope, 4th earl of Chesterfield was pleased to find that ‘The Princess Borghese was so kind as to put [my illegitimate son] upon his haunches, by putting him frequently upon her own’ during Philip’s Grand Tour of 1746–51.⁹¹ Henry Fox famously took his son, Charles James, to Paris to lose his virginity to Madame de Quallens at fourteen.⁹² This was simply an extension of Fox and his wife’s own moral behaviour, in which they made a contract to allow extramarital affairs, yet believed their love to be unsullied.⁹³ Charles James Fox’s Grand Tour letters from 1766–8 unsurprisingly contained graphic descriptions of sexual dalliances, sexual diseases and complaints at the Pope’s refusal to allow pornography in Rome.⁹⁴ These families did not view sex, prostitution and wild behaviour as inherently dangerous. They were a source of pleasure and, in line with libertine philosophies, a means of asserting elite freedom from the constraints of lesser society.⁹⁵ Within this context, and across the century, the continent held few perils, but substantial opportunity.

Such encouragement did not just come from male family members. When socializing daily with the political exile John Wilkes in Naples during the spring of 1765, John Holroyd flirted with radical and libertine principles and pontificated that ‘There is some reason to think that Vice approaches … as near perfection as Human Affairs are capable of ’.⁹⁶ Even before this, Holroyd’s lively letters to his uncle and aunts – the Revd John Baker, Mrs Baker and Mrs Atkinson – openly described flirtations, venereal disease and prostitutes. He reported to his uncle that Swiss brothels were not as good as London ones and that ‘I must acknowledge that we fail in that one point, you probably will say that is everything’.⁹⁷ Observing that the Italian ladies of fashion were not ‘safe goods’, he wrote to Mrs Baker, ‘If you was [sic] a rich lady I shou’d apply to you for an allowance to keep an Opera Girl’.⁹⁸ He also wished Mrs Atkinson ‘had an opportunity of drinking a bottle of wine with [Wilkes], they wou’d be very happy together’.⁹⁹ These letters, shared between the three relatives and wider family members, strongly suggest that his family accepted and even shared his moral code.

Holroyd’s behaviour did have boundaries, but these were not necessarily dictated by moral constraints. When required, he demonstrated his capacity to move seamlessly between different social conventions. For example, he met Lausanne’s strict standards of propriety where he enjoyed his restrained interaction with the Springs, a group of beautiful young society women.¹⁰⁰ Holroyd was also careful to demonstrate his patriotic loyalty to the established order, by publicly celebrating George III’s birthday so ‘that I may not be suspected to be a contempt or reviler of Kings on account of my late connection [with Wilkes]’.¹⁰¹ When in Rome, however, he was part of a rowdy homosocial group of British men. One night in February 1765, their revels went too far and descended into drunken violence. The group had held a riotous birthday dinner that was followed by a ‘walk at night abt the town’ in search of prostitutes. When locals refused to direct them, a ‘bloody battle ensued’. Two Romans were stabbed, one of whom died, and several Tourists were advised by the authorities to leave the city immediately. Holroyd told this story with relish and maintained his friendship with the group, but he also carefully dissociated himself from this particular affair. He had been invited to the dinner but was conveniently unable to attend as he had gone to explore nearby Terni.¹⁰² Strikingly though, Holroyd’s desire to emphasize his lack of involvement stemmed less from any concern about the violent actions themselves and more from fears about the potential legal consequences.

Eighteenth-century elite society did not have a unanimous view on what constituted moral danger. Instead, as Faramerz Dabhoiwala has observed in relation to standards of male sexual conduct, it held a whole spectrum of moral codes, which ranged from the libertine to the profoundly religious.¹⁰³ Certain families would have regarded Holroyd’s exploits with unmitigated horror. One such family was that of William Legge, the 2nd earl of Dartmouth, whose moral outlook was directly shaped by a deep religious faith.¹⁰⁴ Adhering to evangelical teaching on the corruptible nature of humanity and the need for continuous self-analysis, the earl and his wife strove to steep their sons in moral virtue by advising them to become ‘thoroughly acquainted with your own disposition, propensities & failings’ and to embrace God’s redeeming goodness.¹⁰⁵ In his first letter to his son Viscount Lewisham, in Paris in 1776, Dartmouth explicitly labelled the wild behaviour of the English (and not, interestingly, the French) in Paris as ‘dangerous’, ‘senseless’ and ‘indecent’, and imagined Lewisham ‘shrinking’ from such behaviour with ‘fear’, ‘shame’ and ‘confusion’.¹⁰⁶ The equally ardent tutor Stevenson cast himself as a guardian who guided Lewisham and his brothers through their moral ‘Trials’.¹⁰⁷

These differing moral codes cut across social and political alliances. For example, the wayward John Holroyd was brought into kinship with the morally upstanding earls of Dartmouth through two of his three marriages, particularly his final union with Lady Anne North, the daughter of the 2nd earl of Dartmouth’s stepbrother and close friend, Frederick, Lord North.¹⁰⁸ Extremely different moral codes could even exist within single family units, although this had the potential to cause considerable emotional distress. The 10th earl of Pembroke, for example, had strong libertine propensities. He indulged these during his own Grand Tour of 1751–4 to the extent that, more than two decades later, the highly respected British ambassador to Vienna, Sir Robert Murray Keith joked with Herbert that his father’s reputation had left a legacy of Italian women wishing to inspect Herbert’s ‘le jeune Pembroke’.¹⁰⁹ Pembroke encouraged his son ‘to see the Satyr f-g the Goat’ and recommended aristocratic, if elderly, women likely to indulge him: ¹¹⁰

One tutor, Floyd, supported Pembroke’s moral approach, and upon his return to England, wrote to Herbert warning him to ‘Take care of your precious parts, & keep them for home use’ as ‘There are a great many pretty Maids & Mistresses too in these parts’.¹¹²

Pembroke had many affairs before and during his marriage (in 1756), but his own sexual behaviour finally breached the social codes of acceptance in 1762, when he eloped abroad with Elizabeth Catherine (Kitty) Hunter, the daughter of Thomas Orby Hunter MP, with whom he had an illegitimate son, Augustus Retnuh Reebkomp. The scandal resulted in Pembroke’s resignation from various court positions, and he did not get back into favour until 1769.¹¹³ In direct contrast to her husband’s sexual excess, Lady Pembroke was well known for her virtue, which was manifest in her decision to take back her husband in March 1763, and to raise Reebkomp as a member of the family. Lady Pembroke, with the assistance of William Coxe, the second of her son’s tutors, therefore sought to enforce a completely different moral code to her husband’s.¹¹⁴ She desired Herbert to be ‘almost, (or if I may, I will say quite) an enthusiast for Virtue, which will support him at moments when the plausible language of libertinism may in some respects raise his doubts’.¹¹⁵ Through Coxe, she instigated discussions of morality and religion, and altered Herbert’s route, curriculum and company if she feared they might prove morally harmful.

