Touring in 1600. Bates Ernest Stuart

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