Aristocrats (6 page)
At the beginning of the eighteenth century Bath was still a small town largely dependent on a moribund wool industry. But it had two natural resources which, combined with the money of speculators and the vagaries of fashion, quickly made its fortune: the local Bath stone, which glowed golden in the damp west-country air, and hot springs of slightly sulphurous mineral water. For two thousand years the sick, the hypochondriac and the valetudinarian had drunk and immersed themselves in the waters. The Roman baths had long since been buried by modern substitutes. In the eighteenth century pride of place went to the Pump Room, where warm mineral water was sold by the glass, and the King’s Bath. This giant communal cistern was right under the windows of the Pump Room, open to the gaze of all. Patients sat in the bath with hot water right up to their necks. Men were enveloped in brown linen suits. Women wore petticoats and jackets of the same material. They sat side by side in a hot, faintly sulphurous mist. Limp cotton handkerchiefs caught the sweat which dribbled down the bathers’ faces; afterwards they were tucked away in the brims of patients’ hats. Lightweight bowls of copper floated perilously on the water. Inside them vials of
oil and sweet smelling pomanders bobbed up and down. On a cold morning the bathers in their caps and hats looked to the curious onlookers pressed against the glass above them like perspiring mushrooms rising into the thick gaseous air. A nobleman, flushed and puce in the face lay against the side of the bath chatting to – who knew, perhaps a prosperous butcher or even a well-to-do highwayman who had come to Bath to spend some money and lie low. The brown linen covered a multitude of sores and sins.
By 1735 Bath had become a fashionable resort. Lodgings for patients and their families, for doctors and portrait painters and for servants and coachmen were going up higgledy-piggledy. They were crowded with aristocrats, bored in the summer off season, with sick old people, barren wives, amusement seekers and fortune hunters. Like the theatre, whose spectacle it mirrored, Bath was open to all who could pay. Merchants and peers rubbed shoulders at the card tables and jostled prostitutes, charlatans and quacks in the street. Strange alliances and bad marriages were made in the baths; hot water heated the passions and dissolved social distinctions. Hypochondria and vanity, those old associates, were well catered for. Bath was bursting with apothecaries, quacks and doctors touting the latest cures. In their train came painters in pastel and oil, dancing masters, fencing teachers, mantua makers and milliners. They helped patients, their friends and relatives fill the spare hours between bathing sessions, card parties, concerts and the theatre.
It fell to the Master of Ceremonies to impose some kind of order and some semblance of social distinction on this chaos. Under Beau Nash, who had the job in the early decades of the century, a ritual of greeting and talking, bathing and dancing was instituted. People of high social rank were met by a peal of bells when they first arrived in the town. Once they were settled the Master of Ceremonies called and described the coming social attractions. Music began at eight or nine o’clock in the Pump Room where patients went early for their
first dose of the waters, measured out by the pumper in glasses of ascending sizes. At midday, every day except Sundays, there was dancing in the Assembly Rooms, which were built in 1708. Balls were organised twice a week, concerts every other night. Everybody in Bath had time on their hands and anybody could buy tickets to these public entertainments. Despite its mimicry of the London season the social scene at Bath was a mêlée and a scrum.
Architecture too was putting up a façade of order and dignity to hide thieving, quackery, grief and pain. Outside the Pump Room and the Baths the sick spilled out on to the pavement. Paralysed by strokes, swollen with dropsy and blinded by diabetes, patients were wheeled about the streets, their bandaged legs stuck out in front of them, their sightless eyes swivelling giddily about. Lame soldiers hobbled past them. Around these cripples swirled a crowd of nurses and doctors. Anxious relatives passed the time of day with acquaintances and looked for signs of improvement. Healthy hangers-on sneaked into pastry shops or made for the parks. Beside the pavements orderly terraces were rising, their fronts decorated by ranks of tall, upright columns. The regularity, certainty and serenity of the Palladian terraces built in Bath after 1725 contradicted and contained the fear, the sickness and the social chaos they surveyed.