These moral standards were further reflected in the different social groups to which his parents introduced Herbert. When in Paris in May 1780, Herbert spent time with the royal prince and libertine Louis Philippe Joseph d’Orléans, then the duc de Chartres and later the duc d’Orléans. On one memorable occasion, he recorded in his diary how he hunted and dined at Chartres’ ‘petite Maison’, ‘a pretty numerous, noisy Company, there being some Females of the Party. After Dinner we amused ourselves in flinging one another into the Water, at last by stripping naked & hunting the Hare through Wood, Water, etc, etc’.¹¹⁶ But Herbert was also part of Marie-Amélie de Boufflers, duchesse de Lauzun’s famous salon and supper parties. Four days after this party, he received a note ‘full of Reprimands from the Duchesse, who because she and others had not seen me for some Days, imagined I was gott into bad Company’.¹¹⁷ Herbert was well aware of the tensions between his parents. Even though he was close to his mother, and viewed his father as ‘perhaps … the most unaccountable of all humans’, his diaries and letters nevertheless showed the strain (and, evidently, at times, the pleasure) he experienced by being placed between the two.¹¹⁸

To fully understand how, or if, the elite viewed the Grand Tour in terms of moral danger, this complexity must be acknowledged. Sons were clearly expected to adhere to the moral standards of their elders, who played an important role in establishing boundaries. What these standards advocated remains a very different question. A ‘standard’ elite moral code did not exist. Instead, the relatively close-knit elite world encompassed a wide spectrum of standards, ranging from the evangelical to the libertine. In order to identify whether different Tourists and families actually viewed sex, drinking, gambling and related pursuits as dangerous, it is necessary to locate them on this moral and religious axis. The opposing views of Lord and Lady Pembroke illustrate how these factors fundamentally shifted the perceived degree of danger associated with certain activities. While Pembroke regarded continental travel as providing fruitful opportunities to indulge in his and his son’s moral code, Lady Pembroke saw multiple hazards to be negotiated.

Whether it was the danger of crime, illness or moral corruption, a single danger or activity could be legitimately perceived in multiple ways. Grand Tourists’ communities were evidently influential in shaping these perceptions and did not necessarily push Tourists towards the path of fear and caution. This opens up further questions regarding the effect of social dynamics and ambitions on a traveller’s engagement with danger. How, for example, did the desire to attain acceptance and affirmation from family, society and other men influence the risk-taking behaviours of young men? As subsequent chapters will explore, encounters with certain dangers were often seen as a platform for masculine performances to be enacted, applauded and validated. The drive to attain validation was so influential that it could, at times, impel Grand Tourists directly towards encounters with danger.

Eighteenth-century conceptions of danger

In 1755, Samuel Johnson succinctly but rather nebulously defined ‘danger’ as ‘risque; hazard; peril’.¹¹⁹ A fuller etymology of these terms shows that danger had a well-established link with chance, luck, speculation and gambling. From at least the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ‘danger’ was defined as ‘Liability or exposure to harm or injury; the condition of being exposed to the chance of evil; risk, peril’.¹²⁰ ‘Risk/Risque’ came from the French risqué, meaning ‘danger or inconvenience, predictable or otherwise’. It entered the English language in the seventeenth century and was similarly defined as ‘(Exposure to) the possibility of loss, injury, or other adverse or unwelcome circumstance; a chance or situation involving such a possibility’. ‘Risk/Risque’ held specific associations with ‘financial loss’; that is, speculation, and with ‘A hazardous journey, undertaking, or course of action; a venture’. By the eighteenth century, the term had redoubled its association with being ‘in danger, exposed to a risk’ and with the specific chancing ‘something of value or importance’ to ‘jeopardy’.¹²¹ ‘Peril’ and ‘imperil’ held a very similar but older etymology that dated back to the twelfth century. ‘Hazard’, a verb from the fifteenth-century French hasarde, was initially the name for a dice game in which ‘the chances are complicated by a number of arbitrary rules’. Over time, the term broadened to encompass putting ‘(anything) to the risk of being lost in a game of chance or other doubtful issue; to stake; to expose to hazard or risk’. This extended to exposing ‘oneself to risk; … to endanger, to get by chance/luck’.¹²²

Given this, the interconnected histories of probability theory, statistics and gambling offer important insights into the eighteenth-century conceptualization of danger. The century saw the birth of the probabilistic revolution, an emerging worldview in which danger could be domesticated by converting the various hazards of life into calculable, manageable risks. The Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume, for example, argued that chance was merely the absence of an established cause due to the imperfection of human reason and knowledge.¹²³ Yet this mentality remained in its infancy for the majority of the century. Statistical theory was a relatively obscure, developing calculus used for describing individual moral action. Rationality and the will of the individual remained important factors within these calculations. It was the nineteenth century that saw the full emergence of the probabilistic revolution, whereby statistical theory started to outline how the individual was subject to the laws of frequencies and rates observable in large groups and societies.¹²⁴ This had intriguing ramifications for nineteenth-century perceptions of risk. On the one hand, there was an increased certainty that risk could be statistically calculated, assessed and thereby eliminated.¹²⁵ On the other, as the individual’s relationship with chance and probability became characterized by a sense of inevitability and a lack of personal control, this created a growing sense of insecurity and uncertainty. By the mid nineteenth century, society had become ‘risk-averse’. The consequences of ‘unnecessary’ risks needed to be minimized and risk in general was increasingly associated with negative outcomes.¹²⁶

Lorraine Daston and Geoffrey Clark have both argued that eighteenth-century practices of risk, undertaken through insurance (maritime, fire and life), annuities, lotteries and other forms of gambling, remained almost wholly untouched by the advent of mathematical probability that would so profoundly shape the nineteenth century. Clark noted that while the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw an explosion of the insurance industry,¹²⁷ these organizations were largely ignorant of the statistical methods suggested by the theoreticians of probability. Not one insurance company, for example, appears systematically to have collected or analysed information about shipping or fire losses.¹²⁸ Instead, eighteenth-century attitudes towards risk were, as Daston argued, shaped by ‘preprobabilistic’ practices and understandings. Degrees of risk were quantified in the sense that premiums were proportioned to risk, but methods of risk assessment were anti-statistical. They often relied on intuition, experience and assessed individual cases by using ‘specific, up-to-the-minute, and above all personal knowledge’ that was sensitive to myriad individual situations, weighted interrelationships and market circumstances.¹²⁹ As Clark put it, ‘Experience counted; counting didn’t’.¹³⁰

