Not Your Average Beauty Spa: Mineral Waters in Seventeenth-Century England

Susannah Lyon-Whaley

Susannah Lyon-Whaley is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Auckland. Her thesis examines nature in the iconography of Catherine of Braganza. Her research interests include the natural world and its representation, women at the Stuart court, and the court and empire. She has an article forthcoming in 2022 on Stuart queens' medical treatment at the spa in La Revue Histoire, Médecine et Santé, and has written book reviews for The Burlington Magazine and Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies.

Front page to physician Edward Jorden’s A Discourse of Naturall Bathes, and Minerall Waters (1632). Jorden’s book is one of the best-known seventeenth-century texts on English spas and exemplifies the strong medical theory behind the use of spas.

Nowadays, the word ‘spa’ conjures images of fluffy dressing gowns, bubbling waters, scented oils, perhaps a facial, and steamy relaxation. By contrast, the early modern spa was not a place to replenish beauty, but rather health. Like the famous waters at Spa in Belgium and Bourbon in France, English spas were naturally occurring hot or cold springs thought to be impregnated with minerals found in the bowels of the earth. The waters’ perceived benefits for a range of medical conditions could be derived by drinking them over an extended period, or bathing in them. In 1613 and 1615, the queen consort of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Anna of Denmark visited Bath for her painful gout and arthritis, but another popular use was to regulate the female body’s monthly terms and to help supposedly barren women to conceive. For this reason, Anna’s successors Henrietta Maria, Catherine of Braganza, Mary of Modena, and later the queen regnant Anne, all visited spas such as Wellingborough, Bath and Tunbridge Wells. In 1687, Patrick Madan described the waters of Tunbridge Wells as a ‘Universal Remedy’ that cured the bodies’ impurities, while Thomas Guidott’s treatise on Bath promised that ‘Bathing is of great use after hard Labour, and mightily refresheth all weary Persons’, highlighting the wide social strata who might make use of the waters.[1] Much of the water’s medical efficacy was attached to its ability to purge through sweat, urine, and stools. As such, visiting a spa could be a chore rather than a pleasure, an experience to be endured in the hope of relief.[2] At the same time, the spa was a place of social interaction, and England’s well-established spas offered plenty of leisure activities, including walks, markets, and dancing, to those well enough to partake in them.

Spas were accessible to all, from those with leprosy to kings and queens. The detail of Thomas Johnson’s engraving included here shows the King and Queen’s Bath at Bath, open to the air and to a variety of bathers. Men and women lean over the balustrades, watching the bathers. A little boy, nude, jumps into the bath. Some sit and others float. But much like health treatments today, the rich could afford more and better, as well as having the time to devote to their health. Anna of Denmark and successive queens took the waters on the advice of a physician, who could prescribe which waters they needed and in what quantities. Doctors congregated at spas, and were available to anyone who could afford their services, but royals also brought their own physicians with them. By the Restoration, courtiers and gentile visitors to the spa such as Samuel Pepys and Celia Fiennes were bathing in the Cross Bath, a slightly cooler and more secluded bath with high walls, which could be emptied of all other bathers when required for royal use.[3]

Detail of Thomas Johnson’s drawing The King's bath and the Queen's bath at Bath… 1675.
© The Trustees of the British Museum, 1881,0611.85

‘And by and by, though we designed to have done before company come, much company come; very fine ladies; and the manner pretty enough, only methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies together in the same water. … Strange to see how hot the water is; and in some places, though this is the most temperate bath, the springs so hot as the feet not able to endure. But strange to see, when women and men herein, that live all the season in these waters, that cannot but be parboiled, and look like the creatures of the bath!’[4]

After bathing, patients who could afford it were wrapped well and carried home to sweat in bed – Pepys even describes music being played to him.[5] Meanwhile, at cold water springs such as Tunbridge Wells, patients drank spring waters slowly while walking outdoors, the exercise refreshing their bodies and allowing them to digest the waters. Evenings spent dancing and in company were a further part of the relaxation the spa offered.

All this said, the spa was certainly no modern day beauty resort. Or was it? In the early modern period, inner health was reflected in luminous skin, rosy cheeks, and possibly even healthy, shiny hair.[6] Therefore, the elite women flocking to the English spas for medical reasons, or to attend their royal mistresses, may have hoped to return to London restored in looks as well as health. While Pepys describes some bathers as ‘parboiled’, a poem published in 1733 on the cold waters at Scarborough described spas’ effects on patients’ health manifested in their restored looks:

‘First at the Well they take the brackish Glass,
And oft repeat, (for quick the Water pass)
This purifies the Blood from Vicious Taints,
And the Wan Cheek with blooming Beauty paints’.

