3. Wholesome dangers and a stock of health: exercise, sport and the hardships of the road

Figure 3.1. Pompeo Batoni, ‘Alexander Gordon, 4th duke of Gordon (1743–1827)’ (NG 2589, 1763–4).

By permission of National Galleries of Scotland. Purchased by Private Treaty with the aid of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 1994.

During their travels through Italy, Grand Tourists frequently commissioned portraits of themselves. Typically set in elegant, enclosed interiors in the presence of celebrated antiques, or in open-air settings with glimpses of Roman ruins in the background, these portraits were intended to capture and celebrate the moment at which young elite men came of age.¹ One of the more unusual Grand Tour portraits is of the Scottish nobleman, Alexander Gordon, 4th duke of Gordon, painted by Pompeo Batoni in 1764. Accompanied by his horse, dogs, gun and a pile of dead game, the young duke is shown hunting in the Italian countryside without a ruin in sight (see Figure 3.1). Art historians have disparagingly linked the portrait’s lack of overt classical symbolism with an anecdote concerning Johann Winckelmann’s failed attempts to rouse the duke’s interest in ancient Rome. Both have been read as symbolic of an immature, ignorant young man unable to appreciate what the Grand Tour offered. The art historians Edgar Peters Bowron and Peter Björn Kerber even suggested that Gordon would have been surprised to find that his pose in the portrait was a reference to a life-size third-century statue of a hunter found near Porta Latina in 1747.²

This interpretation may be challenged at various points. First, it presumes a correlation between an enthusiasm for sport and a limited cultural refinement and intelligence. There is no reason to doubt Wincklemann’s description of Gordon’s lack of interest in classical Rome, but the future duke was not as culturally disengaged as the anecdote suggests. He purchased artwork throughout his travels and displayed it at Gordon Castle, which he rebuilt according to John Baxter’s design. In adulthood, he became a noted Scottish patron of art and literature.³ It remains entirely possible that Gordon approved of, or even requested, the subtle association between classical and contemporary hunting in his portrait.

Second, Gordon’s portrait can only be considered emblematic of a failed Grand Tour if the sole purpose of continental travel was to produce gentlemen of taste. The setting and trappings of Gordon’s portrait were unusual but Batoni used a range of non-classical motifs – including historical armour, masquerade dress and tartan – in many other Tour portraits.⁴ Furthermore, the activities and the associated masculine virtues and abilities represented in Gordon’s portrait were very much an established part of the Grand Tour and its intended outcomes. In choosing to depict himself hunting, Gordon associated himself with a sporting pastime that was criticized if done to excess but was also idealized within elite culture as an activity that prepared participants for war and was suited to their rank. Fashionably dressed in a hunting outfit that echoed a military uniform, Gordon’s open pose displayed the benefits of his chosen sport: a strong, graceful and healthy body, an easy mastery over his horse (controlled by one hand) and dogs, and his skills in marksmanship, represented by the gun and dead game.

This chapter investigates how elite culture celebrated and used physical exercise, exertion and hardship during the Grand Tour’s process of masculine formation by examining three sets of activities: exercise regimes, in which riding, fencing and dancing played an important part; sports and physical pastimes, which ranged from hunting, tennis, cricket and swimming to promenades, pleasure rides and dancing at balls; and lastly the physical process of travelling itself, which involved exposure to danger and discomfort via rough and mountainous roads, carriage accidents and poor accommodation.

These activities were profoundly important to the success of a Grand Tour in several ways. While they were non-military pursuits, they were nevertheless closely associated with martial culture. Riding, fencing and dancing were an accepted part of military training and polite masculinity, and sports such as hunting had long been associated with demonstrations of martial prowess. As a preparation for war, they created alternative opportunities to encounter danger in a manner that still refined the necessary masculine skills and virtues of courage, endurance and self-control. This ongoing belief that physical exercise and elite sports were a highly effective method of military training shaped the dynamics of elite social (and particularly homosocial) leisure activities. Successful displays of physical skill and prowess served as a form of social capital which led to an increased degree of admiration and respect among peers and social superiors.

These activities were also linked to a wider pedagogical celebration of physical hardship. Hardship, it was believed, developed a young man’s courage, patriotism and capacity to defend his country. As the very nature of the Grand Tour ensured a protracted exposure to the ‘wholesome’ dangers, hazards and discomforts of travelling, Tourists, tutors and writers championed this element of travel. These formative experiences, it was argued, inured men to petty hazards, improved their health, courage and resilience, and refined their perception of danger. Investigating these activities reveals how the martial elements of elite identity seeped into the fabric of what it meant to be an aristocratic male, transmuting into a more general emphasis upon attaining ‘hardy’ manly traits.

These activities were also used to achieve the goal of establishing and maintaining good physical health. Travel was believed to give access to healthy locations and to contain its own medicinal properties. Grand Tourists sought to increase their physical wellbeing by travelling to and spending time in salubrious locations, and by establishing healthy daily routines. This regime was based around six ‘non-naturals’ which comprised air; food and drink; sleep and wakefulness; exercise and rest; evacuation and repletion; and the passions of the mind. Eighteenth-century medical thought asserted that balancing the non-naturals through health (or hygiene) regimes constructed around routines of diet, exercise, regular evacuations (via purges, vomits, ‘sweats’ and blood lettings) and healthy locations would enable the attainment of a perfect state of bodily health. Within this context, physical exercise and sporting pastimes were deemed medicina gymnastica: health-giving exercises that were widely advocated as an important component in maintaining health.⁵ Historians of medicine have long understood that curative travel to spa towns and other salubrious locations played an important part in eighteenth-century medical practice.⁶ Yet travel was also a preventative medical practice closely associated with youth. Through this, the Grand Tour was intended to enable elite men to establish a foundation of good health to last a lifetime, and to establish a disciplined, well-balanced daily routine that would endure throughout adulthood.

Exercise also needs to be considered in light of other eighteenth-century ‘cultures of movement’.⁷ A wide variety of physical pursuits, sports and play were undertaken by a broad spectrum of British society and supported by an increasingly professionalized industry of venues, trainers and equipment. Elite men, for example, would regularly have the opportunity to dance ride, hunt, shoot, take part in fencing, boxing and other combative sports, alongside cricket and tennis matches and numerous other ball games.⁸ Scholars beyond the realm of sports history have often been reluctant to consider how sport and exercise shaped masculine identity and culture, particularly as such pastimes were often castigated as boorish wastes of time that encouraged gentlemen to neglect their duties. Yet the widespread popularity of such pursuits strongly points to their importance in codes of eighteenth-century elite masculinity.⁹ In the 1720s alone most of the key aristocratic families had representatives who took part in large-scale hunts, while gentlemen received boxing lessons at the London academy of the champion pugilist, James Figg (established in 1719). In the same decade, Figg’s pugilistic contest with Ned Sutton in 1727 attracted more than a thousand spectators, including Sir Robert Walpole, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.¹⁰ On a visit to England in 1728, the Swiss traveller, César de Saussure, described how cricket – a sport requiring agility and skill – was played by everyone, ‘the common people and also men of rank’.¹¹

This popularity was accompanied by a body of literature that celebrated sports, play and exertion as healthy, virtuous and even patriotic activities,¹² all embedded in the rationale and interests of the Grand Tour. Moreover, an examination of the way in which Grand Tour cultures of exercise, sport and travel were shaped by an honourable, military mentality towards dangers, and by pedagogical theories of wholesome hardship, further reveals how elite men and their families sought to embrace the transformative qualities of danger.

The Grand Tour as a health regime

It was a commonly held tenet of eighteenth-century medical theory that an individual’s health was closely connected to his or her environment.¹³ Since bad air (otherwise known as miasmas or mal’aria) was thought to spread sickness, good air was essential for healthy living. Other factors, such as season, temperature, wind, soil fertility, and proximity to large bodies of water, also influenced health. A dry, temperate and brisk climate that was free from excessive heat, unhealthy exhalations from the earth and undue humidity was commonly deemed the best combination. This much was agreed on; however, in their detail climate theories were often fragmented, illogical, biased and contradictory.¹⁴ Public and private discussions contained a bewildering array of opinions on the respective healthiness of various locations and geographies.¹⁵ Nevertheless, even temporary residence in a healthy climate was thought to improve physical wellbeing. Travelling to healthy locations and spa towns was therefore a common prescription for those who could afford such excursions.

