Others of more plebeian estate preferred the seclusion of an arbour shaded with climbing shrubs and sycamore, where sweethearts could chat, or, if so minded, enjoy a late breakfast of plum-cake and ale. Older people retired to the coffee-house to smoke and talk politics over their coffee, but the man about town and his female friends were to be found deep at play in the raffling shop, or speculating in the Royal Oak Lottery.[13] Again and again it was the Board that won, while the projector and the man with cogged dice in his pocket looked cynically on. At about eleven a.m. the dancing began. Music for dancing all day long was advertised in 1700 for every Monday and Thursday of the summer season. But the music of that period seems to have been only the harmony of three or four by no means accomplished fiddlers, and it is doubtful if the dancing ever continued beyond the morning and afternoon.
In the early years of the eighteenth century the Spa seems to have gone out of fashion,[14] and in 1714 The Field Spy speaks of it as a deserted place:—
The ancient drooping trees unprun’d appear’d;
No ladies to be seen; no fiddles heard.
The patronage of royal personages at last revived its fortunes. In the months of May and June 1733, the Princess Amelia, daughter of George II., and her sister Caroline came regularly to drink the waters. On some occasions the princesses were saluted by a discharge of twenty-one guns, and the gardens were thronged. On one morning the proprietor took £30, and sixteen hundred people are said to have been present. New Tunbridge Wells once more, for a few years, became the vogue. Pinchbeck, the toyman, prepared a view of the gardens which he sold as a mount for his fans. A song of the time, The Charms of Dishabille, which George Bickham illustrated with another view of the gardens, gives a picture of the scene (1733–1738):—
Behold the Walks, a chequer’d shade,
In the gay pride of green array’d;
How bright the sun! the air how still!
In wild confusion there we view
Red ribbons grouped with aprons blue;