Buch lesen: «Touring in 1600»

CHAPTER I
SOME OF THE TOURISTS

But thus you see we maintain a trade, not for gold, silver, nor jewels; nor for silks; nor for spices; nor any other commodity of matter; but only for God's first creature, which was Light; to have Light (I say), of the growth of all parts of the world … we have twelve that sail into foreign countries, … who bring us the books, and abstracts and patterns of experiments of all other parts. These we call Merchants of Light.

F. Bacon (1561-1626), New Atlantis.

First, M. de Montaigne. – When Montaigne found himself feeling old and ill, in 1580, he made up his mind to try the baths of Germany and Italy. So he set out; and returned in 1581. And sometimes the baths did him good and sometimes they made no difference; but the journeying never failed to do what the baths were meant for. He always, he says, found forgetfulness of his age and infirmities in travelling. However restless at night, he was alert in the morning, if the morning meant starting for somewhere fresh. Compared with Montaigne at home, Montaigne abroad never got tired or fretful; always in good spirits, always interested in everything, and ready for a talk with the first man he met. And when his companions suggested that they would like to get to the journey's end, and that the longest way round, which he preferred, had its disadvantages, especially when it was a bye-road leading back to the place they started from, he would say, that he never set out for anywhere particular; that he had not gone out of the way, because his way lay through unfamiliar places, and the only place he wished to avoid was where he had been before or where he had to stop. And that he felt as one who was reading some delightful tale and dreaded to come upon the last page.

So, no doubt, felt Fynes Moryson, for much of his life he spent either in travelling or in writing the record of it. Starting in 1591, when he was twenty-five, he passed through Germany, the Low Countries, Denmark, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, spending his winters at Leipzig, Leyden, Padua, and Venice, learning the languages so thoroughly as to be able to disguise his nationality at will. Returning through France, he was robbed, and consequently reached home so disreputable-looking that the servant took him for a burglar. He found his brother planning a journey to Jerusalem. On the 29th of November, 1595, they set out, and on July 10, 1597, he was back in London, in appearance again so strange that the Dogberry of Aldersgate Street wrote him down for a Jesuit. But he returned alone: his brother Henry, twenty-six years old and not strong, fell ill at Aleppo, how ill no one knew till too late, and near Iskenderún he died in his brother's arms, while the Turks stood round, jeering and thieving. Fynes buried him there with stones above him to keep off the jackals, and an epitaph which a later traveller by chance has preserved.¹

 
To thee, deare Henry Morison,
Thy brother Phines, here left alone,
Hath left this fading memorie.
For monuments and all must die.
 

Fynes himself hurried home and never crossed the Channel again. But he extended his knowledge of Great Britain by a visit to Scotland, and by accompanying Sir Charles Blount during the latter's conquest of Ireland. Then he settled down to write all he knew and could get to know about the countries he had seen, and wrote at such length that no one till quite recently has had the courage to reprint his account, although what he printed was by no means all that he wrote. For this reason his work has remained practically unused, even by writers whom it specially concerns. It must form the basis of any description of the countries he saw, at any rate, as seen by a foreigner, going, as he does, more into detail than any one else, and being a thoroughly fair-minded, level-headed, and well-educated man, whose knowledge was the result of experience. His day was not the day of the 'Grand Tourist,' whose habit it was to disguise single facts as general statements, and others' general statements as his own experiences.

Yet however irreplaceable may be Montaigne's subjectivity and Moryson's objectivity, it is desirable to find some one who combines both. Such a one is Pietro della Valle, of Naples and Rome. He is the impersonation of contemporary Italy at its best; of, to use his own phrase, "quella civiltà di vivere e quello splendore all' italiana," and to read his letters is to realise, as in no other way can be so readily realised, the reason why Italy held the position she did in the ideas of sixteenth-century people. If you separate the various characteristics that account for much of the attractiveness of his writings; the interest in things small and great, without triviality or ponderousness; the ability to write, combined with entire freedom from affectation; the lovableness of his Italian and a charm of phrase apart from his Italian, which might even, perhaps, survive translation; learning without arrogance and hand in hand with observation; and refinement and virility living in him as a single quality – if you isolate these, there still remains something to distinguish him from contemporary travellers, the product of gifts and character, it is true, but only of gifts and character as moulded by contact from birth with the best of a splendid civilisation, of which all the gentlemen of Europe were students, but none but natives graduates.