Equally, though, travel exposed individuals to unhealthy locations and climates. Grand Tourists and their families were keenly aware of this dichotomy. In 1779, during his stay in Rome, Philip Yorke, later 3rd earl of Hardwicke, contracted a severe case of malaria.¹⁶ He and members of his wider circle were acutely conscious that, as this disease was closely associated with Rome’s environs, travel was in part responsible for his illness. Yet, it was also hoped that travel would bring him back to full health. This proved to be the case. On the first day of journeying from Rome, Yorke claimed, ‘I begin already to feel the salutary effects’ of the journey.¹⁷ Travel allowed him to ‘pick up my quota of flesh & strength in the excellent air of Switzerland’, and to receive expert consultation and treatment in Spa.¹⁸

Grand Tourists used travel reactively, as a cure for ill health, and proactively, as a spur to an improved physical state. In 1726, the Anglo-Irish nobleman, Sir John Perceval, 1st earl of Egmont, congratulated his nephew, Edward Southwell, on his ability ‘to travell [sic] advantageously’. To Egmont, advantageous travel led to good health. He believed that because Southwell’s Grand Tour had involved ‘so many Countrys [sic] and in so short a time’, it must have ‘laid in a Stock of health for fourscore years’.¹⁹ Travelling ‘advantageously’ also meant establishing and maintaining a regular daily routine in a healthy location. This belief was shaped by the established medical theory that the body was a system in which humoral matter needed to be kept in balance.²⁰

Imbalances were caused by a misapplication of the external, environmental, factors – the non-naturals – which, if correctly applied, could forestall disease entirely and enable a permanent state of health.²¹ This ‘conservative’, rather than ‘restorative’, approach to medicine and health was popular among eighteenth-century medical authorities. Achille Le Bègue de Presle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s physician, declared in Le Conservateur de la Santé (1763) that medicine was ‘the art of maintaining man’s good health’.²² He, Samuel-Auguste Tissot, George Cheyne and numerous other prominent physicians sought to achieve this by advising their patients and publishing health regimes organized around the classic grid of non-naturals. These typically included keeping regular hours of rising and sleeping, alongside a daily routine that balanced gainful, rational employment of the mind with play, rest and exercise. Maintaining a good diet was important, as was fasting and purging through emetics and sweating. Attention was also given to finding a healthy environment, avoiding excess and attending to one’s spiritual needs.²³

Considerable evidence exists that patients were encouraged to take up these practices, but it remains – as Michael Stolberg noted – much harder to ascertain whether they followed this advice.²⁴ Establishing regimes like these was not easy. Wealth, leisure and education were all essential prerequisites in this quest for physical wellbeing.²⁵ Grand Tourists had these in abundance, and the efforts made by tutors and families to encourage young men to establish daily regimes indicates that the Tour was recognized by elite families as a privileged opportunity to establish disciplined, healthy habits that would last into adult life. Studying these regimes therefore sheds light on ways in which some eighteenth-century precepts became practice.

Letters from Grand Tourists, parents and tutors stressed regularity and the importance of maintaining set hours of rising, studying, eating, exercising and socializing. Sometimes these timetables were also imposed by academies attended by Tourists. In 1739, Henry Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, 9th earl of Lincoln, described how ‘We begin riding at 8 o’clock in the morning, dance at 10, fence at 11, all dine together at half an hour after 12’, followed by an afternoon of study at the Accademia Reale.²⁶ In other cases, timetables were imposed by parents, tutors or the Tourists themselves. In 1776, the parents of George Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke, created a particularly overambitious two-week timetable for their son while he stayed in Strasbourg. In this, Herbert was faced with a packed day that lasted from 7am until 6pm, in which the non-naturals were well-represented (Figure 2.2). Sleep and watch, motion and rest, evacuation and repletion, were all accounted for in a rigid daily structure that attempted to dictate when Herbert woke, studied, exercised, ate and rested. An accompanying memorandum sought to deal with nutrition and diet: ‘Butter, & Greasy Trash, thick Cream &c disagree cruelly with Ld: Herbert’, whereas he should break his morning fast with ‘a cup of cold Camomile tea early every morning’.²⁷ Careful thought was given to attaining the correct balance between exercise, temperature, air, rest and nutrition. ‘All bodily Exercises’ should be in the morning and never after dinner. When playing tennis, Herbert was to wear ‘Flannel Socks’ and change ‘every thing of dress’ before leaving the court. Exercise should always be followed by rest, and by taking a carriage or chair home.²⁸

Other Tourists attempted to balance the non-naturals in completely different ways, as John Holroyd’s 1763 description of his weekly routine in Lausanne shows:

Holroyd’s regime started by stimulating the internal and external workings of the body with elements of hydrotherapy, followed by a day that moved from studying in isolation, dining, exercise and socializing. These were all deemed important in balancing the passions of the mind.

Tourists’ regimes allocated significant amounts of time, often three to four hours per day, to physical exercise. Between riding, fencing, dancing, tennis, parade and shooting, Herbert was expected to spend twelve of his forty-three timetabled hours (nearly 30 per cent of his week) in physical pursuits. Lincoln’s timetable for the Accademia Reale similarly demanded four uninterrupted hours of daily exercise each morning. Between 1726 and 1728, William Bentinck, the Anglo-Dutch 1st Count Bentinck, undertook an extensive Grand Tour planned by his guardian, the Dutch nobleman and diplomat, Unico Wilhelm, Comte de Wassanaer. As part of this, he attended academies in Lunéville and Geneva where he often spent two or three hours riding in a ménage each day.³⁰ Timetabled physical exercises were typically described as ‘riding, fencing, and dancing’. However, this probably involved a much wider range of activity. Advertisements for the Accademia Reale dating from 1678 show that this general description also incorporated vaulting, leaping, wrestling and running.³¹ Lincoln, for example, was familiar enough with gymnastic exercises to take part in a leaping competition, despite only ever describing his exercise regime at the Accademia Reale as involving ‘riding, fencing and dancing’. These regimes resulted in an observable improvement. During his stay at the academy in Lunéville in 1726, Bentinck boasted to the dowager countess of Portland that ‘I am at least three good inches slenderer than you saw me’.³² Half a century on, David Stevenson – tutor to Viscount Lewisham – commented in 1775 and 1776 on how ‘the effects’ of Lewisham’s exercises in Paris and Tours became ‘more visible every Day’ as the young man’s figure improved.³³

Where these regimes were performed was as important as what they entailed. Grand Tourists’ opinions on Europe’s un/healthiest locations were every bit as individual and contradictory as the contemporary published accounts, but there were two relatively constant opinions. First, malaria was universally feared but also understood to be geographically bound to Rome and the surrounding Pontine Marshes, and temporally bound to the summer months of July, August and September. For the most part, Grand Tour itineraries were deliberately designed to avoid these locations during this three-month period.³⁴ Second, it was generally accepted that the northern European climate was more bracing and invigorating.³⁵ As a result, Tourists almost always established their health regimes when staying at destinations deemed as having such climates. Particular value was given to the ‘wholesome’ and ‘excellent’ ‘Air of Health’ found in the Alps.³⁶ Grand Tourists who established routines while staying in Swiss cities explicitly celebrated the dual effects of climate and regime on their bodies. During the 1760s, Edward Gibbon marvelled at his ‘robust’, uninterrupted good health when in Lausanne, while Holroyd claimed that ‘The regularity of these Countries agree [sic] well with the Elegance of my Constitution’.³⁷

