Histories

The Ball

Good fortune ensured that the party was two days before the death of King George. It was estimated that between seven and eight hundred people attended. Those absent included ‘the Misses’ - all her daughters.

The concert began at 10 p.m. Mr. Leoni Lee sung with Miss Wood, Miss Camplin, Mrs Windsor, Miss Kitty Sharpe and Mr Rolle. The guests were delighted with the singing. At midnight the supper began. After two hours of banqueting, Admiral Sir James Saumarez proposed a toast to Hester to all-round cheering. The dancing was started at 2 a.m. by Hester and Sir John Salusbury Piozzi Salusbury and continued until 5 a.m.

Accounts of the event

Bath and Cheltenham Gazette

A reporter from the Bath and Cheltenham Gazette reported…

It exhibited a scene, which, if not calculated to feast the reason, gave a promise of at least stimulating and heightening its enjoyments; in short, it was substantial as well as elegant, and displayed not only the liberality of the mistress of the feast, but the skill of the provider.

The ease and vivacity of manner which characterises Mrs. Piozzi as an individual, pervaded every scene of her splendid entertainment, and as she had shown herself to be the living centre of good taste, as portrayed in social life, the present entertainment will undoubtedly form an epoch in the annals of fashionable amusement.

The Morning Post

The first stanza of a long poem by Edward Mangin published in the Morning post on 25 July 1810 …

On Hester Thrale’s Eightieth Birth-day, July 8, 1810 Thrice welcome, day! thrice happy year!
That brings our Thrale, our Piozzi, here;
That sees her still, in beauty’s bloom,
Dispel the clouds of age and gloom.
Though eighty winters o’er her head
Their snows have shed, her heart is glad;
And youth’s own spirit, warm and bright,
Still sparkles in her eyes of light.

Mangin went on to describe a ball…

Glittering in the gayest attire, and composed of all that Bath contained of exalted station, talent, genius, youth and beauty … a profusion of delicacies, lights and jewelry. Hester stepped out with astonishing elasticity, and with all the true air of dignity which might have been expected from one of the best bred females in society.

However, another author in The Morning Post wrote…

Lord!, will this Mrs. Piozzi never have done singing and dancing?

To which Mr Mant replied…

Sweet Puritans! don’t frown severe
On dear Piozzi’s dance and cheer;
Groaning beneath your loads of sin,
She does not bid you enter in…
She bids the ignorant of wrong,
Her dance attend, a jovial throng,
And friends long lov’d she calls to see
The scenes of liveliness and glee…
Induced by arguments so weighty,
She dares to give a ball at eighty.

Tom Moore, who breakfasted with her after she was turned eighty, speaks of her as still a …

Wonderful old lady, faces of other times seemed to crowd over her as she sat, — the Johnson’s, Reynoldses, &c. &c: though turned eighty, she has all the quickness and intelligence of a gay young woman.

Kingston rooms

The Kingston Rooms were destroyed by fire on 22 December 1899.