Still, in one respect, contemporary travellers may claim he has taken an unfair advantage. Not one of them has a romantic love-story as a background to his journeyings; Della Valle has two. After a twelve years' courtship at home, his intended bride was given by her parents to some one else. This was the cause of his wanderings. At San Marcellino at Naples, a mass was sung and the nuns prayed, the little golden pilgrim's staff he wore round his neck was blessed, and a vow made by him never to take it off until he had visited the Holy Sepulchre.

Thus he became Pietro della Valle, "Il Pellegrino" (the Pilgrim); and started. Venice, Constantinople, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, was his route; but his next letter thereafter is "from my tent in the desert": he has disappeared over the tourist horizon, and become a traveller on the grand scale. But he returns, and has much to say on the way back. Meanwhile, in Babylon, he has met another lady-love, Maani Gioerida, eighteen years old, daughter of an Assyrian father and an Armenian mother. Marriage with her was soon followed by her death; for the remaining four years of his wanderings he carried her body with him, laying it to rest in the end in his family tomb: and married again, this time the girl who had attended his first wife, alive and dead, Maria Tinatin di Ziba, a Georgian. And with her he lived happy ever after, and by her had fourteen sons.

Another type of traveller is the philosopher philosophizing. Sir Henry Blount set four particular aims before himself when he started for southeastern Europe with the intention of increasing his knowledge of things human, choosing the southeast because the west too closely resembled England. He went to note, first, the characteristics of "the religion, manners, and policy of the Turks" in so far as these threw light on the question whether they were, as reputed, barbarous, or possessed of a different variety of civilisation. Secondly, to satisfy the interest he felt in the subject-races, especially Jews; thirdly, to study the Turkish army about to set out for Poland; and fourthly, Cairo, which being the largest city existing, or on record, had problems of its own whose solutions he wished to note, much as foreigners might come to study London County Council doings now. This was in 1634.

But besides those who were born travellers and those who achieved travel, there were those who had travel thrust upon them; Thomas Dallam, for instance. Dallam was the master organ-builder of Elizabethan England. When, therefore, the Queen wished to send such a present to the Grand Turk as should assure her outshining all other sovereigns in his eyes and assist the Levant Company (who probably paid for it) in securing further privileges, an organ was the present, and Dallam had to make it and to take it. In 1599 he set out, and in 1600 praised God for his return. He, too, was an excellent Englishman: shrewd, interested, and interesting; and with an ability to express himself just abreast of his thinking faculty. His organ was a marvellous creation; played chimes, and song-tunes by itself, had two dummy-men on it who fanfared on silver trumpets, and, above, an imitation holly-bush filled with mechanical birds which sang and shook their wings. The Grand Turk sent for Dallam to play on it, which he did rather nervously, having been warned that it meant death to touch the Signor, and the latter sat so near behind him that "I touched his knee with my breeches… He sat so right behind me that he could not see what I did, therefore he stood up, but in his rising from his chair, he gave me a thrust forward, which he could not otherwise do, he sat so near me: but I thought he had been drawing his sword to cut off my head."

The organ was so great a success that Dallam became a favoured man. One attendant even let him look in at a grating through which he saw thirty of the girls of the harem playing ball, each wearing a chain of pearls round the neck, a ring of gold round the ankle, velvet slippers, a small cap of cloth of gold, breeches of the finest muslin, and a scarlet satin jacket.

Dallam was more in favour than he liked, for he was urged to settle there. "I answered them that I had a wife and children in England who did expect my return, though indeed I had neither wife nor children, yet to excuse myself I made them that answer."

