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Royal Tunbridge Wells
had a very pretty party to Hever Castle yesterday, which perhaps you remember, where Anne Boleyn used to live, before she lost her head. We drove there, and rode home. It was a most beautiful day." The Duchess of Kent was again at Tunbridge Wells in August 1849. Thackeray, then a boy at Charterhouse, went by coach from the Bolt-in-Tun, Fleet Street, to spend his summer holidays in 1823 at Tunbridge Wells, and in the same year no less a person than William Cobbett spent a night there and found some difficulty in getting away. " By making a great stir in rousing waiters and ' Boots ' and maids, and by leaving behind me the name of c a------noisy, troublesome fellow,' " he wrote at the time, " I got clear of c The Wells,' and out of the contagion of its Wen-engendered inhabitants, time enough to meet the first rays of the sun, on that hill that you come up in order to get to Frant, which is a most beautiful little village, at about two miles from ' The Wells.' " Macaulay knew the watering-place well. He had been there in his boyhood, and had spent many hours in Nash's reading-room " in the old corner looking out upon the heath, reading the old novels that lined the shelves." He was 278 |
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