The Myth of the “Grand Tour”: How Queen Elizabeth I Trained Young Noblemen as Diplomats, Soldiers and Spies
- Jul 28
- 9 min read
When Edward de Vere, Philip Sidney, Robert Devereux, Henry Wriothesley and Edward Manners Were Sent Abroad, None of Them Were on a “Grand Tour”
🌍 Why the “Grand Tour” Did Not Exist in Tudor England
Tudor England had no MI6 or CIA, no Foreign Office or State Department, and no diplomatic or military academies. So how did Queen Elizabeth I train the men who would negotiate treaties, command armies, develop allies abroad and help her govern and protect her kingdom?
She sent them to continental Europe with what amounted to military and diplomatic homework assignments. Between 1570 and 1600, many of England’s leading young noblemen, including Philip Sidney, Edward de Vere, Edward Manners, Robert Devereux and Henry Wriothesley, spent time abroad on diplomatic, military, and intelligence-related missions for Elizabeth.
Let’s begin with a small historical correction. When people say that Elizabethan noblemen went off on a “Grand Tour”, what they usually mean is this: a handsome young aristocrat, flush with family money, wanders through France and Italy, admiring art, flirting with duchesses and their maids, and lounging in palaces.
A sort of Renaissance party boy gap year.
This Netflix version of Tudor history didn’t happen. The concept of a “Grand Tour” didn’t exist until the Restoration under the Stuarts in the late 17th century.
Had Elizabeth heard the concept of a “Grand Tour” applied to the European travels of her most talented young noblemen, she would have scoffed and told you it was a waste of talent, time and money.
Wrong century. Wrong purpose. Wrong men. Wrong queen.
Elizabeth did not send her young noblemen abroad because they were rich, idle or bored. She sent them abroad to work and earn her trust, because one day England’s security would depend on them.
🚢 What Queen Elizabeth Expected Of Young Nobles On the Continent
Each nobleman carried Elizabeth’s commission and permission in the form of signed documents (permission to “pass” the “ports”) to leave England for a strictly limited period of time.
Younger noblemen served as aides to more senior statesmen, or as junior officers to seasoned military commanders. The older ones were entrusted with fulfilling specific missions alone when the queen needed representation abroad: attending foreign royal coronations, weddings or funerals; bestowing high honors on foreign kings and dignitaries; strengthening diplomatic relationships; and collecting information and state secrets.
Yes, they were spying, even if they also occasionally enjoyed themselves.
James Bond doesn’t hang out in a tuxedo with beautiful women in Casino Royale because MI6 is paying for his vacation. He is working. Elizabeth expected exactly the same of her young noblemen and kept them on a tight leash. If they accepted an honor from a foreign government without her permission, she yanked them back and made them cough up and return the honor. If they refused, she threw them in the Tower.
📚 Cecil House Was Not a Boarding School, Rather a Pipeline to Diplomacy
Long before modern governments created diplomatic academies and foreign-service exams, Elizabethan England had its own system for training future leaders: they passed first, as children, through the household of William Cecil, Lord Burghley.
Cecil House wasn’t just about learning how to properly use an ivory toothpick in polite society.
Under Burghley’s tutelage, they received access to England's finest private library, elite subject tutors, and perhaps most importantly, a front-row seat to government and politics. For a bright young nobleman, dinner at Burghley's table was often more educational than a lecture hall. Ambassadors, archbishops, military commanders, judges, and privy councilors regularly dined at Cecil House.
From his first royal ward, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, to his last, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, Burghley groomed these young men as statesmen using the same pattern. First came a classical education in languages, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. Then the universities. Then the Inns of Court. Then experience on the continent as apprentices in government service as the final stage of that training.
Elizabeth herself never left England. When she wanted ties strengthened with Venice or intelligence gathered in France, she sent one of Burghley’s young noblemen on an apprenticeship to power.
🏰 “But They Stayed in Palaces!”
