Howard, John
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- Howard, John
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(1726 - 90), philanthropist, s. of John Howard of London; m. 1 c.1752 Sarah Loidore (d. 1755), 2 1758 Henrietta Leeds (d. 1765); FRS 1756; pub. State of the Prisons in England and Wales 1777.
c.1742 Italy
1769 - 70 Turin (by 26 Nov. 1769), Milan (Nov. 1769) [France, Holland] Genoa (Apr. 1770), Pisa, Leghorn, Florence, Siena, Rome ( - 23 May), Naples (by 27 May - ), Rome (15 - 29 Jun.) [Heidelburg 29 Jul.]
1778 [dep. Harwich 18 Apr. 1778] Venice (28 Jul. - Aug.), Padua, Florence, Leghorn, Rome (Jul.), Naples, Rome, Civitavecchia, Leghorn, Lucca, Lerici, Genoa (Sep.), Milan, Turin
1786 Genoa (Jan.), Leghorn, Pisa, Florence, Rome, Naples (Mar.) [Malta, Constantinople] Venice (Oct. - Nov.) [England Feb. 1787]
A man of deeply religious feelings, abstinent and methodical, Howard travelled some fifty thousand miles observing the treatment accorded the least fortunate members of society. He was four times in Italy, but only his first visit could be described as that of a grand tourist. Having succeeded to his father's fortune in 1742 before he was twenty, he went to Italy where, it is said, he acquired or strengthened 'that taste for the fine arts' which led him to collect 'paintings of foreign masters' and other objects of art which furnished his home in Cardington.1 The fine arts, however, were not to loom large in his life.
By the time of his second visit in 1769 - 70, Howard had twice become a widower and had endured imprisonment in France (having been captured at sea when sailing to Portugal in 1756). He conceived his return to Italy as a 'gay and expensive scheme', but his gaiety was soon to be tempered. On 26 November 1769 he wrote, apparently from Turin, criticising Roman religion and blessing God 'for the Reformation: how is religion debased into Show and Ceremony here'. On 4 January 1770, from Abbeville, he was again deploring 'the luxury and wickedness' of the Italians. After wintering in France and Holland, he returned to Italy in April, passing through Genoa, Pisa, Leghorn, Florence and Siena to Rome, 'where', he confided in a journal, 'there are many Monuments to humble the pride of Man and shew how Luxury and Wickedness will sink a Nation'. In another high-minded letter of 22 May from Rome he announced his departure for Naples the next day and his intention to return for the procession on 15 June and stay a fortnight before proceeding home through Loreto, Ancona and Bologna to Venice. In Naples on 27 May he composed a solemn engagement that 'sinful and vain diversions are not my Object but the honour and glory of God'. He also climbed Vesuvius and sent his observations to the Royal Society. In Rome on 16 June he observed the Young Pretender looking 'very stupid; bends double, and is quite altered since I saw him in Paris twenty years ago'.2 By 29 July he was in Heidelberg.
His third and fourth visits were made expressly to study penal and welfare systems. He entered Italy in 1778 with 'raised expectations of considerable information, from a careful attention to the prisons and hospitals'. He was first in Venice: in the Doge's prison he found three or four hundred inmates, many of them confined for life. Howard had arrived in Venice on 28 July3 and was described on 17 August as 'just gone', having warned his compatriots against the insalubrity: 'I do not wonder that Howard of Bedford, the jail-man, who is just gone from hence, should advise a young gentleman who is in the house, not to stay above four days lest he should be ill', wrote Dr John Warner.4 From Venice Howard went to Padua and Florence, where the Grand Duke gave him admission to all the prisons in his dominions, and he saw the galley-slaves in Leghorn. In Rome he observed the activities of the Confraternita della Misericordia, and was favourably impressed with the hospital of S.Michele for orphan or destitute boys, where he found the inscription 'It is of little advantage to restrain the Bad by Punishment, unless you render them Good by Discipline'. Henry Swinburne saw him in Rome in 1778 ('Mr Howard, an excellent philanthropist, who makes it the business of his life to travel for the sake of inspecting prisons').5 He went on to Naples, where he calculated that more murders were committed in a year than in 'our three kingdoms put together'. He returned to Rome and passed on to Civitavecchia, where he saw the slaves on the Pope's galleys; an adventurous sea journey then took him to Leghorn. He went on through Lucca and Lerici, where he met Philip Yorke (later 3rd Earl of Hardwicke) with whom he travelled to Genoa. In September 1778 the British consul at Genoa, John Collet, said Howard had left in a great hurry for Milan.6 In Milan he found only four prisoners confined for debt; there were rehabilitation centres, and Howard was allowed to ransom one prisoner whom he found making gold braid. He left Italy through Turin and Savoy.
His last visit in 1786 was particularly 'to check the progress of devouring pestilence' by examining lazzarettos. Between January and March 1786 he visited Genoa, Leghorn, Pisa, Florence, Rome and Naples. He sailed to Malta and on to Constantinople, choosing deliberately to return to Venice in a vessel with a foul bill of health so that he might experience quarantine precautions at first hand. He was confined for 42 days, in October and November 1786, emerging weak and feverish. He returned to England in February 1787. When Thomas Watkins was at Zante in 1788 he was told that Howard had 'astonished all who knew him' with his 'simplicity of manners and extreme abstinence'.7
Among Howard's publications were The Edict of the Grand Duke of Tuscany for the Reform of Criminal Law in his Dominions [1789] and An Account of the principal Lazarettos in Europe [1791].
1. See J.B. Brown, Memoirs of John Howard, [1823], 12, 70 - 96, 252 - 63, and 422 - 59. 2. Jesse, Memoirs of the Pretenders, 2:319. 3. ASV is 760. 4. Jesse, Selwyn, 3:317. 5. Swinburne, Courts, 1:214. 6. Genoa cons.corr.MSS (26 Sep. 1778). 7. Watkins, Letters, 2:163.