These two houses, numbers 2 and 3 on the east side of Queen’s Square and the private chapel just across the square were there when William Badham, of the parish of Walcot, died at the age of 44 in 1754. He left these two houses and a share in the chapel for life to his wife Margaret née Hampton. Perhaps concerned for costs in her early widowhood, he asked to be “decently interred with as little expense as maybe.” On the other hand, funerals were getting elaborate and probably especially so in fashionable Bath so perhaps there was an element of the puritan in him. His will was proved at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, although there is no indication that he had property outside the Bath and Wells diocese. No doubt this is a reflection of the vogue for using the premier Prerogative court. He refers to his brothers, John, Henry and Thomas and also to his sister Ann, the wife of Thomas Gibbons of Sutton, County Hereford. We can, therefore, place him with some certainty as a child of the marriage of Henry Badham to his second wife, Susan Deem, who were married at Hereford Cathedral in 1700. He was baptised on 31st March 1710 at Weston Beggard a few miles east of Hereford. William, himself, married Margaret at his local Cathedral, that is Bath Abbey, by licence on 24th April 1733. How William could afford two such houses by the age of about 44 is unknown, although his father was possibly a lawyer. In spite of his attitude to funeral expenses, he also left £50 to Sir Robert Long of Draycott, Wiltshire and £50 to William Colborne of Bath, an apothecary, “for care and tenderness in my long illness.”

The Bath Season meant that rooms or suites suitable for renting by the fashionable, were at a premium, and no doubt Margaret was glad enough to use them as a commercial venture, holding on to them until shortly before her death in 1786. A series of New Bath Guides show her as having the two lodging houses until 1785 and in 1784 the Guide tells us:

Comparing values across the centuries is very difficult, but an indication of the value of this income is perhaps given by saying what could be bought. For example 10s would lease you an acre of land and a shilling a day would pay an agricultural labourer’s wage. A farmer would get about a penny a pound for his meat. A guess at the number of rooms from the frontage suggests that if all were let there could have been an income of around £450 a year. Whether Margaret would have dressed fashionably, we don’t know but it’s reasonable to assume that the scene in her two houses would have included people looking something like those in the illustration of North Parade in about 1780.

If you’d had enough of high society and were prepared to get up early enough to catch a coach at 4 o’clock in the morning you could leave for London or Exeter, except on a Sunday. On the other hand, if you fancied something more exotic and an overnight journey, you could go to the Greyhound and Shakespeare Inn and Tavern on the High Street and catch a “machine for London…carries 6 passengers” which left at 10pm. Perhaps some reader can tell me if this would have been a steam coach and if so, whether it was travelling at night to avoid scaring horses?

Sadly, it appears that William and Margaret had no children and when she died her property was largely left to nephews of the Hampton family in Shropshire, Staffordshire and Northumberland. A great niece got her gold watch and Charles Long, son of the, by now, “late” Sir Robert Long Baronet of Draycott, was left her “chamber clock”.

_¹ John Brewer (1997), The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, page 299