Good health could also potentially be achieved by the nature and speed of travel itself. The degree to which travel was a healthy practice provoked extensive contemporary discussion. Exposure to many changes in air quality, temperature and climate had the potential to unsettle a constitution; but it was also argued that a healthy body could be trained to withstand these changing environments. Naturally, it was suggested that travellers of a superior rank were more capable of achieving this.³⁸ Reflecting an awareness of both sides of this debate, Grand Tour correspondence shows how many Tourists and families worried about the detrimental effects of fast travel, especially during the summer heats. However, they also took pride in their ability to withstand extensive changes in climate without harm. Writing from Rome in December 1755, the tutor William Whitehead, reported that his two travelling companions – George Bussy Villiers, later 4th earl of Jersey, and George Simon Harcourt, Viscount Nuneham, later 2nd earl of Harcourt – ‘thank God, continue mighty well through all their change of Climate & Seasons’.³⁹ David Stevenson was similarly pleased to report in the 1770s that Viscount Lewisham, remained ‘in high Health & in full Bloom’, and that ‘the poor Medicine Chest is entirely neglected’ no matter where they were.⁴⁰ Stevenson went further in anticipating that further travel, in the form of a ‘Tour of Swisse … ought rather to increase than diminish’ Lewisham’s health.⁴¹ Both he and Lewisham firmly believed that the practice of travel, combined with the healthy Alpine air, was directly responsible for their excellent ‘health and spirits’.⁴²

By showing that these Grand Tourists withstood and even flourished in scenarios of extensive travel and change, tutors were deliberately drawing attention to their charges’ superior constitutions. Holroyd made a similar claim when he reluctantly decided to send his servant, William, back to England in 1764: William’s ‘Constitution not being calculated for flying post thro’ different Climates I was extremely liable to his being laid up on the road, that was very near happening when I passed thro’ France’.⁴³ In contrast, Holroyd claimed that he had been completely unaffected. Elite men it would appear were not just cosmopolitan in their identities and social networks; they also claimed that their bodies were designed for a cosmopolitan lifestyle.

Read together, Grand Tour letters, diaries and tutor reports often contain a narrative arc in which the Tourist’s health and fitness improved as he travelled. For example, when Lord Lincoln began his Grand Tour in 1739, he was the sole survivor of an illness that had resulted in the deaths of his parents and all his siblings.⁴⁴ Being himself ‘Not of so strong a make’ meant that Lincoln travelled in slower and shorter stages than some other Tourists.⁴⁵ During his time at the Accademia Reale, when he undertook a strict regime of vigorous daily exercise, Lincoln and his tutor Joseph Spence began to claim that his constitution was improving. At one stage, exasperated by his anxious uncle’s demands for updates, Lincoln exclaimed, ‘I am better in heath at present than ever I have been, and have by no means any thoughts of dying abroad’.⁴⁶ These improvements continued as Lincoln and Spence travelled through the summer heats of Italy and southern France. By July 1741, they had arrived at Montpellier, where Lincoln’s mother had previously brought her young family in a failed attempt to improve their health. Lincoln’s condition was now a cause for celebration. Spence triumphantly, if poignantly, reflected that the family would ‘be surprised to see how much stronger and better he is grown now’.⁴⁷

Physical prowess on the Grand Tour

Victorious declarations like these were more than just a commentary on Lincoln’s health. Almost a year earlier, in September 1740, the young man had sent his uncle, the duke of Newcastle, a long, lively letter. This described the circumstances in which he had sprained his leg so badly that his and Spence’s departure from Turin had been delayed for several months while he recuperated at the baths of Acqui. The accident had occurred during a private party at the country home of Domenico Rivarola, the marquis de Riverols, a self-exiled Corsican patriot who would go on to raise and command a Corsican regiment for Charles Emmanuel in 1744.⁴⁸ On the day in question, Lincoln had ridden twenty miles in the rain and arrived soaked to the skin. The count de la Trinité offered him a change of clothes, which Lincoln accepted even though they were too large and made him look ‘a very ridiculous figure’ at dinner. By responsibly putting his health first, Lincoln had compromised his masculine standing by becoming the butt of ‘many jokes’. In the lull between dinner and the ball, the company was walking the gardens when Lincoln was presented with an opportunity to regain his honour: ‘the Prince [of Carignan] proposed jumping with me for the diversion of the company. Upon that, you may be sure I was not a man to refuse a challenge. So accordingly we immediately stript and went to it’.⁴⁹

Lincoln did not describe what the competition entailed but Christian Salzmann’s Gymnastics for Youth (1800) details several likely options. Leaping competitions involved seeing who could jump the longest or highest unaided or with a staff. These feats could be measured by tapes, by gradually raising a post or rope, or by increasing the height from which the competitors jumped (see Figure 3.2).⁵⁰

Figure 3.2. Anon, ‘The leap in height with & without a pole’ from Christian Salzmann, Gymnastics for Youth… (London, 1800), p. 215.

Private Collection Look and Learn/Barbara Low Collection/Bridgeman Images.

At first, the competition went well:

Lincoln’s letter was an explanation of his injury, but he used this account to make several other points. First, despite his misfortune, this was a statement on how his general health was greatly improved, to the extent that he could now ride twenty miles in the rain with no ill effect. Second, it provided Lincoln with an opportunity to boast about his physical prowess, which had enabled him to defeat one competitor and ‘exert’ himself against another. Both his health and physicality were the result of the time devoted to his daily regime and exercise at the Accademia Reale. Third, in detailing the honour of being invited to a private event, Lincoln revelled in his successful integration and easy interaction with Savoyard royalty and nobility. His jumping partner, the prince of Carignan, for example, was the nineteen-year-old Louis-Victor-Joseph of the royal house of Savoy and a prince of the blood.⁵²

Lincoln’s account made it clear that his social success was partly indebted to his newly acquired physical prowess. He also hinted that his public display of skill had salvaged whatever damage had been done to his masculine and social standing during dinner. Furthermore, keenly aware of the ‘military air’ and culture of the Savoyard nobility, Lincoln deliberately used the language of chivalry and honour to describe his competition: his ‘honour’ took centre stage; he ‘was not a man to refuse a challenge’, the first bout led to ‘victory’ and ‘applause’ as he gained public admiration. He desired ‘glory’ and used jousting terms, like ‘champion’, ‘enter the lists’ and ‘field of battle’, to describe the second bout. Having been selected as a worthy adversary by the prince of Carignan – who in addition to his lineage was related to the famous military commander, Prince Eugene of Savoy, and was expected to become a central figure in Turin’s military culture – Lincoln equated his athletic performance to a military one.

Lincoln’s anecdote demonstrates how exercises and sports were an integral part of the Grand Tourist’s leisure time. In Naples during the 1770s, for example, Kenneth Mackenzie, Lord Fortrose, a Scottish expatriate in his early thirties, encouraged young British men to take part in his fencing competitions and daily practice of swimming in the bay.⁵³ At the start of the decade he commissioned the artist Pietro Fabris to produce a two-piece watercolour, ‘Kenneth Mackenzie, 1st earl of Seaforth 1744–1781 at Home in Naples: Fencing Scene’, which depicts Mackenzie (centre) overseeing one such competition in his room (see Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3. Pietro Fabris, ‘Kenneth Mackenzie, 1st earl of Seaforth 1744–1781 at Home in Naples: Fencing Scene’ (PG 2610, 1771).

National Galleries of Scotland/Bridgeman Images. Purchased 1985 with the assistance of the Art Fund.

Because of its importance within elite society and courtly ritual, hunting was a particularly common pastime taken up by Grand Tourists travelling between European courts. Tourists enthusiastically took the opportunity to hunt stag and boar, as these quarries were increasingly rare in Britain and offered a faster, more dangerous chase.⁵⁴ Hunting was also another way of demonstrating one’s physicality and earning the respect of one’s fellow hunters. Almost exactly a year before his jumping competition, Lord Lincoln claimed he had ‘gained much honour in stopping the hounds as they were running the wrong deer’, during a long hunt with the Savoyard king.⁵⁵ In 1726, Bentinck outlined how his skill and enthusiasm for hunting placed him on a footing of intimacy with Prince Frederick of Hanover, claiming that the prince ‘never goes out a hunting or any where here abouts but he takes me along with him’.⁵⁶ Writing in February 1780, Herbert likewise claimed that he had won the admiration of ‘the Piedmontese Spectators’ by jumping his horse through the countryside surrounding Turin.⁵⁷

Lincoln, Bentick and Herbert were from extremely well-connected families and therefore sought to impress the social circles to which they already belonged. In contrast, John Holroyd, whose family had far fewer connections, sometimes struggled to enter more exclusive society. On joining the French king’s hunt in September 1763, Holroyd received a distinctly unwelcoming reception. However, his standing had changed noticeably by the end of the hunt. Holroyd and his fellow Englishmen’s skills in horsemanship were such that they were able to keep up with the chase – despite the fact that Louis XVI changed horses three times while Holroyd and his compatriots had ridden the same borrowed mounts throughout. This feat of skill even attracted attention from the king who ‘surveyed us English very much’.⁵⁸ Episodes like this suggest that sporting pastimes were as important to social success as balls, salons and formal court presentations, and that displays of physical prowess were an admired masculine quality.

