For members of the English nobility in the 18th and 19th centuries, a glamorous Grand Tour of Europe was almost a rite of passage. These cultural expeditions to the continent came for adolescents just coming to an end in their education, providing a chance to broaden one’s horizons and further one’s development through an immersion in the artistic environments of Italy and France.
There might have been a time when Steve Borthwick imagined his squad as a sort of 21st-century Byron or Shelley, an English entity of obvious talent ready to take the next step on consecutive weekends in Rome and Paris. Reeling after back-to-back defeats to Scotland and Ireland, this short sojourn takes on an altogether different meaning – not so much a finishing school for the upwardly mobile, but instead a jaunt upon which England must halt their Six Nations slide.