This adherence to preprobabilistic practice was further shaped by several historically specific cultural understandings of risk. First, there was a lingering perception of risk as positive, inherited from medieval and early modern judicial and theoretical understandings that it played an important redeeming role within aleatory contracts. In the place of labour or property, the parties to the contract exchanged present certainty for future uncertainty. The presence of risk stopped practices like this from collapsing into illegal usury.¹³¹ Second, risk was filtered through a cultural understanding of fortuna (fortune). Like justice, fortuna was almost always depicted with a blindfold to indicate that this ambiguous concept was capricious, unfair, but also utterly impartial and blind to all distinctions. This belief was, as Hume’s comment indicates, deplored by the moral and rational strands of Enlightenment thinking but nevertheless remained deeply persuasive. Fortuna and related concepts – chance, risk, probability, speculation – were imbued with a certain neutrality in which the sword could fall either way.¹³² Third, fortuna was a conceptual category that sat somewhere between divine providence and human agency.¹³³ Eighteenth-century society remained invested in the concept of ‘subjective’ probability, in which the ‘risk’ of gambling, uncertain investment or hazardous travel depended to some degree on the individual’s own agency to ‘take a risk’. Early modern declarations like Machiavelli’s statement that fortune was better mastered by audacity than caution suggested that outcomes could somehow be swayed by actions, attitude and character. Such views still resonated in the eighteenth century.¹³⁴ Card-playing, for example, evolved from late seventeenth-century games that depended almost entirely upon pure luck to an eighteenth-century passion for games like whist, which required individual skill and co-operative play to defeat one’s opponent and chance itself.¹³⁵ Thus whereas Augustan society might have been committed to the social management of risk, as Clark highlighted, this was not a risk-averse society. Rather, practices like insurance that were used to protect against misfortune and compensate loss were also frequently perceived as a speculative opportunity for gain through the process of gambling on lives and outcomes.¹³⁶

The role of divine intervention in dangerous situations also requires consideration. Daston described how the highly individualized name slips submitted to Elizabethan-era blank lotteries were inscribed with prayers requesting God’s intervention in a game of chance.¹³⁷ This corresponds with Alexandra Walsham’s exploration of providence in early modern England, in which she demonstrated that providence was ‘part of the mainstream, a cluster of presuppositions which enjoyed near universal acceptance’.¹³⁸ Inherent to providence was a belief that God actively intervened in human affairs to punish, reward, warn, test and chastise. It offered a way of understanding both petty and perplexing events, was an ingrained response to chaos and crisis, and central to political, medical, philosophical and theological thought.¹³⁹ By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, exponents of ‘rational religion’ had dissociated themselves from the idea that the Almighty perpetually intervened in the temporal realm. This was in response to the Civil War and Interregnum, in which the credibility of providence had been undermined by radical groups who appropriated it as a polemic weapon.¹⁴⁰ Despite this, J. C. D. Clark and others have demonstrated that providence remained a widespread, powerful popular mindset that coexisted with rational scientific orthodoxy in eighteenth-century society.¹⁴¹

Wrestling with the ‘paradoxical alliance of science and providence which emerged during the seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuries’, Robin Pearson argued that as ‘the laws which governed natural phenomena were gradually revealed by science, the immediacy of God’s will was replaced by claims for its indirect revelation through the workings of nature’.¹⁴² Yet Jane Shaw’s investigation into miracles in the eighteenth century has highlighted how the idea that God might intervene very directly into human affairs retained a vitality throughout the long eighteenth century, not in the least through the influence of nonconformist churches.¹⁴³ Carl Thompson’s study of maritime misadventure, shipwreck and captivity narratives has demonstrated how such beliefs in providence directly shaped some travel cultures, and argued that this eighteenth-century subgenre of ‘Voyage and Travels’ writing was closely bound up with a religious agenda. Writers thanked God for delivering them from disaster and used these events to demonstrate the complex workings of Providence in their lives. These narratives described God’s power over nature’s laws. He alone had the ability to save the good and let the wicked perish. In more complex lessons, God would even inflict hardships as a means of purifying the faithful and (re)converting those who had strayed. Readers of all denominations used these narratives as sources of spiritual instruction.¹⁴⁴

These understandings of chance, risk and providence influenced a wide range of eighteenth-century life, including the mechanisms of commerce and speculation, the culture and mentality of mercantile and trade communities, activities such as gambling, lotteries and life insurance, the cultures of religious sub-groups, such as Quakers and Methodists, and campaigns for the abolition of slavery.¹⁴⁵ How, then, did these understandings in turn shape contemporary concepts of danger on the Grand Tour?

Mark Williams has recently explored how the role of memory, interiority and intergenerational relations were important in the framing and reframing of experiences and narratives of travel. Through this, he provides a fascinating insight into one family, the Clerks of Penicuik, Scotland, and their late seventeenth-century experiences of travel. The Clerk family were devout Presbyterians who saw the manifestations of divine providence in their daily surroundings and life stories. Both Sir John Clerk II and his son, John Clerk III, interwove ‘signal providences’ in the narratives of their educational travels to Europe and the role those travels played in shaping their spiritual lives.¹⁴⁶ Clerk II’s retrospective account of his travels of about 1676 centred on how ‘my pride[,] ignorance & follie’ led to a traumatic near-drowning in the Seine. Sinking, he offered:

Providence also played an important role in Clerk III’s travels in the late 1690s. Like some other Scottish and English Presbyterians, Clerk III drew up a covenant prior to his departure, asking God to preserve him from ‘spiritual and bodily dangers’ and vowing to ‘depart from my lusts and close with thee’.¹⁴⁸ When his ship struck a rock off the south coast of France, Clerk commended himself to God and survived.¹⁴⁹ The Clerks’ attitude towards danger markedly echoes the narratives found in maritime and shipwreck disasters, yet it bears no resemblance to my collection of Grand Tourists, who were largely English, Anglican and travelling later in the eighteenth century. The Clerks’ Presbyterian spiritual tradition brought providence to the fore most clearly in their response to dangers, but even the most overtly religious families in this study, such as the Dartmouths, made no reference to providence. God might be invoked as a blessing, church might be attended, and sermons discussed, but providence was not routinely besought as an intervening force in someone’s survival.