Besides the business man who became a tourist without knowing it, there were the tourists who became so because home was too hot for them. Of their number was William Lithgow, whose "Rare Adventures" is the record of nineteen years' travel, ended in 1620 by the severity of the torture he endured in Spain through being taken for a spy. Although fifty years of age when he started writing his account, a fair sample of his style is, – "Here in Argos I had the ground to be a pillow, and the world-wide fields to be a chamber, the whirling windy skies to be a roof to my winter-blasted lodging, the humid vapours of cold Nocturna to accompany the unwished-for bed of my repose." And this was accompanied by so much second-hand history and doggerel that the printer rebelled and saved us from much more of it. The trustworthiness of his facts may be gauged by his stating as the result of his personal experience that Scotland is one hundred and twenty miles longer than England. On the other hand, he visited more places in Europe than any other one tourist, besides having some experience of Palestine and North Africa; and what he wrote he wrote after he had seen all that he did see. His comparisons are, therefore, worth attention, and these and the personal experiences which his verbiage has not crowded out of his book give it a permanent value and interest to those who have the patience to find them.

All this while we are forgetting the ladies; very few in number, but three at least possessing personality, – two princesses and an ambassador's wife. Princess number one was the eldest daughter of Philip II of Spain, the Infanta Doña Clara Eugenia, who crossed Europe with her husband, to take up the government of the Low Countries, in 1599, and wrote a long letter to her brother about the journey from Milan to Brussels, bright and pithy, one of the most readable and sensible letters that remain to us from the sixteenth century. Princess number two is the daughter of a king of Sweden, who had trouble in finding a husband for Princess Cecily, inasmuch as she would marry no one who would not promise to take her to England within a year from the wedding day; for the great desire of her life was to see Queen Elizabeth. A marquis of Baden accepted the condition, and on November 12, 1564, they started, by which time she had spent four years learning English and could speak it well. The voyage took ten months, the winter was a severe one, and much of their way lay through countries whose kings were hostile to her father and the inhabitants to every stranger. Leaving Stockholm while her relatives expressed their opinion about her journey by lamentations and fainting-fits, she crossed to Finland in a storm, in which the pilot lost heart to the extent of pointing out the rock on which they were going to be shipwrecked. Finland they left in four days, to escape starvation, during another storm; crossed to Lithuania; thence by land through Poland, North Germany, and Flanders, to Calais. Even from here it was not plain sailing, in any sense of the words; the sea was high when she started; all were sick ("with the cruel surges of the water and the rolling of the unsavoury ship"), except herself, standing on the hatches, looking towards England. But it proved impossible to get into Dover and they had to turn back. "'Alas!' quoth she, 'now must I needs be sick, both in body and in mind,' and therewith taking her cabin, waxed wonderful sick." A second time they tried; and again all were sick but herself; "she sitting always upon the hatches, passed the time in singing the English psalms of David after the English note and ditty." But again they had to turn back and again that made her sick, so sick that they thought she was going to be confined, for she had become pregnant about the time of her starting. A third attempt was successful; and on September 11, 1565, she arrived at Bedford House, Strand; on the 14th Queen Elizabeth arrived there, too, to see her; and on the 15th came the baby. This story ought to end like Della Valle's, that she lived happy ever after; but that cannot truthfully be said, because of what is recorded about Princess Cecily and certain unpaid London tradesmen. Much more would there be to say of her as a tourist, had she written an autobiography; for the rest of her life she continued travelling, spending all her own money on it and much of other people's.

The third, the ambassador's wife, is Ann, Lady Fanshawe. Her travels belong, strictly speaking, to dates just outside the limits (1542-1642) with which this book is concerned, but for all practical purposes may be referred to with little reserve. Her experience was great, for her journeys were even more numerous than her pregnancies, which numbered eighteen; and being cheerful, clear-headed, and sincere in no ordinary measure, her "Memoirs" are almost as excellent a record of travel as of character.