Literary historian Sophie Vasset states that this beauty ‘is the visible version of the invisible work of the waters on the blood.’[7] The heat of the waters in the baths undoubtedly affected a physical response as well, not only restoring health, but bringing colour to the cheeks as an immediate after effect of taking the waters, colour that was sustained by the opportunities for fresh air and exercise spas offered. The memoirs of the Count de Gramont describe one beautiful lady as ‘entirely English, made up of lilies and roses, of snow and milk, as to colour’. A little later, arriving at Tunbridge Wells, Gramont admired the ‘young, fair, fresh-colored country girls’ he saw selling seasonal produce in the market.[8] The attention to describing the girls’ colour connotes their beauty and health (in a way particular to early modern English standards of beauty), and gives an impression of the benefits the spa’s locale, waters, and its fresh air could offer. After all, classical medical theory still prevalent in early modern England suggested that people’s temperaments, qualities, and health, were all affected by the food, drink, and air they ingested.[9]  

A depiction of a group of ladies and gentlemen at Islington Spa, advertised as the ‘New Tunbridge Wells’, shows the spa as a place to show off a beautiful face. The Charms of Dishabille; or New Tunbridge Wells at Islington, music sheet (detail), 1733. © The Trustees of the British Museum, 1880,1113.4851

If the spa helped restore and replenish health and beauty, it also offered an opportunity to display beauty. Well before the era of Jane Austen, spas and their surroundings were places to see and be seen. Gramont also wrote that:

‘the dishabille of the bath is a great convenience for those ladies who, strictly adhering to all the rules of decorum, are yet desirous to display all their charms and attractions’.[10] 

Beauty and bathing were aligned in cultural consciousness. Artworks depicted the lady at her toilette, as well as biblical figures like Susana bathing in her garden, or goddesses such as Diana who was caught bathing with her maidens. Owing to their perceived abilities to help women conceive, English mineral waters also had a close association with the goddess of love and beauty, Venus. Madan describes Venus as the personification of Tunbridge Wells’ waters, ‘foaming to meet her beloved Mars in the Bowels of the Earth: whom she no sooner embraces, but she is Impregnated and big with a Valliant Hero’.[11] The allusion to Mars raises questions about the waters’ ability to enhance male valour and beauty.

Á la the modern celebrity who visits health resorts where patients are subjected to a range of medical and dietary advice and treatments, with purging that seems to echo the experience of their early modern spa equivalents, seventeenth-century health patients did not primarily visit the spa with the expectation it would improve their appearance. However, in their era, as in ours, health and beauty were closely intertwined.

[1] Patrick Madan, A Phylosophical and Medicinal Essay of the Waters of Tunbridge... (London, 1687), 2; Thomas Guidott, An apology for the Bath. Being an answer to a late enquiry into the right use and abuses of the baths in England… (London: printed for G. Sawbridg [sic], 1705), vii.
[2] For more on the experience at Bath, see Amanda E. Herbert, ‘Creatures of the Bath: Transformations at the Early Modern British Spa,’ in Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500-1800, edited by Sophie Chiari and Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme, 117-134 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
[3] ‘Saturday 13 June 1668’, The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Daily Entries from the 17th Century London Diary, accessed 25 November 2021, https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/06/13/; Celia Fiennes, The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes: 1685-c.1712, edited by Christopher Morris (London: Macdonald & Co, 1982), 44.
[4] See above reference.
[5] Fiennes, The Illustrated Journeys, 44-46. For Pepys, see above reference.
[6] Erin Griffey has identified the close interlinking of health and beauty (particularly for Stuart consorts) in her article ‘“The Rose and Lily Queen”: Henrietta Maria’s Fair Face and the Power of Beauty at the Stuart Court,’ Renaissance Studies 35, no. 5 (2021), 811-836.
[7] ‘Scarborough: a poem’, from The Scarborough Miscellany for the Year 1733, cited in Sophie Vasset, ‘Mineral Waters as a Treatment for Barrenness in Eighteenth-Century Britain,’ Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500-1800, edited by Sophie Chiari and Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme, 211-229 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 220.
[8] Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of Count Grammont, edited by Horace Wadpole, Sir Walter Scott and Anna Jameson (Philadelphia: David McKay, Hathi Trust, accessed November 6, 2019), 298, 303-304.
[9] Hippocrates. Ancient Medicine. Airs, Waters, Places. Epidemics 1 and 3. The Oath. Precepts. Nutriment, translated by W. H. S. Jones (Loeb Classical Library 147 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), 65-138.
[10] Hamilton, Memoirs, 347.
[11] Madan, A Phylosophical Essay, 7.