Sometimes they did. And that’s another point worth correcting.
When English noblemen appear in royal palaces, ducal residences or aristocratic households on the continent, modern readers tend to imagine luxury tourism. What they are actually seeing is diplomacy at work. Access to elite homes came through letters of introduction from royal or ambassadorial networks. Without those credentials, travelers stayed in inns. Think filthy floors, filthier and potentially larcenous inn mates, bedbugs, leaking roofs, the works.
Being hosted by a powerful family wasn’t just a perk. It was building a diplomatic network through a favor that was expected to be returned someday.
💸 Everyone Paid His Own Way (Yes, Really)
Another detail that muddies modern misunderstanding is that Elizabethan diplomats and courtiers were almost always expected to fund their travels themselves. That included ambassadors and military commanders, but not royal messengers who were reimbursed by the Crown.
So when we see young noblemen draining their personal fortunes while abroad, it’s tempting to assume personal extravagance is the cause. Not so. More often, it was simply the business-as-usual cost of the honor of serving the Queen.
This is one reason individuals like Oxford later appear to us to be financially reckless. Continental diplomacy was expensive, as was maintaining status abroad. Everyone complained about the onerous expense and how stingy Elizabeth was on the reimbursement side. You needed servants, weapons, horses, ships, guides, clothing. None of this was budget friendly. And many went deeply into debt for it and never escaped. See: Five of Queen Elizabeth's Favorites Most Lavish Lives and Hidden Debts.
🏛️ Five Young Noblemen, Five Apprenticeships
While we are on habits that need breaking, let’s shatter this one, too. We tend to look at individuals in isolation, as if they were lone eccentrics wandering Europe.
They weren’t. They belonged to a cohort that came, went and overlapped. Sidney, Essex, Rutland, Oxford, Wriothesley, even Burghley’s own sons trained and served in the same orbit, traveled similar routes, spent similar exorbitant sums and faced similar dangers.
📜 Edward Manners, 3rd Earl of Rutland's Instructions for His Continental Journey, 1570
Edward Manners, Earl of Rutland spent about a year abroad in France, Switzerland and northern Italy in 1570 at the age of 21. He carried with him a detailed set of instructions from Burghley that may have been Shakespeare’s source for Polonius’ tedious “few precepts” in Hamlet: keep your own counsel, observe carefully, trust cautiously, dress for success, avoid debt, and, ultimately, “to thine own self be true.”
🩸Sir Philip Sidney: Learning Diplomacy Amid Crisis (1572-1575)
Sidney's travels are often described as educational. Educational, yes, but in building alliances with continental Protestant princes, and up close observation of how foreign courts conducted themselves, including spectacularly badly.
While in France as an 18-year-old, Sidney was attached to the household of Sir Francis Walsingham, England's ambassador, whose daughter he would later marry. Sidney witnessed firsthand the slaughter of 10,000 Protestants by France’s Catholic ruling family during the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Sidney’s sightseeing on the streets of Paris included watching a king eliminate his guests during own his sister’s very “red” wedding.
For the gruesome details, see: The St. Bartholomew Day Massacre: How an Intercepted Letter Exposed the Cover-up of the Slaughter and Reshaped Elizabeth's England .
🏵️ Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford: Ambassador Without the Title (1575-1576)
Although not ambassadors in the formal sense, these young men moved within diplomatic circles.
Oxford's journey of 1575-1576, at age 25, has been described as an irresponsible young aristocrat’s adventure. The historical record indicates otherwise. Although personally charming, Oxford had been likely charged with diplomatic representation and gathering confidential information in two specific foreign courts: Paris and Venice.
Elizabeth sent Oxford abroad with her highest recommendation to foreign rulers to treat him as they would treat herself. He attended French King Henri III’s coronation and royal wedding at Reims. Neither was a carefree event and Elizabeth didn’t throw a clueless party boy into the middle of a pack of French wolves.
