Wyndham versus Bonaparte : the Tuscan crisis of 1796-7

Abstract

'Papa dined at Mr Wyndham's where he got so thoroughly drunk that he was obliged to get into bed as soon as he returned home.' Betsey Wynne's father, here described in her diary, had brought his family from Ireland on an extensive grand tour of Europe which, keeping always one step ahead of the French revolutionary armies, landed them in the early summer of 1796 at Florence, there to find themselves almost the only British visitors. Hence they received more than the usual share of attention given to visiting compatriots by George Ill's minister to the Tuscan court, William Frederick Wyndham. In addition to putting up with a drunken dinner guest, he presented Betsey's parents to the Grand Duchess and lent them his box at the Teatro Nuovo. These attentions were understood to be part of an envoy's duties; indeed one of his predecessors, Sir Horace Mann, accredited to Tuscany for over forty years, found that acting as host to the English and the Florentines absorbed most of his time and all his· income. But the warfare and revolutionary turmoil in northern Italy, which had driven the Wynnes south to the safety of neutral Florence, was presenting British diplomacy with new problems. There seemed to be two worlds in uneasy juxtaposition: the old world of the Grand Tour with a morality still strict about the outward observance of religion, in other ways lax, a society where opera going and court functions loomed large and the poorer classes counted for very little; by contrast a menacing new world of plots, widespread unrest, a prospect of society turned upside down at the cost of bloodshed, heralding an order barely distinguishable from anarchy. Wyndham had somehow to cope with both these worlds.