Sport, athletic ability and physical skill were valued pastimes and qualities because they were believed to prepare elite men for war. As the Sporting Magazine declared in 1802, ‘The Appellation of SPORTSMAN has, for time immemorial, been considered characteristic of strict honour, true courage, unbounded hospitality, & unsullied integrity’.⁵⁹ The ever-present elements of danger, discomfort and exertion were crucial to this. In 1733, one advocate of hunting described how it entailed noble, heroic and ‘Manly Toils which laid the Foundation of Prowess and Glory in the ancient Heroes’. Seven decades on, and in a similar vein, John Aikin’s ‘Critical Essay on Sommerville’s poem of the Chase’ (1800) stated that war and the chase were the image of one another.⁶⁰ Hunting, it was argued, provided a challenging space in which to develop skills required of cavalry officers, such as horsemanship, as well as gaining an eye for the terrain and overcoming fear.⁶¹ Similarly, if more controversially, boxing was believed to prepare British men for war by combating luxury and effeminacy and infusing them with ‘Strength, Hardiness, Courage and Honor’.⁶²

Conscious of this, Grand Tourists did not just use their descriptions of sport to lay claims to social success. They also played up the fact that they were undertaking physically dangerous activities which demanded courage and skill. Holroyd, for one, described how the added risks of wild boar hunting required sturdy boots as a ‘defence against The Boar, The Trees, The Kick of an horse, or the falling of an Horse on the leg’. In the heat of a particular chase, he saw a man thrown and ‘dragged by the leg a considerable way’.⁶³ Of course, the very fact that these harms did not befall Holroyd was another way of underscoring his superior skill.

That Tourists viewed sporting accomplishments as an acceptable substitute for (if not the equivalent to) proving one’s honour in battle is revealed in a series of letters exchanged in the early 1740s between Lincoln’s contemporaries – the members of the Common Room club. This club shared a competitive enthusiasm for a range of sports, including tennis, boxing, cricket, riding and fencing.⁶⁴ That enthusiasm also spilt over into examples of riotous behaviour and into military ambition, as is shown in comments relating to two club members, the ‘German Counts’, William, count of Schaumburg-Lippe, and his brother, George. When Benjamin Tate and his tutor, Thomas Dampier, were reunited with the counts at Leiden University in 1741, they wrote to club members still gathered at Geneva, that the counts were enjoying ‘battleing it with ye Dutch Students in ye Streets. They talk much of ye Irish valour in these Recontres’, and that ‘[George] is to go soon [to] meet his Father in Gelderland, where His Regiment lies. The young Count [William] is at last destined for ye English Service: His Friends are soliciting for a Place in ye Army for Him’.⁶⁵

The rest of the Common Room greatly admired the counts’ martial behaviour and the courageous, honourable virtues they embodied. In marked contrast was their low opinion of the actions and character of another Grand Tourist, Sir Bourchier Wrey, or – as he was dubbed by club members – ‘Sir Butcher Trey’. The son of a Jacobite sympathizer, Wrey made his Grand Tour in 1737–40. As Henry French and Mark Rothery observed, the Common Room saw Wrey as ‘a preposterous fantasist who subverted his claims to high honour by his thoroughly disreputable behaviour’, compulsive boasting and lying.⁶⁶ Dismayed to find that Wrey was also at Leiden, Tate, Dampier and the counts became particularly angry when Sir Bourchier learned of Count William’s earnest desire to have ‘a Pair of Colours in the English services’ and instantly claimed to have an equal amount of military courage.⁶⁷ This, they believed, dishonoured Count William’s reputation for bravery and genuine commitment to the military.

Count William was not the only Common Room club member whose reputation Wrey sullied. Another was Sir Bourchier’s old school-fellow, Robert Price, who had since become another greatly admired member. Unlike the counts, Price had no military ambition. Nevertheless, ‘He loved manly exercises, and excelled in them all’, and was one of the finest boxers and tennis players in England.⁶⁸ The club members were extremely proud of Price’s athletic ability, which set the standard for their own physical performances. Writing from Leiden, Dampier reported that he and Count William had played a tennis match. Before the game, Count William had ‘talk’d much of his being improved & hinted that he thought Himself a Match for Price’. Despite William’s fighting talk, Dampier crowed ‘he could not beat me, tho’ I played with my Cloaths on all ye time & He not’.⁶⁹ When Dampier, Tate and the counts subsequently heard that Wrey was claiming to having beaten ‘Price at School & knocked Him down twice’ during a boxing match, they were incensed.⁷⁰ Viewing this as an insult similar to that suffered by Count William, club members expressed their disgust at Wrey’s attempts to lay claim to a greater degree of physical prowess by dishonouring a man known for his athletic ability. The praise given to Count William’s martial ambitions and to Robert Price’s athleticism is evidence of how far both traits were valued by elite men.

Enduring hardship and the challenges of the road

Participation in active service, and especially in armed conflict, remained the clearest indication that an individual possessed the virtue of bravery. In his Treatise of Military Discipline (1727), Humphrey Bland observed that ‘The military profession has in all Ages been esteemed the most Honourable from the Danger that attends it’.⁷¹ Writing mid century, Samuel Johnson asserted that ‘The profession of soldiers and sailors has the dignity of danger. Mankind reverence those who have got over fear, which is so general a weakness’.⁷² Yet, for all the attention paid to those in combat, the attributes associated with soldiery were not the sole preserve of military men. The Common Room club’s frustrations and the respect earned by Tourists during hunts, tennis matches and jumping competitions, for example, offer an intriguing insight into how demonstrations of physical prowess, courage and honour were valued because of their martial connotations, but in a manner that also prized them in non-military contexts.

Courage in the face of danger and hardship exerted sway as a fundamental testing point of masculinity in a wide range of scenarios. The famous Swiss Alpine explorer, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, glamorized the manly attitude behind a willingness to embrace danger in his Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–96), in which he spoke admiringly of chamois hunters: ‘it is these very dangers, this alternation between hope and fear, the continual agitation kept alive by these sensations in his heart, which excite the huntsman, just as they animate the gambler, the warrior, the sailor and, even to a certain point, the naturalist among the Alps’.⁷³ The late century English moralist Charles Moore, while disapproving of some of the ‘causes and incitements to courage’, similarly acknowledged that ‘its actual exertions will always meet with admiration, because men look up to its atchievements [sic] with a degree of fear and respect; and they pay a deference to its possessor, because they either feel themselves secure under his protection or dread the effects of his prowess’.⁷⁴ For as long as the ideal of elite martial leadership carried weight with aristocratic and gentry men, the ability to confront and overcome hardship, danger and risk remained of central importance.