As a prominent Protestant earl, in Reims and Paris, Oxford was the guest of the same Catholic French royal family that had orchestrated the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre during the last French royal wedding.
Henri de Navarre, who later became King Henri IV of France, said that the French court at the time Oxford was there was “the strangest that you have ever seen . . . we are almost always ready to cut each other’s throats.” Courtiers wore chain mail under their cloaks and carried daggers. Elizabeth was well aware of the dangers in France, because her own courtiers were no strangers to "cloaks and daggers". You can read more about what she did about it here: A Royal Proclamation On Elizabethan Ruffs, Cloaks and Concealed Weapons. She must have judged Oxford capable of handling himself in France, or she never would have sent him.
Oxford’s arrival in Venice coincided with a devastating outbreak of plague. He fled east along the Adriatic coast on a voyage to avoid the pestilence and the Papal and Spanish-held portions of Italy. Five months later, back in Venice, the Doge received him, an honor not extended to random tourists. There was no formal English ambassador to Venice during Elizabeth’s reign. When she needed a special envoy to maintain commercial ties and defenses against Spain with the Venetians, she sent someone she trusted.
🕵️ Enjoying upsetting the comfortable myths about Tudor history?
Good, so do I.
For more little-known, evidence-based adventures in Shakespeare’s England, from spies and diplomats to forgotten women, coded politics and extraordinary journeys, I’d love to have you join me for the journey: Subscribe for Elizabethan Secrets. You’ll receive a thank you packet of exclusive peeks into the past that just didn’t make it into the history books.
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⚔️ Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex: Learning the Business of War (1585 - 1601)
Essex's foreign experience focused more on military than diplomatic affairs. His service in the Low Countries under Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester placed him in direct contact with one of the most important theaters of English foreign policy and immersed him in the military and diplomatic realities of the struggle against Spain on the front line of England’s security. He gained further experience in command, alliance politics, logistics, and intelligence, supporting Protestant Henri IV in his bid to claim the throne of Catholic France.
👑 Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl Southampton’s Service Abroad (1594)
At the age of 20, Southampton undertook service in France alongside the man who, later, would become his bitterest enemy and seek his ultimate destruction: Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son. Like Rutland, Oxford, Devereux, and Sidney, Wriothesley learned firsthand how diplomacy actually worked, not from books, but from participation. He was present during the diplomatic negotiations of the Treaty of Vervins, not a drinking party, but cessation of the hostilities between France and Spain. He subsequently frequented French court circles and joined Essex’s military forays in the Low Countries and Ireland, which served him well later commanding troops in the 80 Years’ War.
👁️ Eyes and Ears of the Crown
England was a small kingdom surrounded by larger and often hostile powers. Information, alliances, secret information all were essential to its survival.
Young noblemen abroad were ideally suited to observe military developments, report political changes and cultivate lifelong relationships. None of these five were merely spending money wandering randomly around Europe in search of the next good time.
🔎 Rethinking the "Party Boy" on the “Grand Tour” Narrative
Queen Elizabeth knew boys did not become men through creature comforts and coddling. She expected them to complete the tasks that they had been assigned, sometimes under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, and return to England.
If they also returned with improved literary and musical skills, a love of fine art and continental fashion, a romantic foreign fling or two, and proficient in foreign languages, it did not make them dilettantes.
It made them Renaissance men, fit for deployment at home or abroad.
“M” would approve.
🕵️ If you’d like more clandestine Elizabethan political secrets, you can explore how Queen Elizabeth's government really worked, including:
• William Cecil's surprising and almost deadly missteps before he became Elizabeth's most trusted minister. The Traitor William Cecil and Cecil in Love
• Robert Dudley, the Queen's favorite “favorite”, nearly losing his head as a young man in the dangerous world of Tudor court politics. The Untold Backstory of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester
• How Sir Francis Walsingham's hunt for spies really worked. Elizabethan Spies and Plots
