7 - The English community in Rome

Summary

The prosperity and high reputation of the English community in Rome would have been hard to predict when diplomatic relations between London and the Vatican were severed after the defeat of James II by William of Orange. For many decades, the Pope's support for the Jacobite cause made Rome an uncomfortable place for aristocratic English visitors. But the influence of the Jacobites began to wane, and by the mid century Rome had become one of the most important destinations on the Grand Tour. Thomas Jones reported that Romans arranged their English visitors in three classes: ‘Artisti’, who came for ‘Study and Improvement’; ‘Mezzi Cavalieri’, ‘who lived genteely, independent of any profession’; and ‘Cavalieri’ or ‘Milordi Inglesi’,who moved in a ‘Circle of Superior Splendour surrounded by a group of Satellites under the denomination of Travelling Tutors, Antiquarians, Dealers in Virtu, English Grooms, French Valets and Italian running footmen’. ‘To be a native of Great Britain’, Kelly wrote of his experiences in Italy in the late 1770s, ‘was a passe-partout’ all over the country.’ With no formal representation as yet at the Vatican, the large English community relied on a leading banker, Thomas Jenkins, who functioned in effect as an unofficial ambassador. As James Northcote pointed out in 1778, Jenkins was ‘of vast use to all the English, who fly to him as they would an Ambassador, for the King sends none to the Pope’.