The eighteenth-century elite held a deeply ingrained belief that exposure to danger was transformative. It defined a person’s nobility, conferred a special knowledge and status, and cultivated the virtues of courage, fortitude and endurance. This transformative danger did not have to be located in a battle or at the point of a sword. It could be encountered on the hunting field, during a jumping competition, or – as seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century educational theory consistently advocated – in many other forms of physical hardship and exercise. In 1622, Henry Peacham quoted the advice of Horace:

A belief that children could be prepared for war and adult life through exposure to hardship, an outdoor life and ‘dangers rife’ was later endorsed by John Locke in his highly influential treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693).⁷⁶ It was Locke’s firm opinion that ‘A Gentleman in any Age ought to be so bred, as to be fitted to bear Arms, and be a Soldier’. From the cradle, boys should be exposed to the open air, plain diets, hard beds, early mornings, thin shoes and clothes, and cold water.⁷⁷ These measures would, argued Locke, create the ‘strong Constitution’ and ability ‘to endure Hardships: and Fatigue’ that was a ‘requisite … to one that will make any Figure in the World’.⁷⁸ Furthermore, ‘As the Strength of the Body lies chiefly in being able to endure Hardships, so also does that of the Mind’.⁷⁹ Boys needed to be ‘harden’d against all Sufferings, especially of the Body, and have a tenderness only of Shame and for Reputation’. Achieving a ‘brawniness and insensibility of Mind’ and body was ‘the best Armour’ against the evils of the world.⁸⁰

Locke’s plea for mental and physical robustness also dealt briefly with the importance of recreation. Dancing, riding the great horse, fencing and wrestling were ‘of use to a Gentleman both in Peace and War’, in contributing to a man’s courage and martial ability.⁸¹ Importantly, Locke argued that ‘ Recreation is not being idle … but easing the wearied part by change of Business: And he that thinks Diversion may not lie in hard and painful Labour, forgets the early rising, hard riding, heat, cold and Hunger of Huntsmen, which is yet known to be the constant Recreation of Men of the greatest Condition’.⁸² In Locke’s understanding, elite men’s greatest pleasures and diversions should be rooted in embracing hard and painful labour.

While Locke’s wider thoughts on education had a profound influence on early eighteenth-century pedagogical texts, his focus on virtue of hardship and exercise appear to have received little attention. By the mid century, however, they had become a dominate theme. James Nelson’s 1753 study of childrearing is one example of this renewed attention. For Nelson the bearing of hardship imparted a ‘command of Countenance, a dauntless Air and … a Firmness of Spirit that enables us to encounter every Danger when necessary; and to demean ourselves to a proper manner under Trouble, Pain, and Disappointment’.⁸³ George Chapman, author of a Treatise on Education (1773), was another champion of the Lockean approach: ‘the body, when softened by indolence, or mistaken tenderness, enfeebles the mind, relaxes its vigor, and unfits it for every great or difficult undertaking’, but ‘when nourished by temperance and hardened by exercise, it enables the soul to exert its native strength’.⁸⁴ Chapman argued that young men should be ‘almost continually in motion’ and trained like the ancient Roman and Greek youths.⁸⁵ This would make their bodies ‘more hardy and vigorous’, and ‘diffused a manly, independent, patriotic spirit’, military virtue and public liberty.⁸⁶ Learning how to ‘suffer pain with a manly spirit … a lesson for which they may have occasion in the different stages of life’, was deemed vital for this goal.⁸⁷ Three decades on, William Barrow, a writer on boys’ education, believed that ‘hardy and even dangerous diversions’ were meant to give ‘activity of body and vigour of mind; the capacity of making manly exertions, and bearing fatigues and inconveniences; and courage and confidence in themselves and their own powers’.⁸⁸ As these few seventeenth-and eighteenth-century commentaries show, and the historian Elizabeth Foyster observed, physical hardship and exercise were enduringly important educational elements throughout the early modern period and into the nineteenth century. Working from the premise of mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body), eighteenth-century pedagogical thinkers regarded experience of hardship as an effective means of developing manly virtues of courage, fortitude, resolution, patriotic spirit and a self-control which in turn enabled them to command others.⁸⁹

What were the implications of such commentaries for the practice of travel on the Grand Tour? Crossing seas and rivers, traversing mountains and journeying on roads of every description, Grand Tourists used a wide variety of transportation. They took ships, water diligences and carriages of every sort, were carried in chairs and sledges, rode on horseback and on mules, and even went on foot. The roads across Europe cut through wide variations in terrain, weather and topographical hazards, of which the Alpine passes of Mont Cenis, Simplon and St Bernard were among the most challenging. Away from the dangers of an Alpine crossing, the privations experienced on the road ranged from carriage accidents to rough tracks, hard, flea-ridden beds and dirty inns. These travelling conditions provoked an endless litany of complaints from eighteenth-century travellers, including many Grand Tourists.⁹⁰ And yet they were also thought to play an important role in the Grand Tour’s agenda of masculine formation. Collectively they created a prolonged encounter with hardships and hazards on a scale that could not be easily replicated elsewhere during a young man’s lifetime.

Pedagogical writers celebrated such adversity as an opportunity for physical and emotional development. In his The Voyage of Italy (1670) Richard Lassels claimed that privations:

Lassels believed these difficulties should be approached cheerfully, arguing that ‘mirth is neuer so lawfull as in traueling, where it shortens long miles, and sweetens bad visage; that is, makes a bad dinnar go downe, and a bad horse go on’.⁹² Such views were echoed in Maximilien Misson’s A New Voyage to Italy (1695). This was an account of the Grand Tour of Charles Butler, later earl of Arran, who travelled between 1678–8, with Misson as his tutor and Samuel Waring as a companion.⁹³ Misson reflected on their travelling conditions: ‘The Weather is very rough; the way of Travelling ordinarily unpleasant, and the days so short, that we get late in at Night, and rise very early: We oftentimes meet with hard Lodging, and worse Diet; and besides, we are exposed to many dangers’.⁹⁴ Yet Misson also maintained that ‘with a good Stock of Health, Money, Chearfulness and Patience, we have surmounted these difficulties, even almost without taking notice of them’. Novelty ‘recreates the Spirits’, ‘weariness supplies the want of a Bed, and Exercise sharpens our Appetites’ to the extent that even ‘the tenderest and most delicate Persons of our Company, have easily overcome all those Obstacles’.⁹⁵ For Misson, ‘ Travelling is attended with Pleasure and Profit, but ‘tis no less certain that these Advantages cannot be obtain’d without Pain’.⁹⁶

As Michèle Cohen has shown, seventeenth-century conduct literature clearly stated that the hardships of the Grand Tour produced men, not just gentlemen.⁹⁷ In contrast, this assertion, often drawn directly from travel experiences, was remarkably absent from subsequent eighteenth-century publications on travel and gentlemanly conduct. Commentators such as Joseph Addison or Thomas Nugent made no reference to the value of travel’s adversities; and nor did this form part of Richard Hurd’s reimagining of the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury’s defence of the Tour in his Dialogues on the Use of Foreign Travel (1762).⁹⁸

Nevertheless, the letters and diaries of eighteenth-century Grand Tourists and their tutors show that elite families held tenaciously to an earlier understanding of the Tour’s wholesome hardships. This commitment was evident in two main discourses. First, Tourists echoed Lassels and Locke in demonstrating that they took pleasure in hardship. These experiences, they insisted, resulted in ‘mirth’ and cheerfulness. As Helen Yallop has demonstrated in her study of eighteenth-century attitudes towards aging, cheerfulness has a distinct set of social and moral values. It conveyed notions of calm, freedom from passional turmoil, humanistic appreciation, civic virtue and closeness to God.⁹⁹ In this context, cheerfulness demonstrated that the soundness of mind and body remained uninterrupted by the demands of travelling and was representative of patience, stoutness and hardiness. This active embrace of privation and challenge was a dominant theme in William Bentinck’s descriptions of the central European leg of his tour. Travelling between 1726 and 1728, Bentinck ‘scribbled’ a letter while ‘hungry and cold’ on the road between Dresden and Prague. In it, he described how he and his tutor, Moses Bernege, had ‘walked about twelve mile a foot, having no mind to break our necks, or be drown’d’, while travelling with a poorly mended carriage along bad roads surrounded by steep precipices. Yet Bentinck was far from downhearted and jauntily continued that:

Half a century on, Viscount Lewisham – described by his tutor as ‘one of the best Travellers I know’ – maintained a similar sense of cheerful pleasure in his letters home, written during the 1770s.¹⁰¹ While his brother William and tutor were laid low by seasickness during the Calais crossing, and unable to sleep in Pont St. Maxenne and Tours because the room was full of fleas, Lewisham buoyantly claimed he had been ‘perfectly well’, ‘never slept more soundly in my life’, and that scratching flea bites was a good form of exercise.¹⁰² Lewisham’s determination to show that these trials actually increased his overall enjoyment is particularly evident in a detailed account of his entry to Basle. Having given their places in the carriage to their servants, he and Stevenson were on horseback when they were caught in a ferocious thunderstorm several miles from the town. Alarmed, the pair took ‘the shelter of a couple of chevystices [crevasses]’ and ‘were completely wet through’: ‘Upon our entry into Basil [sic] we rode from preference under the waterspouts, in order to be thoroughly bathed, to the no small edification of numberless spectators, who were still at the windows to see the emperor go by’.¹⁰³

