Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 8th Baronet

Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 8th Baronet (7 March 1745 – 11 February 1810) was born on 7 March 1745 on the Continent into a devout Catholic gentry family based in Yorkshire. Despite receiving a solid Catholic education at institutions in northern France and Italy, Gascoigne would later renounce his religion to become a Foxite Whig Member of Parliament. Prior to his apostasy he travelled extensively as a Grand Tourist throughout much of Spain, France and Italy in the company of the noted travel writer Henry Swinburne, who would later record their journeys in two popular travel guides Travels through Spain in the Years 1775 and 1776 (1779) and Travels in the Two Sicilies, 1777–1780 (1783–5). Together they gained close access to the leading courts of Europe, particularly in Spain and Naples. An honorary member of the Board of Agriculture, Gascoigne was an important advocate of agricultural reform as well as a considerable coal owner who helped pioneer technological developments in the extractive industries. He is emblematic of how movements within the Enlightenment were having a major influence on the attitudes, activities and outlook of many leading English Catholic gentry families in the period.

Sir Thomas Gascoigne was born at the English Benedictine convent at Cambrai, the third son of Sir Edward Gascoigne, 6th Baronet of Parlington Hall, Yorkshire, and his wife, Mary (1711–1764), daughter and heiress of Sir Francis Hungate of Saxton, Yorkshire. The Gascoigne family were a staunch Catholic family and Sir Thomas was raised, and remained, a Catholic until his apostasy for a political prefferment and a seat in Parliament in June 1780. He succeeded his elder brother, Sir Edward Gascoigne, 7th Bart., who died of smallpox in Paris in January 1762. He was educated alongside postulants at the English Benedictine school at St Gregory's Priory, Douai, and in 1762, as a result of concerns about his indolence and lack of application, was transferred with a private tutor to study philosophy at the Collège des Quatre Nations, Paris. Briefly visiting England and his estates for the first time in late 1763, Gascoigne returned to the Continent in January 1764 to attend the Academy at Turin, with a new tutor Harry Fermor, which marked in essence the beginning of his first continental Grand Tour - a tour that was designed to introduce him to both elite British and Italian society. At Turin, Gascoigne made the acquaintance of the King of Sardinia Charles Emmanuel III, the British charge d'affaires Louis Dutens, the distinguished English Catholic natural philosopher John Turberville Needham, and the historian Edward Gibbon; becoming a member of Gibbon's Roman Club upon his return to England later that year. Following his time at the Academy, Gascoigne embarked upon a broader tour of Italy in the company of two eccentric friends he had made at Turin, John Damer and his brother George Damer. Sadly, this first tour was to end in tragedy when in March 1765 Gascoigne was implicated, along with George Damer, in the murder of a coachman in Rome. In the aftermath the Governor of Rome, Cardinal Eneo Silvio Piccolomini, assisted Gascoigne and Damer's escape and even obtained a papal pardon for them from Pope Clement XIII on 6 September 1765.

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