This elite group’s perceptions and understandings of danger were much more clearly underpinned by a preprobabilistic understanding and practice of risk that centred on taking their chances with fortuna’s capricious neutrality. In 1777, Philip Yorke wrote from Vienna to his guardians and uncles, the 2nd earl of Hardwicke and Sir Joseph Yorke, asking for permission to gamble. Prominent in Whig political and intellectual circles, Yorke’s family practised a ‘middle of the road’ Anglican morality, for which church attendance and prayers were important.¹⁵⁰ They were outwardly disapproving of gambling as an immoral and irrational act. At the same time, however, the evils of gambling had to be balanced against a second threat: that of social failure. The popularity of gambling in eighteenth-century elite society is well known. Deplored by moralists, it was nevertheless a fashionable pastime that had an important social function in providing space for conviviality and an opportunity to demonstrate one’s fashionable credentials.¹⁵¹ Yorke’s lack of skill at the gaming table had already compromised his efforts with the social elites of Brussels and Mannheim.¹⁵²

In order to avoid the prospect of social failure, Yorke proposed embracing this ‘Evil’. He was not alone in this belief. Hoping to convince his uncles, Yorke reported that ‘Sir Robert [Murray Keith, the British ambassador to Vienna and a voice of adult authority, trusted by most parents and Grand Tourists] advises me much to play & several others recommend it very much as the best & most agreeable way of making acquaintances’.¹⁵⁴ His uncle evidently agreed as Yorke’s diary entries dated after his letter regularly recorded episodes of play.¹⁵⁵

Yorke’s use of the term, jeux de societé, is a play on words that holds the key to understanding eighteenth-century elite attitudes towards danger and risk. Jeux de societé did not just refer to gambling as a specific pastime, but also in its literal translation alluded to ‘the games of society’. Yorke was therefore referring to the need to play (with skill) the games, strategies and rules necessary to moving successfully within powerful and fashionable society. As such, the principles of preprobabilistic chance ran well beyond the boundaries of the card-table and insurance companies, and the concept of risk and danger sat at the very heart of elite culture itself. The Grand Tour and elite masculine formation were themselves a game of society; an enormous, costly gamble with a family’s finances, with the life and reputation of its son, and with a variety of hazards, in which the outcome could be either hugely rewarding or an extensive failure.

Yorke’s letter, Keith’s advice and Hardwicke’s response reflected an intimate knowledge of how to succeed within the elite world. To this end, the decision was taken to gamble with Yorke’s morality in order to secure greater social success. A similar mentality is evident in Stevenson’s and the Dartmouths’ correspondence regarding Lewisham’s Grand Tour. Despite their concerns over the moral dangers of Paris, both tutor and pupil nevertheless believed that there was ‘no place where young Men run so little Risk, with opportunity of learning more’.¹⁵⁶ Writing from Paris in January 1776, Stevenson declared that ‘The Advantages are so much greater than the Hazards, that, where a young Man is well disposed & attended by a Friend of common Experience, I cannot hesitate to pronounce it the first & only school to be found in this Country’.¹⁵⁷ Stevenson and Lewisham’s father, Lord Dartmouth, believed that exposing Lewisham to the Grand Tour’s many temptations and pitfalls was a gamble, but also presented opportunities to develop an effective moral and social compass. It was an approach that appears to have paid off. Less than a year later, Lewisham and Stevenson reached Vienna from where the tutor celebrated his student’s ability to freely interact with continental society and his fellow Grand Tourists without arousing any alarm. Lewisham went on to delight his parents with his resolution to marry, live a ‘Domestic’ ‘life of application’, avoid clubs and play, form a new club that would proudly uphold overt Christian principles, and contribute to the country’s governance and improvement.¹⁵⁸ Lord and Lady Dartmouth’s response demonstrated how their staunch morals mingled with a clear insight into the nature and dynamics of their world. They smiled on Lewisham’s ‘good intention’, but also gently quizzed him on the ‘practicability’ of entirely shunning these social spaces and practices as a Tourist.¹⁵⁹

In chancing danger, young elite men and their families sought to reap the rewards of a potentially good outcome by risking it against the possibility of a harmful or negative one. In doing so, they were fully cognisant of the danger, but willingly balanced this against a belief that these self-same dangers, if successfully negotiated, would result in benefits. As such, families experienced anxiety and advised certain precautions but, on the whole, they were not unduly tempted to take a path of safety. This was not always the case, of course; but strenuous attempts to avoid any semblance of danger were highly unusual. The letters of Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, written during his son, Daniel’s 1708–10 Grand Tour provide one such example. Nottingham feared everything: from the possibility that the younger Finch might break his leg by ‘ye sudden & unexpected turn of ye pole wch guides ye rudder’ during the Channel crossing, and whether Wolfenbüttel or Geneva’s academies would expose him to worse ‘temptations’ and ‘ill Examples’, to whether Finch was travelling too fast or too slow.¹⁶⁰ Unusually for his time, Nottingham tried to make travelling entirely safe for his son by seeking to envisage harm before it occurred. Attempting to do this as the War of Spanish Succession, plague and smallpox swept the continent resulted in paralysis: ‘I am in great perplexity about yr travels: the plague on one hand & ye war on ye other makes it extremely difficult for me to resolve upon any Course for you. To proceed where you shall be under ye inconvenience of ye one or ye other would be intolerable & little lesse than madnesse’.¹⁶¹ Unsurprisingly, the 2nd earl’s idiosyncratic view of danger meant he continually hovered on the brink of the safest option of all: recalling Finch home until a safer time.

Grand Tourists played the jeux de societé with more than just their cards, money and morals. As the following chapters explore, in facing the physical dangers of war, sport, the practice of travel, the natural phenomena of mountains, glaciers, Mount Vesuvius and even the climate of the warm south, they gambled with their physical health, reputations, identities and, on occasions, their lives. To fully understand the rationale behind this, however, thought needs to be given to the central role of honour and to how its relationship with masculinity and danger directly moulded Grand Tourists’ responses to these hazards.

Honour was an early modern and eighteenth-century concept that concerned the reputation of an individual, as judged by their peers and society.¹⁶² Faramerz Dabhoiwala and Elizabeth Foyster have emphasized how gender roles and social status were differentiated through nuances in the language and construction of honour. Aristocratic and gentry men, for example, adhered to a specific code of honour that set them apart from their social inferiors.¹⁶³ By the eighteenth century, elite male honour was deemed to be a mixture of blood, birth and individual merit. This fragile combination of lineage and virtuous action meant that the prospect of dishonour was never far away: honour always had to be earned and defended.¹⁶⁴ This was achieved through a multifaceted code of moral and social behaviours, that ranged from actions of piety, charity and justice to retaining control over oneself and one’s household, and performing duty by holding public office.¹⁶⁵ Crucially, elite status and power traditionally rested on military leadership and the right to bear arms. Elite honour was therefore proven, affirmed and defended through the same violent means. While actions of courage, prowess and leadership on the battlefield were important to this facet of honour, historians have primarily focused on the association between elite honour, violence and the practice of duelling.¹⁶⁶ In this context, Robert Shoemaker observed that men had to confirm and maintain ‘their status by physically defending their integrity and reputation against all challenges’.¹⁶⁷

