Traveling Tudor Women: Hidden History of 16th Century Female Travel

Traveling Tudor Women played a far more significant role in early modern history than most people realize. While Tudor-era travel often conjures images of noblemen on the Grand Tour or merchants crossing the Channel, thousands of English women were also on the move across Europe between 1558 and 1630. These women weren’t simply accompanying their husbands — they were pilgrims, caregivers, diplomats, traders, and political actors in their own right.

Recent research, like Christopher Higgins’ doctoral thesis Wide Wandering Women, reveals how widespread and purposeful this female mobility was. In this post, we explore the forgotten stories of Traveling Tudor Women and how their journeys shaped religion, diplomacy, and daily life in early modern Europe.

Transcript of Tudor Women on the Move: The Hidden History of Female Travelers (1558–1630)

When we picture Tudor travel, we usually imagine men, noblemen heading off on the grand tour, diplomats packing for long postings, or merchants sailing off to Antwerp. But in the later Tudor and early Stuart period, roughly 1558 to 1630, thousands of English women were traveling across Europe too, and they weren’t just tagging along.

A doctoral thesis I found by Christopher Higgins called Wide Wandering Women uncovers the hidden world of these women travelers, and I want to share this research with you. It drew on a newly built database of over 2,000 women, and Higgins showed just how often and how widely English women journeyed across the Channel and why we’ve forgotten them.

Let us dig in and discuss who these traveling women were in the spirit of summer vacations and road trips. So, they weren’t all ladies of the court. Some were aristocrats, yes, women like Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel, who traveled widely and built an art collection that rivaled any man’s. But many were merchants’ wives, diplomats’ daughters, nurses, midwives, servants, or even fleeing religious persecution.

The thing is, they often don’t show up in the official paperwork. Travel licenses usually just name the men. If a merchant got permission to go to Calais, his wife and three daughters might be with him, but they wouldn’t actually be mentioned. So Higgins painstakingly pulled together evidence from licensing records, port books, ambassadorial letters, exile lists, and convent registries to reconstruct their presence. What he found was that women weren’t rare exceptions. They were an entire hidden category of early modern travelers.

So why were they traveling? It turns out their motives were just as varied as men’s — go figure. Religion was a huge one, especially for Catholics. After the Reformation, under the reign of Elizabeth, many English women crossed to the continent to enter convents, support exiled priests, or simply live more freely. Others were helping to smuggle books or maintain communication with English Catholic networks.

Health was another major reason. Wealthier women went abroad seeking cures at spa towns, often with physicians’ letters in their hands. Higgins dedicated an entire chapter to one of these destinations, the town of Spa in present-day Belgium. There’s a good Formula One race at Spa, isn’t there? Spa-Francorchamps, which we will talk about in just a moment.

Family ties mattered too. Some women traveled to join husbands or brothers stationed abroad or to escort children to foreign schools. And in diplomatic households, women were central, managing logistics, representing their families, and serving as cultural and political intermediaries.

Finally, commerce brought many across the sea. Wives of traders and artisans went to the Low Countries and France to help run businesses, buy supplies, or oversee apprentices. Even women who weren’t officially on business were often key to making things run smoothly. In other words, Tudor and early Stuart women traveled with purpose and sometimes with considerable risk.

One of the most fascinating case studies in Higgins’ thesis is the town of Spa in what is now Belgium, like I said. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Spa was the place where people went to “take the waters”—healing springs that promised cures for everything from kidney stones to melancholy.

By the late 1500s, Spa had become something of a hotspot for English women, especially those with money, connections, or chronic health problems. But they weren’t just going for medical reasons. Spa was politically neutral, relatively tolerant, and socially active. Higgins described it as a convergence point where Protestants and Catholics, nobles and tradespeople could mingle, gossip, and network.

Unlike most destinations in early modern Europe, Spa was known for being woman-friendly. You could almost say it was the closest thing to a health resort for early modern women, but with all the politics, plotting, and religious undertones of the Tudor period still in play.

These women often got travel licenses from the Privy Council, and Higgins found records of dozens of them, sometimes traveling in groups. Some went more than once. Clearly, Spa wasn’t just a place to get well—it was the place to be and be seen.

Another group of well-traveled women was the wives of ambassadors. Now, don’t just picture them smiling politely at court banquets. These women, often called ambassadresses, were running large, complex households overseas, and their roles could include everything from arranging housing and managing staff to handling correspondence, exchanging diplomatic gifts, and even dealing with tricky local customs.

Take Lady Carleton, for example, the wife of Sir Dudley Carleton, the ambassador to Venice and later The Hague. She had to maintain relationships with elite European families, host events, and act as a stand-in for her husband when he was away. Higgins showed how these women had informal diplomatic power and often wielded it more subtly and effectively than their husbands.

And it wasn’t just the wives. Female staff like ladies-in-waiting, governesses, and even nurses would travel as well. They played vital roles in maintaining the daily rhythm of these overseas households. In a world where women were supposedly confined to the domestic sphere, ambassadresses were running the show abroad.

So what did people think about these traveling women? Of course, not everybody approved. The phrase “wide wandering women” wasn’t meant as a compliment. It was a sneer, a warning that women who traveled were morally suspect. Some travel guides and moralists described them as frivolous, vain, or even dangerous. But not everybody felt that way.

Some were praised in poetry and correspondence, especially if they traveled for pious or diplomatic reasons. Public opinion was changing very slowly, as it became clear that these women were not going away—while they were going away, because they were traveling—but they weren’t disappearing from public life. The traveling women weren’t going away.

So anyway, Christopher Higgins’ thesis opens up a world that’s been hiding in plain sight: the world of the English woman on the move. These weren’t tourists. They were caregivers, strategists, cultural brokers, and sometimes even quiet rebels. They crossed borders—not just geographic ones, but social, religious, and political. Now, thanks to work like this, they’re finally getting their passports stamped in the historical record where they belong.