54 C.C. NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 



III. was advised to try the effects of Cheltenham waters and in the 

 July of that year visited the town with the Queen and three of the 

 Princesses. They had their quarters in Bayshill House, lent by Lord 

 Fauconberg, and the King, who contemplated an annual visit, made 

 large additions to it in order to secure greater space. Space was cer- 

 tainly needed, for Miss Fanny Burney, who accompanied the Queen, 

 gives a lively account of the cramped character of the royal quarters. 

 The Queen had to use the drawing room to dress and undress in ; the 

 little court had to have its tea in the passage ; the pages slept in out- 

 houses, and the maids a quarter of a mile off in the town. But the 

 discomfits of the interior were compensated in Miss Burney's mind 

 by the prettiness of the landscape, the fields sloping down to the 

 town, and the charming walks round the Spa. The King used to 

 begin his day betimes, drinking the water at the Spa at six, and then 

 promenading in the Walks. He was everywhere received with raptu- 

 rous loyalty ; the crowd following him down the High Street when he 

 came away from the Church on Sunday, where to celebrate the royal 

 visit the hymn was performed on the bassoon. He seems to have 

 enjoyed his two-months' visit hugely and came away saying that he 

 felt no worse, but if anything rather belter. A year afterwards when 

 in Dorsetshire he made a remark which will be re-echoed by many 

 here, that the finest part of his dominions was the Vale of Gloucester. 



The town now became the rage. The Morning Post of the same 

 year tell us that the fashions throughout the kingdom were Chelten- 

 hamised : Cheltenham bonnets, buckles, buttons being 'all the go.' 

 The town went up by leaps and bounds ; everybody that was anybody 

 visited Cheltenham during the next thirty years. At Cambray stayed 

 the exile Bourbons, Louis XVHL among them. The fat man with 

 dark intellectual features, with every mark of disipation, is C. J. Fox. 

 The handsome, distinguished man with padded limbs, seeking to dis- 

 guise the trail of one of his legs is Byron. But of all the visitors the 

 one received with the greatest enthusiasm was the Duke of Wellington ; 

 he used to stay in a house now pulled down, the tradition of which 

 still survives in the name of Wellington Street, and in the gardens an 

 obelisk was erected to commemorate the victories of the great Gene- 

 ral. It was sold for building materials in 1843 ! 



The fashionable residences were in the High Street and Cambray. 

 Early in this century the Montpellier and Lansdown estates were 

 bought for a purely nominal price ; previous to that they were so wild 

 and uncultivated that they were regarded as extra parochial and not 

 rated. On this estate in 1809 a Spa was built, with its adjoining 