Their bedraggled appearance – ‘wet, dirty, & dismal’ – may have entertained the crowds, but it did not please the landlord, who refused to serve them until an acquaintance luckily vouched for their status. Guiltily concluding that he had used three pages ‘very foolishly … describing a very common event (simply that of being wet through!)’, Lewisham was evidently intensely pleased by an experience in which he simultaneously became both a questing knight – heroically returning to a town of cheering spectators – and a vagabond Odysseus.¹⁰⁴

Eighteenth-century Tourists’ second way of embracing the challenges of the road was to claim that these experiences enhanced men’s capacity to withstand and judge danger and discomfort. Lewisham’s contemporary, Philip Yorke, was at pains to describe the dangers of the ‘frightful’ route to the Baths of Leuk and over the Simplon Pass as he travelled through them in 1778 with his tutor Colonel Wettstein. On the Pass, ‘The road was so narrow in several places that while I was sitting on my horse I could touch the rock with one foot & let the other leg over the edge of the road’.¹⁰⁵ Their guide told them ‘with all the sangfroid possible’, that he had been thrown two hundred yards down a precipice into a torrent. When his tutor’s horse ‘began to kick & run’, he [Wettstein] ‘was obliged to throw himself off the side of the rock to avoid falling into the river’.¹⁰⁶ Yet Yorke then proceeded to state that the road was not actually that dangerous ‘for those whose heads and feet are steady & who walk with caution; those who are subject to giddiness should not attempt it, or let themselves be carried in a chair on mens shoulders & turn their backs to the precipice or have a bandage over their eyes’.¹⁰⁷

Safety lay in the ability to control one’s body and mind. Those incapable of this had to ensure their safety by surrendering control to others. Yorke’s later entries show how his travel experiences had increased his command of these virtues. When he crossed Mount Cenis, he contended that it was ‘nothing in comparison of the St Gothard or the Gemini or the Simplon … yet it must strike anyone who has not passed them’.¹⁰⁸ The more Yorke travelled, the more he became inured to danger. The tutor William Coxe echoed Yorke’s sentiments almost exactly in his published account of Herbert’s Grand Tour, also during the 1770s. Coxe wrote dismissively of those ‘delicate travellers, who do not chuse to mount a rugged ascent, either on foot or on horseback, are carried in an arm-chair supported by means of poles upon men’s shoulders. We proceeded, however, on horseback, having before rode up steeper and more difficult paths’.¹⁰⁹

After travelling through Switzerland and on Baltic routes with Herbert in the late 1770s, Coxe accompanied another Tourist, Samuel Whitbread, in 1784. On his return from this second tour, Coxe set out how repeated exposure to physical hazard had shifted his perception of what was, and was not, dangerous. In Coxe’s words:

Coxe’s double play on ‘accurate composition’ took a humorous punt at the unreliable narrations of travellers ‘who are unused to mountainous countries, or whose heads are apt to turn giddy’.¹¹¹ But even as he recorded his ability to ride and read simultaneously, he sought to remind readers that the Alps remained hazardous terrain: what had changed, ultimately, was Coxe’s capacity to cope with these hazards. In his Travels into Poland – Coxe’s description of the Baltic and Scandinavian legs of Herbert’s Tour – he described how it was not just Alpine precipices that had inured him to danger, but their sleeping arrangements as well:

This concept of ‘supineness’, an indolent state of inertia, is also present in Bentinck and Lewisham’s accounts of flea-invested straw beds and Yorke’s description of the Alpine passes. But in each case supineness was balanced against robust activity. Elite young men and tutors alike sought to present themselves as travellers who, by accommodating themselves to so-called minor dangers and hardships, proved their ability to confront much greater trials.

The performances and narratives of cheerful resilience went well beyond establishing themselves as good travellers, and instead made a bid to claim a very particular type of hardy masculine identity. For example, Herbert and his tutors, Coxe and Floyd, were extremely proud of their unusual Grand Tour route which explored the harsh terrains of the Alps and the fringes of the Arctic wastes. These collective experiences of hardship in travel – tested and affirmed within each other’s presence – gave the three men a sense of masculine superiority over those who endured fewer physical challenges and privations. During a mountain journey to Turin, Herbert scoffed, ‘I wish and still wish only that those Gentleman who find hardships in such trifles, had followed the Triumvirate through Swisserland [sic] and other places where they went for their pleasure’. These lesser men were juxtaposed against ‘my Coxe [who] is certainly nothing less than a hardy, stout, Man’ and even his manservant, Laurent, ‘a most excellent Fellow on these Expeditions’.¹¹³ On his return home to rejoin his regiment, Captain John Floyd also mocked those who reacted with dismay to a severe British winter frost. Exclaiming that the temperature never even reached minus eight degrees, he remembered how ‘at St: Petersburg we had [minus] 28 – You may laugh if You please, but I find myself infinitely the better for that northern Jaunt’.¹¹⁴

In their narratives surrounding sports, physical exertion and the practice of travel, Tourists and tutors alike outlined how the Grand Tour exposed them to challenging terrains and activities from which they expanded their capacity for hardship and danger. Through this, they conveyed a deep-seated understanding that danger and discomfort were positive attributes in masculine formation, and a desire to identify with a hardy male performance that would be appreciated and praised by others. Despite this, the construction and expression of a successful elite masculinity depended on more than forbearance and physical prowess. Any one of the multiple masculinities that made up the elite whole had to be kept in check and motivated by the higher ideals of emulative male conduct. Any elite man whose participation in sports became unregulated, for example, was subject to reproach.¹¹⁵ The tipping point between acceptable and unacceptable physical pastimes revolved around the issue of responsibility and duty: did these activities, trials and dangers, as pleasurable as they might be, prepare and aid elite men in carrying out their aristocratic roles? Returning to the writings of the Common Room club provides one further case study of how this question was dealt with between friends.

Robert Price and his fellow Common Room club member, William Windham, both died in 1761, at the relatively young age of forty-four. Their deaths prompted another club member, Richard Aldworth Neville, to reflect with deep affection on the lives of his friends. These reflections were subsequently published in William Coxe’s study of Windham’s tutor, Benjamin Stillingfleet. Aldworth Neville began by acknowledging both men’s love of athleticism and sports, but reached completely different conclusions on whether this was a beneficial pastime. Price’s athleticism was praised without reservation. This was not because Price was the most talented, but because he turned that ability ‘as he did every other, to good purposes, and good purposes only’ by, for example, only using his skill in boxing ‘to correct impertinence’. Moreover, Price’s love of sport was subservient to his wider sense of duty. When Price’s father had confessed his fears that tennis might lead his son into bad company, Price immediately gave up the sport in an act of filial devotion.¹¹⁶

For Aldworth Neville, Price’s most admirable quality was that he ‘never failed in any one essential duty of father, husband, son, friend, or neighbour’.¹¹⁷ Sporting pastimes were not allowed to hinder that quality. In contrast, he wrote far more censoriously about William Windham’s sporting talents. Though a man of ‘bright imagination, and extensive knowledge’, Windham’s ‘utter abhorrence of restraint’ tragically meant that neither his mind nor his athleticism was applied to any ‘good purpose’. Instead, his pleasure in sport led to disreputable company and wasted years. Fortunately, Windham was redeemed in later life by his involvement in the New Militia movement. Indeed, such was his dedication that Windham was ‘pointed out as the man who by his pen, and his example, had most contributed to carry it into perfection’.¹¹⁸ The militia had, in his friend’s opinion, finally channelled Windham’s abilities in an appropriate direction: the service of his country.