It is a matter for regret that her husband, Sir Richard, has not left us an account of his own, but in this he resembles practically all his kind. There is Sir Robert Sherley, who went ambassador to two Emperors, two Popes, twice to Spain, twice to Poland, once to Russia, twice to Persia: yet of Sir Robert Sherley as tourist, we know next to nothing. So also of Sir Paul Pindar, who says in a letter that he has had eighteen years' experience of Italy; and De Foix, a man greatly gifted, who wished to serve his country as far as possible distant from its Valois Kings, and consequently chose a series of embassies as an honourable, useful form of self-exile. Yet of these last two and others there remains some record by means of men who accompanied them. Part of the travels of Peter Mundy, whose name will often recur, happened in the train of the former; and when De Thou, the historian, paid the visit to Italy which he recounts in his autobiography, it was with De Foix that he went.

Among the exceptions, most noticeable is Augier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Fleming. After representing the Emperor in England at the wedding of Philip and Mary, he was sent to Constantinople (1556-1562), and afterwards to France. His letters from France that have been preserved are semi-official; of minor interest compared with those from Constantinople, which, not meant for publication but addressed to friends who were worthy of them, in time became printed. They belong to the literature of middle age, that which is written by men of fine character and fine education when successful issues out of many trials have made them wise and left them young. A many-sided man: the library at Vienna is the richer for his presents to the Emperor; many are the stories he tells of the wild animals he kept to while away the hours of the imprisonment which he, ambassador as he was, had to endure; the introducer into Europe of lilac, tulips, and syringa; a collector of coins when such an occupation was not usual as a hobby. His opportunities, indeed, were such as occur no more; in Asia Minor coins one thousand years old were in daily use as weights; and yet Busbecq missed one chance, for a brazier to whom he was referred regretted he had not met him a few days earlier, when he had had a vessel full of old coins which he had just melted down to make kettles.

Turning from the personalities to the causes of travel, we find that the class to which Busbecq belonged, that of resident ambassador, was of recent growth, and that it, and the tendencies of which it is one symptom, are responsible for creating the whole of the motives and the facilities for travel which characterise journeyings of this time as something different in kind from those which preceded them. The custom of maintaining resident representatives was developed in Italy during the fifteenth century, but it did not spread to the rest of civilised Europe till near the beginning of the next; German research, indeed, has even narrowed down the dates within which it established itself as an international system to 1494-1497.² The change was partly due to the consolidation of sovereignties, which increased the distances to be traversed between neighbour-princes, partly to the insight of the three great rulers who achieved the consolidations, – Ferdinand of Aragon, Louis XI, and Henry VII, who abandoned the idea of force and isolation as the only possible policies, and attempted to gain the advantages, and avoid the disadvantages, of both by means of ambassadors. Henry VII regarded them as in no way differing from spies; the most efficient kind of spies, from the point of view of the sender; and unavoidable, from that of the receiver. The latter's only remedy, Henry VII thought, was to send two for every one received. This alone, regarded, as it must be, considering who the speaker was, as indicating what the practice of the future would be, suffices to explain, even to prove, a great increase in diplomatic movements. But what further compels the deduction is that the foregoing is reported by Comines, who was probably, next to Francesco Guicciardini, the most frequently read historian throughout the sixteenth century.

Side by side with these official spies was the secret service; bound to grow in proportion to the increase among the former, implying a certain cosmopolitanism in its members, which, again, implies touring. This class of tourists is naturally the least communicative of all, but so far as England alone is concerned, if the history of the growth of the English spy-system between Thomas and Oliver Cromwell ever comes to be written, it is bound to reveal an enormous number of men, continually on the move for such purposes, or qualifying themselves for secret service by previous travel. And while there is a certain amount of information concerning tourists and touring to be gathered, in scraps, among State Papers which concern spies as spies, there is a great deal available, often first-hand, from them during this period of probation. Many, also, would be termed spies by their enemies and news-writers by their friends; persons who are abroad for some other, more or less genuine, reason, whose information was very welcome to those at home in the absence of newspapers, and was often paid for by politicians who could acquire a greater hold on the attention of those in power by means of knowledge which was exclusive during a period when the Foreign Office of a government existed in a far less definitely organised form than at present. It was in the course of such a mission that Edmund Spenser saw most of Europe and gained that intimate knowledge of contemporary politics which gives his poems a value which would have been more generally recognised had not their value as poetry overshadowed other merits. The traveller, then, still fulfilled what had been his chief use to humanity in mediæval times, that of a "bearer of tydynges," as Chaucer insists often enough in his "House of Fame."

