Grey de Wilton, Thomas Egerton, Baron

(1749 - 1814) of Heaton, Lancs, 1st surv. s. of Sir Thomas Grey Egerton; suc. fa. 1756 as 7th Bt.; educ. Westminster and Ch.Ch. Oxf.1767; m. 1769 Eleanor Assheton; MP 1772 - 84; cr. B. Grey de Wilton 1784, E. of Wilton 1801.

1785 [dep. Dover 13 Oct. 1784] Genoa (21 - 25 Jan. 1785), Lerici (26 Jan.), Pisa ( - 30 Jan.), Florence (30 Jan. - 9 Feb.), Rome (13 - 16 Feb.), Naples (19 Feb. - 8 Mar.), Rome (10 Mar. - 15 Apr.), Loreto, Ancona, Rimini, Bologna (20 - 24 Apr.), Padua, Venice (27 Apr. - 9 May), Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, Milan (14 - 19 May), Turin (20 - 25 May), Mont Cenis (26 May)

1788 [dep. Brightelmstone 1 Sep. 1787] Genoa (7 - 15 Apr. 1788), Milan (16 - 23 Apr.), Brescia (24 Apr.), Verona (25 Apr.), Vicenza (26 Apr.), Venice (27 Apr. - 10 May), Padua, Bologna (18 May), Modena (19 May), Parma (20 May), Turin (27 May - 2 Jun.), Mont Cenis (3 Jun.) [ret. England 21 Jul.]

Lord Grey de Wilton first went to Italy at the age of thirty-five, setting out five months after he had been ennobled on resigning his Lancashire seat in Parliament. He was accompanied by a Mr Vincent Foxley. Grey's prosaic travel journal (Grey jnl.mss 1) contains their itinerary and lists the principal sites in some detail. They sailed from Nice to Genoa where they stayed at the Hotel du Grand Cerf, continuing five days later in the same felucca to Lerici. In Florence they stayed ten days at the Hotel Carlo 'kept by an Englishman by the name of Marget [Megit]'; 'Mons Jean Figliazzi' took them to the Palazzo Pitti, and at a masked ball they saw the Young Pretender, 'wore down with age' and his daughter, who had 'a good person and is lively'; Nardini's playing on the violin 'at Mr Biddulph's' Grey found 'superior to any I ever heard, Giardini excepted' and his principal cultural interest appears to have been in music. From Florence they passed through Rome to Naples where they stayed at the Crocelli hotel, close by the sea. Clarke [doubtless James Clark] was their cicerone and their sight-seeing during their two-and-a-half-week stay was relentless, interrupted only by bad weather. They spent five weeks in Rome in March - April 'at the English Taylors in the Piazza d'Espagna'. James Byres was their cicerone, [Christopher] Norton standing in for him on two days when he was not well; the course lasted from 11 March to 14 April and Grey's notes fill 74 pages of his journal. Byres showed them Poussin's Seven Sacraments in the Bonapaduli Palace, which he was about to buy and replace with copies. They visited the studios of several artists: Ducros, the eighty-year-old Batoni, Philipp Hackert, Jacob More, Tresham and Pichler, the German gem-engraver. On 31 March they dined with Thomas Jenkins. Grey commissioned four drawings from Jacob More through Byres, for which he paid 'Mr Edgar to answer a Draft of Mr Nortons from Rome for 4 of Moors Drawings £;17.10' on 29 August 1787.1 More recorded the four drawings (views in Rome and the Campagna) as finished on 20 June 1787 (Heaton Hall sale, 2 Jun. 1902).2 At the conclusion of his first tour Grey noted that he had travelled 4,386 miles, a statement characteristic of his journal.

Three years later he spent two months in northern Italy with his wife and daughter (also called Eleanor). A second Grey travel journal (Grey jnl.mss 2) gives the complete itinerary, but the terse commentary stops at Parma on 20 May; again the distances travelled were recorded, the whole tour amounting to 3,374 miles.

1. Grey accts., Lancs CRO (transcript in Manchester CAG). 2. More letters mss.