No matter how enjoyable, any physical activity on the Grand Tour had to fulfil the wider purpose of preparing elite young men for their adult responsibilities and duties. War, exercise, sport and travel itself were all harnessed towards this end. The next chapter explores the ways in which the natural phenomena of the Alpine glaciers and mountain passes, and the southern Italian volcano of Mount Vesuvius, were also approached by Grand Tourists as a novel way of attaining well-established goals. Eighteenth-century Grand Tourists certainly encountered these natural marvels as sites of the sublime and of scientific curiosity. But they also regarded and experienced these distinctive landscapes as another opportunity for formative encounters with dangers that complemented and went beyond their day-to-day opportunities to participate in sports or overcome the routine hardships of the road.

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1 E. Peters Bowron and P. Björn Kerber, Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2007), ch. 2.

2 Bowron and Kerber, Pompeo Batoni, p. 87.

3 J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1997), pp. 407–8; H. M. Chichester, ‘Gordon, Alexander, fourth duke of Gordon’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11023> [accessed 15 March 2019].

4 E.g., Bowron and Kerber, Pompeo Batoni, pp. 53–5, 66.

5 See, e.g., A. Emch-Deriaz, ‘The non-naturals made easy’, in The Popularization of Medicine, 1650–1850, ed. R. Porter (London, 1992), pp. 134–59; R. Batchelor, ‘Thinking about the gym: Greek ideals, Newtonian bodies and exercise in early eighteenth-century Britain’, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxxv (2012), 185–97.

6 See Pathologies of Travel, ed. R. Wrigley and G.Revill (Amsterdam, 2000); Resorts and Ports: European Seaside Towns Since 1700, ed. P. Borsay and J. K. Walton (Bristol, 2011); R. Bates, ‘The Petit Tour to Spa, 1763–87’, in Beyond the Grand Tour: Northern Metropolises and Early Modern Travel Behaviour, ed. R. Sweet, G. Verhoeven and S. Goldsmith (London, 2017), pp. 127–46.

7 For a discussion of this term, see R. von Mallinckrodt and A. Schattner, ‘Introduction’, in Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Culture: New Perspectives on the History of Sport and Motion, ed. R. von Mallinckrodt and A. Schattner (London and New York, 2016), p. 6.

8 See, e.g., Von Mallinckrodt and Schattner, Sports and Physical Exercis e, ed. S. Harrow; M. Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (University Park, Pa., 2017); J. Allen, Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale: Sport, Health and Exercise in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2012); M. de Belin, From the Deer to the Fox: the Hunting Transition and the Landscape, 1600–1850 (Hatfield, 2013); E. Griffin, Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain Since 1066 (New Haven, Conn., 2007).

9 R. Holt, ‘Historians and the history of sport’, Sport in History, xxxiv (2014), 1–33, at p. 6. For criticisms of sport, see K. Downing, ‘The gentleman boxer: boxing, manners, and masculinity in eighteenth-century England’, Men and Masculinities, xii (2012), 328–52, at pp. 237–8; S. Deuchar, Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England: a Social and Political History (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1988), pp. 63–5.

10 S. Rees, The Charlton Hunt: a History (Chichester, 1998); Downing, ‘The gentleman boxer’, pp. 335–6.

11 D. Underdown, Start of Play: Cricket and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 2001), pp. 15–16.

12 See, e.g., P. Radford, ‘The Olympic games in the long eighteenth century’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxxv (2012), 161–84.

13 See V. Janković, Confronting the Climate: British Airs and the Making of Environmental Medicine (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 2–3; J. Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago, Ill., 2007), ch. 5.

14 C. Brant, ‘Climates of gender’, in Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844, ed. A. Gilroy (Manchester, 2000), pp. 129–30.

15 For examples of this, see J. C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (New York, 1987).

16 See WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/33, Thomas Bromley, Harrow, to Herbert, 15 Sept. 1779; Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 35378, fo. 331, Yorke, Rome, to Hardwicke, 24 March 1779.

17 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36258, Yorke’s Grand Tour journal, 14 Apr. 1779.

18 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36258, Yorke’s Grand Tour journal, 14 Apr. 1779.

19 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 47031, fo. 202v, Sir John Perceval, 1st earl of Egmont, Charlton to Edward Southwell, 14 Sept. 1726. My thanks to Richard Ansell for sharing this with me.

20 M. Stolberg, ‘Medical popularization and the patient in the eighteenth century’, in Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine: Meditating Medicine in Early Modern and Modern Europe, ed. C. Usborne and W. De Blécourt (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 90–1, 97.

21 E.g., L. J. Rather, ‘The “six things non-natural”: a note on the origins and fate of a doctrine and a phrase’, Clio Medica, iii (1968), 337–47.

22 Quoted in W. Coleman, ‘Health and hygiene in the Encyclopédie: a medical doctrine for the bourgeoisie’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, xxix (1974), 339– 421, at p. 401.

23 Coleman, ‘Health and hygiene’, pp. 412–1; Emch-Deriaz, ‘The non-naturals made easy’, pp. 134–59.

24 M. Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 21–3, 44.

25 Coleman, ‘Health and hygiene’, p. 399.

26 Henry Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, 9th earl of Lincoln, Turin, to duke of Newcastle, 25 Nov. 1739, in Joseph Spence: Letters from the Grand Tour, ed. S. Klima (Montreal, 1975), p. 230.

27 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/278, ‘Instructions’, 1776.

28 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/278, ‘Instructions’, 1776.

29 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 136, Holroyd, Lausanne, to Revd Dr Baker, 19 Dec. 1763.

30 Brit. Libr., Egerton MS. 1711, William Bentinck, 1st Count Bentinck, Geneva, to Elizabeth Bentinck, countess dowager of Portland, 2 Jan. 1727.

31 Quoted in P. Bianchi, ‘Una palestra di arti cavalleresche e di politica. Presenze austro-tedesche all’Accademia Reale di Torino nel settecento’, in Le corti come luogo di comunicazione: gli Asburgo e l’Italia (secoli XVI–XIX), ed. M. Bellabarba and J. P. Niederkorn (Berlin, 2010), pp. 140–1.

32 Brit. Libr., Egerton MS. 1711, Bentinck, Lunéville, to Lady Portland, 5 Aug. 1726.

33 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, David Stevenson, Paris, to Dartmouth, 4 Jan. 1776; D(W)1778/V/885, Stevenson, Tours, to Dartmouth, 20 Sept. 1775; D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Paris, to Dartmouth, 4 Jan. 1776.

34 E.g., Joseph Spence, Florence, to Mrs Spence, 23 Aug. 1732, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 117.

35 C. Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 119, 123.

36 E.g., Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 35378, fo. 357, Yorke, Basle, to Hardwicke, 20 June 1779; Add. MS. 35378, fo. 359, Yorke, The Hague, to Hardwicke, 7 July 1779.

37 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34883, fo. 63, Edward Gibbon, Lausanne, to Dorothea Gibbon née Patton, 17 Feb. 1764; Add. MS. 34887, fo. 151. Holroyd, Lausanne, to Mrs Baker [undated, 1764].

38 See F. A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, Md., 1995), p. 10.

39 LMA, Acc. 510/248, William Whitehead, Rome, to Lord Jersey, 27 Dec. 1755.

40 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Paris, to Dartmouth, 7 March 1776; D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Rennes, to Dartmouth, 29 March 1776; D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Paris, to Dartmouth, 18 May 1777; D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Brussels, to Dartmouth, 8 June 1776.

41 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 1 July 1777.

42 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 9 Sept. 1777.

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

44 Klima, ‘Introduction’, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 8. See Herbert’s Grand Tour (both published and manuscript) for a similar narrative.

45 Spence, Paris, to Mrs Spence, 23 Sept. 1739, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 221.

46 Lincoln, Acqui, to Newcastle, [?] Sept. 1740, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 315.

47 Spence, Antibes, to Mrs Spence, 31 July 1741, Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 400.

48 Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 309, n. 3.

49 Lincoln, Turin, to Newcastle, 2 Sept. 1740, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, pp. 306–8.

50 C. G. Salzmann, Gymnastics for Youth or a Practical Guide … to healthful and amusing exercises for the use of schools … (London, 1800), ch. 11.