It is worth while turning back to Chaucer's time to see how far the classes of travellers then existing have their counterparts in 1600, and how far not. Omitting students and artizans, as not varying, the types to be met on the road then may be collected into those of commerce, pilgrimage, vagabondage, and knight-errantry.

With regard to commerce, it may safely be guessed that the absence of the modern inventions for communication at a distance implied, in 1600 as in Chaucer's day, a greater proportional number of journeys in person than at present: and the enormous extension of commerce involved in the discoveries of sea-routes must have involved an increase in commercial traffic within Europe. As for the particular forms of trade that were responsible for taking men away from their homes, within the limits of Europe, it would probably be found, if statistics were possible, that dried fish came first, with wine and corn bracketed second. The Roman Catholic fast-days had produced a habit of eating dried fish which was not to be shaken off, in the strictest Protestant quarters, directly; and it was largely used for provisioning armies.

The second class of mediæval traveller, the pilgrim, is often in evidence about 1600, usually indirect evidence; the pilgrim who is nothing but pilgrim leaves practically no detailed record of himself except when he goes to Jerusalem. Yet Evelyn was told at Rome that during the year of Jubilee, 1600, twenty-five thousand five hundred women visitors were registered at the pilgrims' hospice of the Holy Trinity there, and four hundred and forty thousand men. Also, one who was at Montserrat in 1599, was told that six hundred pilgrims dined there every day, and at high festivals between three thousand and four thousand; while another (1619) learnt that whereas the monks' income from their thirty-seven estates stood at nine thousand scudi (say, thirteen thousand pounds at to-day's values) annually, they spent seven times that amount, the balance being derived from the sale of sanctified articles or from gifts.³ On the whole, however, a decrease must be presupposed during this period on account of the cessation of pilgrimage among the Protestant half of Europe. Moreover, the kind of journeying which is specially characteristic of this period incidentally tended to further Protestant ideas and discredit pilgrimage. For pilgrimage was, of course, towards some relic. Now relics which mutually excluded each other's genuineness, such as two heads of one saint, were not likely to be met with on the same pilgrim route: the establishment of one such on a given route would hinder the establishment of a second for financial, as well as devotional, reasons. But when a believer travelled for diplomatic or educational purposes, his direction was quite as likely to lead across pilgrim routes, as along them. In which case he would be morally certain to come across these mutually exclusive relics, on one and the same journey, and the doubts thus started might be cumulative in their results.⁴ On the other hand the very fact of opposition stimulated pilgrim zeal among the orthodox, as, e. g., to the still flourishing shrine of Notre Dame des Ardilliers near Saumur, as a result of Saumur itself becoming a headquarters of the "Reformed" creed. There abided of course the permanent features of life which make pilgrimage as deep-rooted as the love of children, and one of the epidemics of pilgrimage that occur periodically burst out in France about 1585, so Busbecq writes. Whole villages of people clothed themselves in white linen, took crosses and went off to some shrine two or three days' journey away. The special cause of this epidemic may perhaps be sought in the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Chartres by their queen, in 1582, to beg for relief from her barrenness. One incident of this journey ought not to be left buried in the Calendar of Foreign State Papers, the only place where it has hitherto been printed. On being told why the queen was going thither, a countrywoman said, "Alas! Madame is too late; the good priest who used to make the children has just died."

An example of the pilgrim we have already met in Della Valle. Bartholomew Sastrow in his autobiography reveals a man travelling in search of work, a very unpleasant man, perhaps, but so strikingly true a picture of the every-day life and every-day thought of a lower middle-class man of the sixteenth century as not to be surpassed for any other century, past, present, or future, not even among autobiographies.

