Prelude to Piety: Nicholas Ferrar's Grand Tour

[He] doth truly travell, who whither soever he directeth his journey, travelleth for the greater benefit of his wit, for the commodity of his studies, and the dexterity of his life.Thomas Coryat1To describe Nicholas Ferrar's Grand Tour as a 'prelude to piety' is, of course, to view it retrospectively knowing that Little Gidding lay in his future. Vital elements of that later enterprise did indeed reflect particularly significant experiences from his Grand Tour, as I shall seek in this paper to demonstrate. Nevertheless I think it worth reminding ourselves at the outset that the young man who set off for the Continent in 1613 was securely established as a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and, so far as we know, expected to resume that place on his return. His immediate purpose in going was to restore his health. No doubt too, like most contemporary travellers, he expected to acquire the sort of broader knowledge and personal polish that Thomas Coryat extolled. We have little explicit evidence of spiritual benefits he might have anticipated as well, but it is hard to imagine he expected none. Nicholas nonetheless, however much 'dexterity' of life he gained in his travels, could hardly have foreseen at the time what in future he would draw from those experiences as he created for his family's household a distinctive pattern of piety.The seven years immediately following his return in 1617 in fact suggested a 'dexterity' that had turned his travels into a prelude to politics and place rather than to prayer and piety. How much that new readiness to apply his talents to worldly affairs owed to the stimulus of his time abroad and how much to family pressures after his return is unclear. What is clear, however, is that during those years he exchanged the collegiate world of Cambridge for the London world of the Virginia Company and ultimately, in 1624, of Parliament. That his close colleague during those years, Sir Edwin Sandys, could have been 'amazed' at news of Nicholas's subsequent ordination as deacon in 1626 suggests how thoroughly he had till then immersed himself in this worldly role.2 What caused a change of course dramatic enough to have 'amazed' Sandys and probably to have accompanied a reassessment of his experiences abroad?Nicholas sought ordination only after the collapse of the Virginia Company and the near-bankruptcy of his elder brother, John Ferrar, had left him and his family in 1625 with not only a country property at Little Gidding but also a conviction that their reverses were a call from God to live a different sort of life. Such a conviction would not in itself have been an unusual response, particularly for a pious family, but the Ferrars pursued it with exceptional and enduring fervour. Whether individual members of the family reached that conclusion for themselves or required persuasion from Nicholas one can only speculate. There is certainly the possibility, as Maycock suggests, that Nicholas for his own part felt a special need to repent of such actions as his parliamentary role in the impeachment of Lord Treasurer Cranfield.3 Whatever the route by which the family reached its collective decision, its effect at that critical juncture was to give Nicholas charge not only of restructuring the family's finances but also of providing a new and more godly pattern for their life together.While there is general agreement that the shape of the pattern he devised bore some imprint of his earlier travels, documentation of that view comes down all too often to the probable rather than to the certain. It is important also to keep in mind that while these ideas and institutions that Nicholas encountered abroad played a significant role, they were by no means the only factors and they were inevitably intertwined with the pervasive influences of his English homeland. Nicholas could in fact have learned of at least some of them from friends and books without ever leaving England. Nevertheless, he did travel and those travels did leave their mark on his later life, however imperfectly recorded. …