The year after the King’s accession to the throne Princess Amelia went to Bath to drink the waters, attended by Lady Pomfret. Royal visits to Bath were as yet few and far between, indeed the only royal personages who had visited Bath before the Princess were Queen Anne (before she came to the throne) with her husband Prince George of Denmark.[33] Princess Amelia was received by the Mayor and Corporation in full state, and a hundred young men on horseback met her coach at the North Gate and formed an escort to her lodgings. Bath had already become a gay and fashionable place, and many persons of quality and of no quality at all, who suffered from gout, rheumatism, the results of dissipation, or that mysterious ailment which the ladies of the eighteenth century called “vapours,” flocked thither to drink the waters and kill the time. The pump room and assembly-rooms were “elegantly fitted” and a band played daily. Breakfast parties were much the vogue at “one and twenty pence a piece,” and the forenoon was passed in drinking the waters and listening to the concert. In the afternoon there were the bowling greens and the promenade in the gardens skirting the river, the toy shops and the coffee-houses where the _beau monde_ loitered, drinking “dishes of tea” and eating Bath buns. In the evening there were cards and dancing--and there was scandal all day long. Bath was then under the reign of “King” Nash, who had become its _arbiter elegantiarum_. Opinions differ as to the services Nash rendered to Bath. Some say he made the place; others that he merely cloaked the grossness and licentiousness of the fashionable world there by throwing over it a garb of mock ceremony. Certainly Bath was a hotbed of gambling, and many undesirable characters were attracted thither simply by the high play.