But for the man who is trying to avoid work, the third of the mediæval types, the vagabond, it would be out of place to select an individual to stand for the class in Renascence days, seeing that it became a stock literary type; vagabondage in general being epitomized for the time in the Spanish picaro. The picaro was one who saw much of the seamy side of life and remembered it with pleasure – it was all life and the true picaro was in love with life. The only enemy he had permanently was civilisation; yet he and it became reconciled in his old age: a picaro who grew old ceased to be a picaro. Meanwhile he was always forgiving civilisation, and being forgiven; both had equal need of forgiveness. Yet there is one picaro characteristic hard to overlook – his passion for being dull at great length when he drops into print: Lazarillo de Tormes and Gil Bias being the only ones of whom it may be said that from a reader's standpoint they were all that they should have been and nothing that they should not. The rest, when met between the covers of a book, resemble the parson whom one of themselves, Quevedo's Pablos, caught up on the way to Madrid and whom he hardly prevented from reciting his verses on St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, fifty octavetts to each virgin; even then he could not escape a comedy containing more scenes than there were days in a Jerusalem pilgrimage, besides five quires concerning Noah's Ark. This same Pablos explains incidentally what his kind talked about to chance companions on the road, for meeting another making for Segovia they fell into "la conversacion propia de picaros." Whether the Turk was on the downhill and how strong was the king: how the Holy Land might be reconquered, and likewise Algiers: party politics were then discussed and afterwards the management of the rebellious Low Countries. There were, too, picaros of high degree, but these were all men of war, whereas nothing but hunger made an ordinary picaro fight. High and low, however, had this in common, that they preferred living at others' expense to working, and consequently shifted their lodgings as often as any other class of tourist, in deference to local opinion.

Of the fourth mediæval type, the knight-errant, it is hard to say whether it was extinct or not: all depends on the extent to which the knight-errant is idealised. It is certainly true in this degree, that contemporary fiction must be reckoned as a cause of travel. Don Quixote is not to be ignored as a traveller and he was not alone. The first Earl of Cork's eldest son was so affected by the romances that the "roving wildness of his thoughts" which they brought about was only partially cured by continual extraction of square and cube roots. But perhaps the knight-errant of this date is better identified with the picaro of high degree, and as such the class may be exemplified by Don Alonzo de Guzman, the first chapter of whose autobiography gives a better insight into the psychology, and life on the road, of the picaro than the whole flood of nineteenth-century comment on the subject. At the age of eighteen he found himself with no father, no money, and a mother pious but talkative; after having provided for his needs for a while by marriage, he left home with a horse, a mule, a bed, and sixty ducats. And though what follows belongs more to the history of lying than the history of the world, it throws side-lights. And at any rate, any excuse is good enough to turn to it, for Don Alonzo has much in common with Benvenuto Cellini.

Now we have passed beyond the mediæval types and come to such as are somewhat more prominent in this, than in the previous, centuries. Exiles, for instance. The economic changes that took place during the sixteenth century made it increasingly difficult for the equivalents for Chancellors of the Exchequer to meet the yearly deficits. The legal authorities were therefore called upon to assist, and a working arrangement was established in practically all European countries whereby the political ferment of the time was taken advantage of for the betterment of the finances. Instead of the slow process and meagre results of waiting for death-duties, a man of wealth suffered premature civil death, or was harried into civil suicide. He was exiled, or fled: he had become a tourist.

Inseparable from political is religious self-exile. What happened very often in England was this. A youngster is seized with that belief in the likelihood of an ideal life elsewhere and that desire for a change, which are characteristic of the age of twenty. The theological cast of the age gives the former a religious bias. He escapes. After a time it seems to him that human characteristics have the upper hand of the apostolic, even in Roman Catholics, to a greater extent than he once believed, and that he would like to go home. He lands, is questioned by the Mayor, reported on to the Privy Council, in which report his experiences are to be found summarised.