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Royal Tunbridge Wells
fiddle and the clarionet. I can find but one expression to describe the scene—it was a moral vertigo."
It was the desire to try their luck at the tables which Webster had set up that induced Nash and some of his friends to go to Bath during the season of 1705. His good fortune did not desert him : he won, it is said, a thousand pounds at gaming, and became so intimate with the Master of the Ceremonies that he sometimes acted as deputy for that official. Nash's star was clearly in the ascendant, for Webster was killed in a duel: whereupon the Corporation invited Nash to become King of Bath. He who had gone to the Somersetshire watering-place for a few weeks' frolic, remained to rule over it as unquestioned autocrat for nearly three-score years.
Elsewhere the present writer has traced at length the development of Bath under Beau Nash, and shown how licence was exchanged for decorum, and courtesy replaced boorish-ness. One of the first innovations introduced by the new Master of the Ceremonies was to order the bells to peal to announce the arrival of new-comers, and the band presently to serenade them: a custom humorously 140 |
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