The monumental Palladian building at Bath was the brainchild of the architect John Wood, who moved there in 1727. Wood was a visionary who gradually imposed on the town a fantastic dream of using domestic architecture to re-create what he saw as the mystical harmony embodied in the great buildings of the past. In his vision, Bath was to be re-created, using the medium of Italian-derived Palladianism, as a place where buildings echoed the measured and mystical deliberations of a
mélange
of great leaders of former times, Druids and ancient Britons worshipping at stone circles, Romans in the Forum and the Coliseum, Greeks in the amphitheatre. The new city was to be senatorial and magical at the same
time. Dignity and mystical harmony would replace, or at least disguise, the dissolution of gambling and death. Wood planned a Forum, a Circus and an Imperial Gymnasium. Health and activity were the keynotes of Wood’s planned city. He described the Circus as a place ‘for the exhibition of sport’. Athletes would display their prowess in the gymnasium.
Perhaps these temples of health and ritualised activity were too grotesque ever to be built in a city whose prosperity was founded on the sick and the lame. But some of Wood’s schemes did come off, and his son, who built the stately Royal Crescent in the 1760s, inherited his father’s notions of grandeur without his eccentric fantasy of a temple to youth and health in the midst of age and illness.
Caroline found lodgings in South Parade, one side of the Forum, which had been completed in 1743. It was a fashionable place to stay, close to open fields but only a short walk from the Pump Room and baths. Caroline was pleased with her lodgings, but she worried about Henry and fretted over Ste. ‘You don’t expect I suppose to hear I am in vast good spirits yet,’ she wrote on her first day there. ‘You know I always tense myself with some melancholy apprehensions of what may happen. The two things that hang on my spirits at present are the fear that you should not love me when I return to you and the fear of Ste’s catching the small pox.’ Caroline was anxious and alone. Without Henry to reassure her about Ste and to reiterate his love, her fear grew bigger and bigger. ‘If anything should happen to you or him, or you should grow not to love me I believe I should go mad. He is infinitely dearer to me than anything in the world except you. Do comfort me about it in your letter. Pray, pray, dearest angel, write often to me and believe me tho’ I do vex you sometimes I love you with the truest and tenderest affection.’
The next day Caroline left her card with Lady Bell Finch, Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Amelia, George II’s unmarried daughter. Her visit was a matter of duty, one of the rituals by
which Bath high society tried to hold its head above the mass of humanity thronging the streets. ‘I went according to the form here,’ Caroline grumbled. ‘I did not much care to wait on her as she never visited me in town but was told it was necessary for those who went to court.’
Bath offered Caroline a chance to rest as much as a cure for her stomach trouble. For the first week she couldn’t drink the waters because she was menstruating. A month later she had to stop because she thought she was pregnant and was too embarrassed to ask a doctor if pregnancy and the waters went together. ‘I can’t possibly ask the doctor about drinking the waters (for its so vastly queer to have you come for a week and to be breeding immediately that I will keep it a vast secret for some time if it should prove so) but I know it is not right for Garnier when I came to Bath begged me to be very sure I was not breeding.’ Instead she walked about in the fields around the town and played endless dull and soothing games of cards for small stakes. Cards gave Caroline all her life a modest thrill of the forbidden. She disapproved of them in principle but she was easily persuaded to join a table. At Bath she justified herself as an observer of the exotic social mix that thronged assemblies and hung around the games. ‘My whist party (for I could not avoid playing a little) were Lady Fitzwilliam … Lord Brooke and some other men, of which there are a curious collection here. Lady Bateman and Lady Bell Finch have a highwayman and a tape merchant in their quincy party.’ She sat to Hoare, one of the crowd of painters who made a living from the boredom of Bath’s wealthier visitors and she read a good deal. Philosophy and history were interspersed with political pamphlets and newspapers. ‘I have read le Canapé, couleur de feu. ’Tis the filthiest most disagreeable book I ever read,’ she wrote with relish, and she re-read Clarendon’s
History of the Rebellion
with more sober enjoyment, siding with its royalist apologia which explained the rebellion as a series of accidents rather than the result of monarchical despotism.
Mostly she was engrossed with Ste. Fears about his catching smallpox subsided when she had a more obvious complaint to worry about. Ste got a cough. At the same time, Henry sent news from London that little Harry had died of a fever. All Caroline’s grief was diverted into terror that Ste would die too. ‘I’m so frightened about Ste. Do tell me what to do if I should lose him. I could never be happy again. My dear angel, you don’t know what I suffer. I think there was too much done for my dear little child in town.’