Particular attention has been given to tracing whether or not noble violence declined and whether this can be ascribed to the rise of civility. There has been little consensus.¹⁶⁸ Duelling was vehemently attacked by its critics, and the eighteenth century did see a transition in its mode of practice.¹⁶⁹ The shift from swords to pistols, for example, meant that the duel went from being an active assertion of bravery via a trial of fighting skills to a more passive demonstration of courage by standing firm in the face of fire. This resulted in fewer fatalities and was, Shoemaker argued, the result of wider reforms to notions of masculine conduct and honour.¹⁷⁰ Yet, other scholars have highlighted that the number of duels and advocates of duelling actually increased across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seemingly in direct contrast to cultures of politeness, civility and restraint.¹⁷¹

Linda Pollock argued that the stress placed on duelling, violence and the ‘goading revenge for insults’ meant that ‘many vital facets of the honour culture have been overlooked’.¹⁷² Throughout the following chapters, I will explore how the militaristic elements of honour manifested and influenced elite young men in contexts outside of interpersonal violence and the duel. This particular aspect of honour was deeply embedded in wider elite culture and centred upon what Donna Andrew termed the ‘aristocratic male quality par excellence’ – the virtue of courage.¹⁷³ It retained its connotations with the confrontation of an external challenge, but these challenges did not just take the form of a jostling elbow or spoken insult. They could also be found in the call to battle, the chance to hunt, or in many other scenarios with the potential for physical harm. As honour had to be bravely and (if necessary) violently proven and defended, walking away from such challenges could risk the unacceptable outcome of damaging one’s status and reputation. Elite male concerns of honour therefore revolved around ‘a deliberate courting of large risks’, and were influential in shaping a mentality in which a highly confrontational relationship with danger was an important means of asserting one’s masculinity.¹⁷⁴ While chapters 3 and 4 explore the wider array of contexts in which this mentality was present, chapter 2 offers an exploration of how the martial element of honour and danger remained a very active component for eighteenth-century elite men as they continued to maintain a strong understanding of their military status on the Grand Tour.

_______________________

1 M. Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London, 1992), p. 29.

2 One of the servants of George Simon Harcourt, Viscount Nuneham and later 2nd Earl Harcourt, died at an unspecified point during his Grand Tour of 1754– 6; Theophilus Bolton, a travelling companion of John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield, died of consumption in 1765 in Genoa; an unrelated Mr Herbert died in Turin in 1780, while being cared for by Lord George Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke, his servant, Laurent and their mutual friend, Jarrett.

3 Hon. Stephen Fox, Baron Ilchester and John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey of Ickworth (who undertook their Grand Tour in part because of their pre-existing ill-health); Henry Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, 9th earl of Lincoln (general ill health); Horace Walpole (quinsy); John Holroyd’s servant (unspecified illness, severe enough to be send home); Holroyd’s travelling companion, Theophilus Bolton (consumption); Holroyd’s other companion, Major Richard Ridley (rheumatism); Charles Legge (jaundice); George Augustus Herbert (ague fits); Philip Yorke, later 3rd earl of Hardwicke (malaria).

4 Henry Fiennes Pelham-Clinton (sprained his leg in a jumping competition); George Legge, Viscount Lewisham and later 3rd earl of Dartmouth (injured leg in the Alps); Philip Yorke’s tutor, Colonel Wettstein (fell from his horse several times).

5 Henry Fiennes Pelham-Clinton fell in love with Lady Sophia Fermor; Charles Lennox, 3rd duke of Richmond, became entangled with a Genevan woman of low birth.

6 See Norfolk Record Office (NRO), WKC 7-49 for the legal documents dealing with William Windham’s contract and R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Felbrigg: the Story of a House (London, 1962), pp. 117–19. Windham’s friend, Richard Aldworth Neville also became engaged to Magdalen Calendrini, daughter of the first syndic of Geneva, whom he subsequently married.

7 British Library (Brit. Libr.), Additional MS. 38507, James Hay, Utrecht, to George Compton, the 4th earl of Northampton, 1 Sept. 1707; Hay, Berlin, to Northampton, 10 Oct. 1707.

8 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 51345, John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey of Ickworth, poem to his wife, 1729.

9 Henry Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, 9th earl of Lincoln, Rome, to Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st duke of Newcastle, 29 Apr. 1707; and Lincoln, Paris, to Newcastle, 14 Sept. 1741, in Joseph Spence: Letters from the Grand Tour, ed. S. Klima (Montreal, 1975), pp. 379–80, 411.

10 Berkshire Record Office, MS. D/EN/F.54-5, Richard Aldworth Neville’s Grand Tour journal, 1743– 4, 17 Oct. 1744 and 22 Oct. 1744.

11 Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies (CBS), MS. D-LE-E2-8, George Simon Harcourt, Viscount Nuneham, later 2nd Earl Harcourt, [Germany], to his sister, Lady Elizabeth Harcourt, 18 Dec. 1754.

12 Brit. Libr, Add. MS. 34887, fo. 172, John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield, Naples, to Mrs Baker, 4 June 1765; Add. MS. 61979 A, Holroyd’s Grand Tour journal, 19–21 July 1764.

13 William Coxe, Travels in Switzerland: in a Series of Letters to William Melmoth (3 vols., London, 1789), i. 131; Staffordshire County Record Office, D(W)1778/V/852, William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth [unknown location] to George Legge, Viscount Lewisham, later 3rd earl of Dartmouth, 30 Sept. 1777.

14 CBS, MS. D-LE-E2-2, Nuneham, Rheims, to his sister, 12 July 1754.

15 NRO, WKC 7/46/11, Richard Price, Paris, to the Bloods, 9 Nov. 1741.

16 ‘Lord Herbert’s Grand Tour journal’, in Henry, Elizabeth and George (1734–80): Letters and Diaries of Henry, Tenth Earl of Pembroke and his Circle, ed. Lord Herbert (London, 1939), pp. 436–7.

17 E.g., SRO, D(W)1778/V/885, David Stevenson, Tours, to Dartmouth, 28 Aug. 1775.

18 Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre (WSHC), MS. 2057/F4/29, Henry Herbert, 10th earl of Pembroke, Ely, to George Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke, 30 Sept. 1779.

19 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/27, Lady Pembroke [location unknown], to Coxe, 18 Dec. 1775.

20 Henry Seymour Conway [location unknown], to Horace Walpole, 23 June 1741, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (48 vols., New Haven, Conn., 1937–), xxxvii. 100; Thomas Ashton, Acton, to Walpole, 25 July 1741, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, xiii. 246–7.

21 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34883, fo. 75, Edward Gibbon, Rome, to Edward Gibbon, 9 Oct. 1764, my emphasis.

22 D. Martin, ‘Introduction: the Victorians and risk’, Victorian Review, xl (2014), 47–54, at pp. 48–9.

23 For examples of research establishing quantifiable understanding of early modern danger, see Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski’s ongoing project, ‘Everyday life and fatal hazard in sixteenth-century England’ <http://tudoraccidents.history.ox.ac.uk> [accessed 12 March 2019].

