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a literary genre: the English Civil War, taking place during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. As the interests of King Charles I and his parliament grew more polarized during the late 1630s, with open conflict between the two sides breaking out in 1642, some younger members of the English gentry made up their mind not to participate directly in the war, whatever their political or religious sympathies. I’m reminded at this point of a neat observation by the lawyer and amateur musician Roger North, who notes of his musically inclined contemporaries at this period that ‘many chose rather to fidle at home, than to goe out and be knockt on the head abroad’. But what of those who preferred to fiddle abroad, metaphorically if not actually, rather than stay at home to be knocked on the head? The era saw a notable increase in the number of travellers slipping out of England to spend long spells wandering through France, Holland, Germany and Italy. John Evelyn, for example, newly graduated from Oxford, occupied almost nine years, between 1641 and 1650, with journeys up and down continental Europe, writing up most of them afterwards to create one of the most valuable and entertaining records of travel produced during the seventeenth century. Like many others retreating across the English Channel, he was a Royalist, and his trip, like theirs, may in some sense have represented a self-imposed exile. 10
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n such travels we can see the beginnings of what would later become known as the Grand Tour, an essential element of aristocratic and gentry culture during the following century. Making the journey, these pioneer tourists of the 1640s needed advice on what to see, where to stay, how much money to take, what languages to learn and what – or whom – to avoid. Some of the earliest exemplars of the guidebook as we now know it sprang from imperatives created directly or indirectly by the decisive Parliamentarian victories at Marston Moor and Naseby, by the various attempts on the part of Parliament itself to institutionalize puritan worship in place of the suspect Popery represented by Laudian Anglicanism, and by the eventual arrest, trial and execution of King Charles I. n 1642, the very year when the armed struggle commenced, the Welsh writer James Howell, a committed Royalist, produced his Instructions for Forreine Travell. His previous book, and the one for which he became best known, Familiar Letters or Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1641) – the title incorporates a Latin version of his surname – is dedicated to the King as ‘the centre of our happiness’. In an introductory poem entitled ‘The Vote, or a Poem-Royal’, Howell boasts that: have had audience (in another strain) Of Europe’s greatest kings, when German main 11

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a literary genre: the English Civil War, taking place during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. As the interests of King Charles I and his parliament grew more polarized during the late 1630s, with open conflict between the two sides breaking out in 1642, some younger members of the English gentry made up their mind not to participate directly in the war, whatever their political or religious sympathies. I’m reminded at this point of a neat observation by the lawyer and amateur musician Roger North, who notes of his musically inclined contemporaries at this period that ‘many chose rather to fidle at home, than to goe out and be knockt on the head abroad’.

But what of those who preferred to fiddle abroad, metaphorically if not actually, rather than stay at home to be knocked on the head? The era saw a notable increase in the number of travellers slipping out of England to spend long spells wandering through France, Holland, Germany and Italy. John Evelyn, for example, newly graduated from Oxford, occupied almost nine years, between 1641 and 1650, with journeys up and down continental Europe, writing up most of them afterwards to create one of the most valuable and entertaining records of travel produced during the seventeenth century. Like many others retreating across the English Channel, he was a Royalist, and his trip, like theirs, may in some sense have represented a self-imposed exile.

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