Caroline hinted that Harry had been killed with kindness and perhaps a surfeit of drugs too. Certainly by the mid-eighteenth century fashionable society was drowning in a tidal wave of potions and syrups. Avalanches of powders and hailstorms of pills engulfed the sick and the well alike. Doctors were setting up offices by the mansions of the rich. They were well connected and well organised, but the opinions and prescriptions they gave for large fees were scarcely distinguishable from the cheaper remedies offered by quacks who toured the streets. Do-it-yourself health manuals poured from the presses into nurseries and libraries. They offered instant consultations with the written word of famous physicians. With them came a new medical language which dressed up seventeenth-century theories of the humours with a new verbal patina that threw a glittering cloak of wisdom and impenetrability over its initiates.
Despite her reservations about Harry’s treatment, Caroline was dazzled by doctors and struggled to master this new language. ‘Lady Curzon … lost a little boy of a year old that had the whooping cough and she says when they opened him up they found he had a twisting of the guts which they attributed to his taking too much of the oxymel of squills and convulsive powder mixed with it. She said it had what she called excoriated his bowels. I don’t understand the word but beg your advice about it.’ Austere though she professed to be in matters of food or alcohol, medical ingestion called forth in her almost boundless extravagance. Multiple consultations,
powders to ward off illness, pills to carry it away, repeated visits from doctors: all were ordered and paid for. Medicine had become a luxury commodity in the new world of goods.
At some point consumption and caring were intermingled. Desperate parents watching beloved children killed in hours by raging fevers or crippled and stunted by disease easily came to believe that doing something was better than inactive, agonising waiting for the workings of God’s will. More doctors rattled through the night streets, more pills changed hands, more money, more medical talk and, by and large, no more cures. Doctors had few spectacular successes, although smallpox inoculation was eagerly used and advertised by the aristocracy and demonstrated that cures were possible. But doctors both benefited from and advertised new attitudes towards sickness and the body. Old fatalistic notions about illness were being swept away. Hope and prescriptions were replacing inertia and prayer. That hope was often only a white powder in a screw of paper that had been given the sanction of the regular copperplate of a medical hand. In the apothecary’s shop, drugs were like luminous beacons. Syrups lay thickly in crystal vials with cut-glass stoppers. Plum-red, royal-blue and emerald-green decanters twinkled at customers from the windows. Conical mounds of powder, pall-black, earthy-brown and bluey white, squatted on the shelves. All beckoned onlookers with promises of action and cure.
Caroline was soon an ardent believer in the new medicine. Ste was its beneficiary and, in the end, its victim. When he started coughing and twitching in Bath in December 1746, Caroline sent at once for the local apothecary. Later on she brought in two well-known Bath doctors, Pearce and Harrington, who confidently announced that the little boy had worms. Caroline still wanted the opinion of her London doctors. ‘I should be easier if I was near Garnier and Truesdale for I have a great opinion of them.’ Nevertheless she pressed on with the prescribed cures. Ethiops mineral, a black powder
which turned white in the light, was followed by calomel. Calomel was less emollient than it sounded; in fact it was Ethiops mineral under another name and consisted of pure mercury sulphide. Oxymel of squills, a syrup concocted of vinegar, honey and ground up bulbs of the scilla plant, was soon added to the mercury. Ste was learning to talk and take medicine at the same time. He bravely endured blistering and, as a coda, was given mellipidus, a preparation made of ground-up woodlice. Caroline’s doctors had some trouble getting this because, they said, live woodlice were hard to find in the country. Ste’s illness was the beginning of a long torment for himself and his mother.
All the medicines Ste was given had a similar effect. They brought things out of the body and, the story went, purged it of poisons. There were powders, like mercury sulphide, which made the patient vomit. Others produced diarrhoea, fevers and sweats. Bleeding and cupping drew off excess blood. Blisters and boils gathered pus and poisons to the surface of the skin. Medicines allowed the body to express illness and produce its own graphic account of distress. Caroline and her sisters saw this bodily expression as a close relative of emotion. Emotion was the expression of feeling, pain the expression of sickness. Expressing emotion also had a physical component, it was in part the expulsion of bad feeling, which ensured that destructive feelings did not get bottled up in the body. So tears assuaged grief and simultaneously indicated that the body was expelling harmful feelings that might otherwise cause illness. New medical techniques that stressed action rather than inertia sat easily with Caroline’s belief in the value of emotion; getting out passion and getting out poison could go hand in hand.