24 C. E. Althanus, ‘A disciplinary perspective on the epistemological status of risk’, Risk Analysis: an International Journal, xxv (2005), 567–88, at pp. 568–9.

25 U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter (London, 1992), p. 23.

26 See D. Lupton, Risk (New York, 1999), p. 57; M. Douglas, ‘Risk as a forensic resource’, Daedalus, cxic (1990), 1–16, at pp. 9–10.

27 Douglas, ‘Risk’, pp. 40, 58, 69, 103.

28 Lupton, Risk, p. 32.

29 W. E. Mead, The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Boston and New York, 1914), p. 7.

30 E.g., Mead, Grand Tour, pp. 2, 33, 44, 49, 51, 142–8.

31 A. Giddens and C. Pierson, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Cambridge, 1998), p. 209; Beck, Risk Society, p. 260.

32 T. Baker and J. Simon, Embracing Risk: the Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (Chicago, Ill., 2002), p. 17; Beck, Risk Society, p. 10; Martin, ‘Victorians and risk’, pp. 47–8.

33 Lupton, Risk, pp. 31–3.

34 J. Bourke, ‘Fear and anxiety: writing about emotion in modern history’, History Workshop Journal, lv (2003), 111–33, at pp. 111–13, 120.

35 H. French and M. Rothery, ‘Male anxiety among younger sons of the English landed gentry, 1700– 1900’, Historical Journal, lxii (2019), 967–95. See also M. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1996).

36 Bourke, ‘Fear and anxiety’, p. 120.

37 J. Black, The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1992), pp. 177–82, 186–9.

38 Captain John Floyd’s Grand Tour journal, taken from Herbert, Henry, Elizabeth and George, p. 196.

39 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/28, Floyd, Pembroke House, to George Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke, 14 Sept. 1779.

40 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/7, Herbert’s Grand Tour journal, 2 Nov. 1779.

41 R. Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: the British in Italy, c.1690–1820 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 231.

42 Sweet, Cities, pp. 188–91.

43 A. Wildavsky and K. Drake, ‘Theories of risk perception: who fears what and why?’, Daedalus, cxix (1990), 41–60, at p. 49.

44 E. Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge, 2000), p. 10.

45 See, e.g., L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2002), pp. 6–7, 168–9.

46 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 172, Holroyd, Naples, to Mrs Holroyd, 7 July 1765.

47 Record Office of Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland (ROLLR), DG7 Bundle 32/42, George Finch, 9th earl of Winchilsea, Rome, to his mother, Lady Charlotte Winchilsea, 3 Apr. 1774.

48 ROLLR, DG7 Bundle 32/48/1– 2 Winchilsea, Naples, to his mother, 18 May 1773.

49 Sweet, Cities, p. 181. For local rejections of stereotypes, see M. Calaresu, ‘From the street to stereotype: urban space, travel and the picturesque in late eighteenth-century Naples’, Italian Studies, lxii (2007), 189–203, at p. 201; W. Bracewell, ‘The travellee’s eye: reading European travel writing, 1750–1850’, in New Directions in Travel Writing Studies, ed. J. Kuehn and P. Smethurst (London, 2015), pp. 215–27.

50 Sweet, Cities, pp. 181, 134–5; A. R. Lesage, The Adventures of Gil Blas… trans. Tobias Smollett (5th edn., 4 vols., London, 1764), iv. 15–16.

51 See K. M. Botelho, Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 11; ‘Fama’ and her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe, ed. H. Kerr and C. Walker (Turnhout, 2015).

52 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/31, Lady Pembroke, London, to Herbert, 4 May 1779.

53 Ashton, Acton, to Walpole, 28 May 1740, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, xiii. 221.

54 Horace Mann, Florence, to Walpole, 4 June 1740, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, xvii. 27–8.

55 Joseph Spence, Bologna, to Mrs Spence, 29 May 1741, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 388.

56 Joseph Spence, Bologna, to Mrs Spence, 29 May 1741, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 387.

57 Black, British Abroad, pp. 197–200.

58 M. Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 53–4.

59 See, e.g., L. Smith, ‘The relative duties of a man: domestic medicine in England and France, ca. 1685– 1740’, Journal of Family History, xxxi (2006), 237–56, at p. 245; L. Smith, ‘Women’s medical care in eighteenth-century England’, Social History of Medicine, xvi (2003), 327–42, at pp. 327–8, 330, 333.

60 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Brussels, to Dartmouth, 15 June 1776.

61 E.g, Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 162, Holroyd, Rome, to Mrs Baker, 5 Dec. 1764; WSCH, MS. 2057/F5/5, Herbert’s journal, 20 Dec. 1780.

62 J. Lane, ‘“The doctor scolds me”: the diaries and correspondence of patients in eighteenth-century England’, in Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial Society, ed. R. Porter (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 218, 228–9; E. Leong and S. Pennell, ‘Recipe collections and the currency of medical knowledge in the early modern medical marketplace’, in Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450–c.1850, ed. M. S. R. Jenner and P. Wallis (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 137–9.

63 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, The Hague, to Dartmouth, 27 June 1776; D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Brussels, to Dartmouth, 15 June 1776; D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Brussels, to Dartmouth, 8 June 1776.

64 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36259, Philip Yorke, later 3rd earl of Hardwicke’s Grand Tour journals, 18 Aug. 1779; Add. MS. 35378, fo. 84, Yorke, Gottingen, to Philip Yorke, 2nd earl of Hardwicke, 1 Sept. 1777.

65 Stolberg, Experiencing Illness, pp. 11–12.

66 Grand Tourists and tutors were also well aware of these important figures. While leading the Grand Tour before Lincoln’s, Joseph Spence, e.g., was excited to attend Boerhaave’s lectures in Leiden in 1737 (Spence, The Hague, to Mrs Spence, 11 June 1737, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, pp. 170–1).

67 For a consideration of some of the strengths and limitations of these exchanges, see L. Brockliss, ‘Medical education and centres of excellence in eighteenth-century Europe: towards an identification’, in Centres of Medical Excellence? Medical Travel and Education in Europe, 1500–1789, ed. O. P. Grell, A. Cunningham and J. Arrizabalaga (Farnham, 2010), pp. 17–46.

68 For literature on spas and health travel, see The Medical History of Waters and Spas, ed. R. Porter (London, 1990); P. Hembry, The English Spa, 1560–1815: a Social History (London, 1990); A. Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: the Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, trans. J. Phelps (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), ch. 3.

69 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/27, Coxe, Strasbourg, to Lady Pembroke, [?] Dec. 1775; MS. 2057/F4/27, Lady Pembroke, Wilton, to Coxe, 16 Dec. 1775; MS. 2057/F4/27, Coxe, Strasbourg, to Lady Pembroke, undated 1775; Stolberg, Experiencing Illness, p. 146.

