(1672 - 1739) of Wentworth Castle, Yorks, 1st surv. s. of Sir William Wentworth of Northgate Head, Wakefield, Yorks; suc. fa. 1695 as 4th Bt., and cos. 1695 as 3rd B.; army officer, cornet 1688, col. 1697, lt.-gen. 1707; env.extra. and amb. Berlin 1701, 1703 - 5 and 1705 - 11; amb. Congress of Utrecht 1711 - 14; m. 1711 Anne Johnson; cr. 1711 E. of Strafford; KG 1712; cr. 1722 D. of Strafford [J].
1705 Padua (4 - 5 May)
1709 Florence [?], Rome, Naples, Venice [Berlin by Nov.]
Lord Raby visited Italy twice while he was British ambassador in Berlin, though each visit appears to have been very brief. 'Raby the true not the counterfeit that is at Venice', was in Padua on 4 May, and 'Wentworth, Ld Raby alias' was there on 5 May 1705 with John Powell,1 probably the Captain John Powell from the ambassador's household in Berlin.2 The 'counterfeit' was presumably the Catholic impostor, see Wentworth.
Lord Raby returned to Italy in the late summer/autumn of 1709, as he described in a letter to Lady Bathurst in January 1710. After attending the Kings of Prussia, Poland and Denmark and the Queen of Prussia at Berlin in the summer of 1709, he 'set out for Italy, and overran all that glorious agreable country in two months time. I was above six weeks in sick bed in Rome of a violent feaver I got by the excessive heats in travelling thither in the dog days,' but he succeeded in buying works of art for his new seat, Wentworth Castle, then being built. 'Though it cost me a great deal, yet it is a furniture for me and my posterity. I have about 30 pictures, most part originals by the best hands or the copies by good painters after the best pictures in Rome, and had I had time there I should have ruined myself with buying up such sort of curiosities'. He was back in Berlin by November 1709, when Williams & Smith in Venice were concerned with the dispatch of three cases of his pictures from Rome; their correspondence also reveals Raby had been in Naples, where he was unable to buy an (unnamed) picture. In 1710 Williams & Smith were getting for him a copy of Santo Bartoli's La Colonna di Augusto Traiano, and in June 1711 Raby (then in The Hague) received four views of Rome and some Roman imperial medals from Ficoroni (again through Williams & Smith).4
In July 1710 Raby told his kinsman Sir William Wentworth of Bretton, who was also in Italy in 1709, that he had 'great credit by my pictures and find I have not thrown my money away. These are all designed for Yorkshire, and I hope to have a better collection than Mr Watson [Thomas Watson, later Watson-Wentworth, of Wentworth Woodhouse]'.3 Other letters from him containing advice on Italian travel are quoted under William Wentworth of Bretton.
In August and September 1714 Lord Strafford (as Raby had become) was writing from The Hague (where he was then ambassador) to Christopher Crowe in Leghorn concerning his commissions for four statues by Soldani and some marble columns and pedestals. The statues, copies from the antique, were, it seems, subsequently executed by G.B. Foggini,5 and these commissions may well have been placed during his visit to Italy in 1709.
1. Brown 1236, 1242 - 3. 2. Wentworth Papers 1705 - 39, ed. J.J. Cartwright, 17. 3. Ibid., 25 - 6 (letters quoted). 4. F. Vivian, Il Console Smith, 6, 7, 8, 83. 5. Add.22221, ff.259, 261. See H. Honour, Connoisseur, 141[1958]:223.