SOCIETY AT ROYAL TUNBRIDGE WELLS - Online Book

People, Society & Culture of Tunbridge Wells in the 18th Century & later.

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Since the Eighteenth Century
machinations of her enemies. " That same evening (as the Duke of Sussex returned) there was a ball at the Assembly Rooms," Lord Albemarle, who accompanied His Royal Highness, has put on record, " but at midnight the local authorities, who were of the adverse faction, took away our fiddles, and the Master of the Ceremonies withdrew his countenance from us by retiring. . . . We elected Mr. Douglas Kinnaird our provisional Master of the Ceremonies, and under his tuition went through the figures of the quadrille without instrumental music, humming the tunes, as well as our laughter would enable us to do so." Royalty was again at the spa in 1834 in the persons of the Duchess of Kent and the Princess Victoria, staying at the big house in Calverley Park, which was afterwards the Calverley Hotel. "To Tunbridge Wells we also went, living at a house called Mount Pleasant, now an Hotel. Many pleasant days were spent here, and the return to Kensington in October or November was generally a day of tears," thus the Queen in 1872 recalled the place, from which she had eight-and-thirty years earlier, on September 14, 1834, written to her uncle the King of the Belgians. " We
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