70 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Brussels, to Dartmouth, 8 June 1776; D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Brussels, to Dartmouth, 15 June 1776.

71 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Brussels, to Dartmouth, 15 June 1776.

72 R. Porter, ‘The patient’s view’, Theory and Society, xiv (1985), 175–98, at pp. 189–93; D. Porter and R. Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 9, 26–7. For revisions of this term, see M. S. R. Jenner and P. Wallis, ‘The medical marketplace’, in Jenner and Wallis, Medicine and the Market, pp. 24–46, at p. 2.

73 Stolberg, Experiencing Illness, pp. 69–71, 74.

74 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/7, Herbert’s journal, 10 Jan. 1780.

75 Newcastle, Newcastle House, to Lincoln, 4 Feb. 1740, in Klima, Letters, p. 250.

76 See, e.g., Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36258, Yorke’s journal, 20 June 1779, 2 July 1779, 7 July 1779.

77 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 35378, fo. 192, Yorke, Venice, to Hardwicke, 25 May 1779.

78 Aside from Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham’s concerns in 1709, the only references to smallpox and vaccinations that I have found came from parents updating Tourists on the inoculation of young siblings.

79 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/27, Lady Pembroke [location unknown], to Coxe, 18 Dec. 1775; SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Brussels, to Dartmouth, 15 June 1776; D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson [no location] to Dartmouth [undated].

80 Black, British Abroad, ch. 9; I. Littlewood, Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex (Cambridge MA, 2002).

81 M. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1689–1780 (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), p. 71; See also D. T. Andrew, Aristocratic Vice: the Attack on Duelling, Suicide, Adultery, and Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2013).

82 See, e.g., Black, British Abroad, pp. 203–4.

83 H. French and M. Rothery, Man’s Estate: Landed Gentry Masculinities 1660–1900 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 124–5, 127, 128, 130–1.

84 Black, British Abroad, pp. 204, 217, 225; B. Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1996).

85 See also V. Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2006), pp. 178, 316.

86 J. Kelly, ‘Riots, revelries, and rumor: libertinism and masculine association in enlightenment London’, Journal of British Studies, xliv (2006), 759–95, at pp. 774–5.

87 Kelly, ‘Riots’, pp. 788–90.

88 H. Greig, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford, 2013), pp. 202, 206.

89 Greig, Beau Monde, pp. 193–4, 210, 209, 212, 215.

90 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 22998, 26 June–6 July 1741 and 15–26 June 1741, Pococke’s journal; NRO, WKC 7/46/11, Price, Paris, to the Bloods, 9 Nov. 1741.

91 Chesterfield quoted in Black, The British Abroad, p. 211.

92 L. G. Mitchell, ‘Fox, Charles James (1749–1806)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) <https://doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/10024> [accessed 29 May 2015].

93 Gatrell, City of Laughter, p. 316.

94 See Charles James Fox’s letters in Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 47576.

95 Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century, ed. P. Cryle and L. O’Connell (New York, 2004), pp. 2–3.

96 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 138, Holroyd, Lausanne, to Mrs Atkinson, 9 Jan. 1764; Add. MS. 34887, fo. 172, Holroyd, Naples, to Mrs Holroyd, 7 May 1765; Add. MS. 34887, fo. 166, Holroyd, Rome, to Mrs Atkinson, 7 Feb. 1765.

97 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 136, Holroyd, Lausanne, Baker, 19 Dec. 1763.

98 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 138, Holroyd, Lausanne, to Mrs Atkinson, 9 Jan. 1764; Add. MS. 34887, fo. 156, Holroyd, Leghorn, to Mrs Holroyd, 4 Sept. 1764.

99 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 168, Holroyd, Rome, to Baker, 8 March 1765.

100 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 149, Holroyd, Lausanne, to Mrs Baker, 12 Apr. 1764.

101 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 172, Holroyd, Naples, to Mrs Holroyd, 7 May 1765.

102 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 166, Holroyd, Rome, to Mrs Atkinson, 7 Feb. 1765; Add. MS. 34887, fo. 168, Holroyd, Rome, to Baker, 8 March 1765; Add. MS. 34887, fo. 170, Holroyd, Naples, to Mrs Baker, 7 Apr. 1765.

103 F. Dabhoiwala, ‘The construction of honour, reputation and status in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vi (1996), 201–13, at p. 204.

104 P. Marshall, ‘Legge, William, second earl of Dartmouth (1731–1801)’, ODNB <https://doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/16360> [accessed 26 June 2012].

105 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, London, to Lewisham, 18 Dec. 1775; D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, London, to Lewisham, 3 Feb. 1777. See G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Methodism and the evangelical revival’, in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H. T. Dickinson (Oxford, 2002), p. 253.

106 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 14 Aug. 1775.

107 E.g. SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Paris, to Dartmouth, 4 Jan. 1776.

108 J. Cannon, ‘Holroyd, John Baker, first earl of Sheffield (1735–1821)’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13608> [accessed 13 March 2019].

109 J. E. O. Screen, ‘Herbert, Henry, tenth earl of Pembroke and seventh earl of Montgomery (1734–1794)’, ODNB <https://doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/13034> [accessed 29 May 2015]; WSRO, MS. 2057/F4/26, Sir Robert Keith, Vienna, to Herbert, 12 Aug. 1779.

110 Pembroke quoted in Sweet, Cities, p. 57; WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/29, Pembroke, Stony Stratford, to Herbert, 21 June 1779.

111 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/29, Pembroke, Ely, to Herbert, 30 Sept. 1779.

112 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/28, John Floyd, Stamford, to Herbert, 15 Dec. 1779; MS. 2057/F4/28, Floyd, Pembroke House, to Herbert, 22 March 1780.

113 Screen, ‘Herbert, Henry, tenth earl of Pembroke’.

114 See, for support of Lady Pembroke, WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/27, Coxe, Strasbourg, to Lady Pembroke, 17 March 1776.

115 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/31, Lady Pembroke, London, to Herbert, 20 Apr. [1779]; MS. 2057/F4/27, Lady Pembroke, Wilton, to Coxe, 16 Dec. 1775; MS. 2057/F4/27, Lady Pembroke, Wilton, to Coxe, 10 Dec. 1776.

116 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/7, Herbert’s journal, 19 May 1780.

117 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/7, Herbert’s journal, 23 May 1780.

118 Quoted in Screen, ‘Herbert, Henry, tenth earl of Pembroke’.

119 S. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (2 vols., London, 1755), i, unpaginated; ‘danger, n. and adj.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/47183?rskey=mTn3xQ&result=1&isAdvanced=false> [accessed 12 Apr. 2017]; ‘† danger, v.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/47184?rskey=mTn3xQ&result=2> [accessed 12 Apr. 2017].

