"The pretender (whom you desire an account of)" : curious travellers and the exiled Stuarts in Rome

Abstract

The Stuart Court in Rome fascinated eighteenth-century English visitors to Italy. These curious travellers were keen to report sightings of the exiled royal family in their letters home to their equally curious relatives and friends. This article considers varying attitudes to the Stuarts, and the associated politics of identity, revealed in the correspondence of five English writers - Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, Joseph Spence, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Lady Henrietta Pomfret - who visited Rome between 1738 and 1745, a period identified as ''the heyday of the exiled court." Their letters home demonstrate that their attitudes to the prohibited Stuart court were often more complex, and sometimes more ambivalent, than one might assume from their political allegiances. The article concludes with examining a hoax letter that cleverly caricatures the "curious traveller" in Rome by sending up the anxieties associated with maintaining a safe distance from the exiled Stuarts.