Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [524]
It was early afternoon when Adam arrived at Bath. He had decided to remain there the night.
And Bath, too, was a revelation.
For thirteen centuries nothing much had been done about the spa town of Aquae Sulis. At the start of the century, in the reign of Queen Anne, the place had been little more than a run-down provincial town with a small trade surrounding its mineral springs. The huge complex of Roman buildings with their magnificent halls and baths had all but disappeared under centuries of mud.
And then that inveterate – and successful – gambler, Richard Nash arrived.
It was the Bath created by Beau Nash that Adam Shockley now entered with wonder.
There were elegant streets, squares and crescents, all built in the classical Georgian style with pediments, urns, pilasters, like so many Greek or Roman temples and all done in the mellow, creamy-grey stone of the region; there were the assembly rooms where, like the great Mr Harris at Sarum, Beau Nash had presided over the exquisite social gatherings he had so carefully fashioned himself, and where the fashionable could gamble when they were not taking the cure. There was the hot bath, the king’s bath, the great pump room where both sexes, discreetly segregated when necessary, immersed themselves in the curative saline springs or drank the mineral waters. There were obelisks to commemorate royal visits. There was even the Royal Mineral Water Hospital where the poor could obtain treatment. And, crowning glory, a quarter of a century ago, a little before the great Beau Nash had died, parts of the old Roman baths themselves had come to light.
Adam walked the streets in a daze. He forgot that his scarlet uniform was unquestionably shabby; that his grey bob wig looked as though the moths, having tasted it once, had left it alone, that his neckcloth was no longer gleaming white and that his shoes had old-fashioned buckles. As he saw the fashionable world pass him by, men carried in sedan chairs, women wearing fantastic piles of hair, with their footmen and flunkeys everywhere in attendance, as he stared at the broad classical vistas of the town, so strange after the long years overseas, he murmured:
“I might be in Rome.”
He might indeed. And it was only because he was now returning home almost as a stranger, that he saw it so clearly.
Not for nothing was the century of elegance known as the Augustan age. For did not Britain, like the Rome of that great emperor, have an empire of which she was the civilised centre? Even if America was almost lost, there was still Canada, India, the West Indian islands, Gibraltar. Were not her Georgian buildings severely classical in design, her country houses modelled on those of the Italian Palladio – and therefore Roman? What did her children study if not Latin and Greek? Young men of means visited Italy on their Grand Tour. And when men of education debated in Parliament, did they not drop Latin tags in their speeches like so many senators, even if they had long since forgotten how to construe? A gentleman not only collected classical busts in his house, like as not he had one made of himself. In literature, the late poet Alexander Pope was as great a master of metre and wit as any Latin poet of the silver age. Had not the elegant periods of Addison’s prose been as well-judged as Cicero’s in the greatest days of Rome?
It seemed to Adam Shockley that they probably had. It was not the Renaissance in England but the eighteenth century that was the true classical age, and poets, architects, painters, and ordinary gentlemen were out to prove it. Why, even the religious tolerance, the easy scepticism of the English Church towards other sects, exactly paralleled the amused tolerance of civilised pagan Rome to the cults of the people they conquered. ‘Rome has seen it all’. So it seemed had England. Rational, sceptical,