51 Lincoln, Turin, to Newcastle, 2 Sept. 1740, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, pp. 307–8.

52 Spence, Turin, to Mrs Spence, 8 June 1740, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 288.

53 P. Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta (London, 1776), pp. 10–12, quoted in I. Jenkins and K. Sloan, ‘Introduction’, in Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection, ed. I. Jenkins and K. Sloan (London, 1996), p. 15.

54 For the decline of these quarries and further changes to eighteenth-century hunts, see M. de Belin, From the Deer to the Fox: the Hunting Transition and the Landscape, 1600–1850 (Hatfield, 2013); J. Bevan, ‘Agricultural change and the development of foxhunting in the eighteenth century’, Agricultural History Review, lviii (2010), pp. 49–75.

55 Lincoln, Turin, to Newcastle, 25 Nov. 1739, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 230.

56 Brit. Libr., Egerton MS. 1711, Bentinck, Hanover, to Lady Portland, 15 Oct. 1726.

57 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/7, Herbert’s journal, 26 Feb. 1780.

58 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fos. 126–7, Holroyd, Lausanne, to Revd Dr Baker, 1 Sept. 1763.

59 Sporting Magazine, Apr. 1802, p. 3, quoted in Deuchar, Sporting Art, p. 43.

60 Deuchar, Sporting Art, p. 54.

61 Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur, pp. 94–5.

62 P. Radford, ‘Lifting the spirits of the nation: British boxers and the emergence of the national sporting hero at the time of the Napoleonic wars’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, xii (2005), 249–70, at p. 264. See R. Ungar, ‘The construction of the body politic and the politics of the body: boxing as battle ground for conservatives and radicals in late Georgian England’, Sport in History, xxxi (2011), 363–80.

63 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 126–7, Holroyd, Lausanne, to Revd Dr Baker, 1 Sept. 1763; Add. MS. 61979 A, Holroyd’s Diary, 11 July 1762.

64 For examples of the group undertaking these activities, see Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 22998, Richard Pococke’s travel journals, 1 June 1741, 28 June 1741, 5 July 1741, 1 June 1741; NRO, WKC 7/46/12, Robert Price, Lyons, to the Bloods, 24 Oct. 1741; WKC 7/46/11, Price, Paris, to the Bloods, 9 Nov. 1741.

65 NRO, WKC 7/46/9, Thomas Dampier, Rotterdam, to the Bloods, 19 Apr. 1741.

66 H. French and M. Rothery, Man’s Estate: Landed Gentry Masculinities, 1660–1830 (Oxford, 2012), p. 110.

67 NRO, WKC 7/46/9, Thomas Dampier, Rotterdam, to the Bloods, 19 Apr. 1741.

68 W. Coxe, Literary Life and Select Works of Benjamin Stillingfleet… (3 vols., London, 1811), i. 160.

69 NRO, WKC 7/46/9, Dampier, Rotterdam, to the Bloods, 19 Apr. 1741.

70 NRO, WKC 7/46/9, Dampier, Rotterdam, to the Bloods, 19 Apr. 1741.

71 H. Bland, A Treatise of Military Discipline in which is Laid Down and Explained the Duty of the Officer and Soldier, Thro’ the Several Branches of the Service (London, 1727), p. 114.

72 J. Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. C. P. Chadsey and G. Ross (New York, 1945), pp. 449–50.

73 H.-B. de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes… (Neuchâtel, 1779–96), quoted in R. MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination (New York, 2003), p. 71.

74 C. Moore, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide, to which are added … Two Treatises on Duelling and Gaming (2 vols., London, 1790), ii. 262.

75 H. Peacham, Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman… (London, 1622), p. 31.

76 For discussions of Locke’s influence, see S. Bygrave, Uses of Education: Readings in Enlightenment in England (Lewisburg, Pa., 2009), pp. 33–4, 98; A. Fletcher, Growing up in England: the Experience of Childhood, 1600–1914 (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2008), p. 80.

77 J. Locke, Some Thoughts on Education (London, 1693), pp. 4–25.

78 Locke, Some Thoughts, pp. 3, 8.

79 Locke, Some Thoughts, pp. 32–3.

80 Locke, Some Thoughts, pp. 127–8.

81 Locke, Some Thoughts, pp. 237–40.

82 Locke, Some Thoughts, pp. 245.

83 J. Nelson, An Essay on the Government of Children ... Health, Manners and Education (London, 1753), pp. 215–6.

84 G. Chapman, A Treatise on Education: in two parts (London, 1773), pp. 5, 6, 7, 40, 130–2.

85 Chapman, Treatise, pp. 133, 135. See Bygrave, Education, ch. 3 for the complex debates over Sparta and educational ideals.

86 Chapman, Treatise, pp. 11–17.

87 Chapman, Treatise, p. 134.

88 W. Barrow, An Essay on Education (2 vols., London, 1802), ii. 162, quoted in M. Cohen, ‘“Manners” make the man: politeness, chivalry and the construction of masculinity, 1750– 1830’, Journal of British Studies, xliv (2005), 312–29, at p. 324.

89 E. Foyster, ‘Boys will be boys? Manhood and aggression, 1660–1800’, in English Masculinities 1660–1800, ed. T. Hitchcock and M. Cohen (London, 1999), pp. 153, 164. This culture ran alongside, and counter to, a growing emphasis on the physical and emotional comfort within an 18th-century domestic setting. See J. Stobart and C. Prytz, ‘Comfort in English and Swedish country houses, c.1760–1820’, Social History, xliii (2018), 234–58, for the latest literature on this.

90 See J. Black, The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1992) for typical examples.

91 R. Lassels, The Voyage of Italy… (Paris, 1670), preface, pp. 141–2.

92 Lassels, Voyage of Italy, preface.

93 R. Ansell, ‘Reading and writing travels: Maximilien Misson, Samuel Waring and the afterlives of European voyages, c. 1687–1714’, English Historical Review, cxxxiii (2018), 1446– 77.

94 M. Misson, A New Voyage to Italy. With curious observations on several other countries: as Germany; Switzerland; Savoy; Geneva; Flanders, and Holland (London, 1695), p. 144.

95 Misson, New Voyage to Italy, pp. 144–5.

96 Misson, New Voyage to Italy, p. 305.

97 M. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996), p. 58.

98 R. Hurd, Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel Considered as a Part of an English Gentleman’s Education: between Lord Shaftesbury and Mr. Locke (Dublin, 1764).

99 H. Yallop, Age and Identity in Eighteenth-Century England (London and New York, 2015), pp. 85–90.

100 Brit. Libr., Egerton MS. 1711, Bentinck, Prague, to Lady Portland, 18 Jan. 1727.

101 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Rennes, to Dartmouth, 29 March 1776.

102 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Calais, to Dartmouth, 20 July 1775; D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Paris, to Dartmouth, 31 July 1775; D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Tours, to Dartmouth, 26 Aug. 1775.

103 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Constance, to Dartmouth, 8 Aug. 1777.

104 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Constance, to Dartmouth, 8 Aug. 1777.

105 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36259, Yorke’s journal, 24–27 July 1778.

106 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36259, Yorke’s journal, 26 July 1778.

107 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36259, Yorke’s journal, 24 July 1778.

108 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36259, Yorke’s journal, 14 May 1779.

109 W. Coxe, Travels in Switzerland: in a Series of Letters to William Melmoth (3 vols., London, 1789), i. 372.

110 Coxe, Travels in Switzerland, iii. 337.

111 Coxe, Travels in Switzerland, iii. 313, 372, 374.

112 W. Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark (3 vols., Dublin, 1784), i. 278–9.

113 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/7, Herbert’s Grand Tour journal, 1 Dec. 1779.

114 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/28, John Floyd, Stamford, to Herbert, 20 Jan. 1780.

115 See, e.g., the frequent association made by Grand Tourists between King Ferdinand IV of Naples’s obsessive love of hunting and his complete neglect of kingship. K. Sloan, ‘“Observations on the Kingdom of Naples”: William Hamilton’s diplomatic career’, in Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, p. 30.

116 Coxe, Literary Life, i. 160.

117 Coxe, Literary Life, i. 161.

118 Coxe, Literary Life, i. 161.