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Development of Tunbridge Wells
by having masques and dances performed before her. One day she went for a walk, and, at some distance from the camp, being weary, she reclined beneath a birch - tree, where refreshment was served to her. She then ordered that a stone should be erected on that spot as a memorial of her travels in the county of Kent. An inscription was carved upon it by one of her suite, but this was subsequently obliterated by a Roundhead in the days of the Commonwealth. "Such generally," moralised Burr, a hundred and thirty years later, " are the effects of licentious rebellion, which is at all times destructive of the arts, and attended with ruin and confusion." 1 On the spot was presently erected an ale-house called The Queen's Stone, which, however, later hung out the sign of The Blue Bell. The attempts to commemorate the visit to "The Wells" of this regal lady were apparently doomed to failure, for though Dr. Rowzee, a physician practising at Ashford in Kent, in his treatise, published in 1632, entitled " The Queenes Wells, that is, a Treatise of the nature and vertues of Tun-bridge Water, mentions that " those Springs may justly be called, as some doe call them now,
1 History of Tunbridge Wells, 26.
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