120 ‘danger, n. and adj.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/47183?rskey=mTn3xQ&result=1&isAdvanced=false> [accessed 12 Apr. 2017]; ‘† danger, v.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/47184?rskey=mTn3xQ&result=2> [accessed 12 Apr. 2017].

121 ‘risk, n.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/166306?rskey=qddti4&result=1> [accessed 12 Apr. 2017].

122 ‘peril, n.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/140934?rskey=FHCDdH&result=1&isAdvanced=false> [accessed 12 Apr. 2017]; ‘hazard, n. and adj.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/84853?rskey=KxgLxr&result=1> [accessed 12 Apr. 2017].

123 G. Clark, Betting on Lives: the Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 1, 37.

124 Y. Choi, ‘Writing the Victorian city: discourses of risk, connection, and inevitability’, Victorian Studies, xliii (2001), 561–90, at pp. 578–83.

125 Althanus, ‘Disciplinary perspective’, pp. 568–9.

126 Baker and Simon, Embracing Risk, p. 17.

127 For accounts of the enormous increase in these industries, see R. Pearson, Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke, 2004); and Clark, Betting on Lives.

128 Clark, Betting on Lives, p. 7.

129 L. Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J., 1995), pp. 112–6, 119–20, 125, 138–40.

130 Clark, Betting on Lives, p. 7.

131 Daston, Classical Probability, p. 117.

132 Daston, Classical Probability, pp. 151–2, 161; Douglas, ‘Risk’, pp. 1–2.

133 Daston, Classical Probability, pp. 151–2.

134 Daston, Classical Probability.

135 Clark, Betting on Lives, pp. 39–40.

136 Clark, Betting on Lives, pp. 4, 40. For literal examples of how lives were gambled on, see pp. 49–53.

137 Daston, Classical Probability, p. 143.

138 A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 2–3.

139 Walsham, Providence, p. 3.

140 Walsham, Providence, pp. 333–4.

141 E.g., J. C. D. Clark, ‘Providence, predestination and progress: or, did the Enlightenment fail?’, Albion, xxxv (2004), 559–89.

142 Pearson, Insuring the Industrial Revolution, p. 1.

143 J. Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2006).

144 C. Thompson, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford, 2007), pp. 7–82, 26–7, 71–5, 274.

145 See, e.g., J. Smail, ‘Credit, risk, and honor in eighteenth-century commerce’, Journal of British Studies, xliv (2005), 439–56; C. Cunard, ‘“Labouring in suspense”: paying attention to providence in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, xxx (2018), 395–418; R. Pearson, ‘Moral hazard and the assessment of insurance risk in eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Britain’, Business History Review, lxxix (2002), 1–36, at pp. 9–10; Clark, Betting on Lives; P. Koch, ‘Slavery, mission, and the perils of providence in eighteenth-century Christianity: the writings of Whitefield and the Halle Pietists’, Church History, lxxxiv (2015), 369–93.

146 M. R. F. Williams, ‘The inner lives of early modern travel’, Historical Journal, lxii (2019), 349–72, at p. 350.

147 Williams, ‘Inner lives’, p. 351.

148 Williams, ‘Inner lives’, p. 361.

149 Williams, ‘Inner lives’, p. 370.

150 The entries on the following dates record church attendance and comments on the quality of the sermon: Brit. Libr. Add. MS. 36258, Yorke’s journal, 29 June, 9 Aug., 21 Sept., 29 Nov. 1777, 1 Feb., 23 March, 6 June 1778.

151 D. Miers, ‘A social and legal history of gaming: from the Restoration to the Gaming Act 1845’, in Legal Record and Historical Reality: Proceedings of the Eighth British Legal History Conference, ed. T. G. Watkin (London, 1989), pp. 107–19; see also J. Richard, ‘“Putting to hazard a certainty”: lotteries and the romance of gambling in eighteenth-century England’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, xl (2011), 179–200.

152 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 35378, fo. 56, Yorke, Brussels, to Hardwicke, 20 June 1777; Add. MS. 35378, fo. 74, Yorke, Carlsmuche, to Hardwicke, 5 Aug. 1777.

153 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 35378, fo. 109, Yorke, Vienna, to Hardwicke, 21 Nov. 1777.

154 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 35378, fo. 109, Yorke, Vienna, to Hardwicke, 21 Nov. 1777.

155 See, e.g., Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36258, Yorke’s journal, 6, 9, 10, 17, 20, 29 Dec. 1777 and 7 Jan., 3 Feb. 1778.

156 SRO, D(W)1778/V/885, Stevenson, Tours, to Dartmouth, 28 Aug. 1775.

157 SRO, D(W)1778/V/885, Stevenson, Paris, to Dartmouth, 4 Jan. 1776.

158 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Vienna, to Dartmouth, 10 Nov. 1776.

159 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth [location unknown], to Lewisham, 16 Dec. 1776.

160 E.g., ROLLR, Finch MS., DG7 Bundle 23, Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, Soho Square, to Daniel Finch, later 3rd earl of Nottingham, 24 March 1708/9.

161 ROLLR, Finch MS., DG7 Bundle 23, Nottingham, Burley, to Finch, 12 Oct. 1709.

162 L. A. Pollock, ‘Honor, gender, and reconciliation in elite culture, 1570–1700’, Journal of British Studies, xlvi (2007), 3–29, at p. 5.

163 Dabhoiwala, ‘The construction of honour, reputation and status’, p. 203.

164 E. A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London, 1999), pp. 8–9, 35, 37–8.

165 Dabhoiwala, ‘The construction of honour, reputation and status’, pp. 203–4; Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England, pp. 36–8.

166 See e.g., Dabhoiwala, ‘The construction of honour, reputation and status’, pp. 201–5; P. Spierenburg, ‘Masculinity, violence and honour: an introduction’, in Men and Violence: Gender, Honour, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, ed. P. Spierenburg (Columbus, O., 1998), p. 6.

167 R. Shoemaker, ‘Male honour and the decline of public violence in eighteenth-century London’, Social History, xxvi (2001), 190–208, at p. 193.

168 Pollock, ‘Honour, gender, and reconciliation’.

169 Andrew, Aristocratic Vice, ch. 2.

170 Shoemaker, ‘Male honour and the decline of public violence’; Shoemaker, ‘The taming of the duel: masculinity, honour and ritual violence in London, 1660–1800’, Historical Journal, xlv (2002), 525–45.

171 See, e.g., S. Banks, A Polite Exchange of Bullets: the Duel and the English Gentleman, 1750–1850 (Woodbridge, 2010); and Pollock, ‘Honor, gender, and reconciliation’, p. 6, nn. 15–16 for further key literature.

172 Pollock, ‘Honor, gender, and reconciliation’, p. 8.

173 Andrew, Aristocratic Vice, p. 19.

174 Daston briefly speculated on this in Classical Probability, pp. 178, 160.