OPHELIA FIELD

The Kit-Cat Club

To Paul, and the other members of the Second Hungarian Literary Society

All the good talk over the pies and wine, Congreve's wit, Wharton's fascinating impudence, and Addison's quiet humour, is lost forever without record. The Kit-Cat had no Boswell.

G. M. TREVELYAN, The Times, 10 March 1945

Persons in great Station have seldom their true Characters drawn till several Years after their Deaths. Their personal Friendships and Enmities must cease, and the Parties they were engaged in be at an end…[I]f an English Man considers the great Ferment into which our Political World is thrown at present, and how intensively it is heated in all its parts, he cannot suppose that it will cool again in less than three hundred Years.

JOSEPH ADDISON, The Spectator, no. 101, 25 June 1711

Remember that a free State is only a more numerous and more powerful Club…

SIR WILLIAM JONES, The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Scholar and a Peasant, 1783

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Preface

Prologue - Dryden's Funeral, May 1700

Chapter I - Self-Made Men

Chapter II - Friendships Formed

Chapter III - The Scent of the Pie-Oven

Chapter IV - The Toast of the Town: A Kit-Cat Meeting, 1697

Chapter V - Culture Wars

Chapter VI - The Europeans

Chapter VII - The Whigs Go to War

Chapter VIII - Kit-Cat Connoisseurs

Chapter IX - By Several Hands

Chapter X - The Comeback Kits

Chapter XI - Uneasy Unions: 1707

Chapter XII - Beset

Chapter XIII - Ireland: Kit-Cat Colony

Chapter XIV - The Monopoly Broken: Whig Downfall

Chapter XV - In Their Own Image

Chapter XVI - The Crisis

Chapter XVII - Big Whigs: The First Georgians

Chapter XVIII - Paradise Lost

Chapter XIX - The End of the Club

Chapter XX - Later Clubs and Kit-Cats

Epilogue - Legacies

Notes

Bibliography

List of Members

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

From the reviews of The Kit-Cat Club

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

A detailed chronology and other additional material may be found at www.opheliafield.com

PREFACE

THE KIT-CAT CLUB existed at a pivotal point in British history, and its members participated prominently in the cultural, constitutional and social revolutions of their times. The Kit-Cat Club's story can therefore be read as a study of how the political stability Britain experienced after 1720 was constructed and defended from the 1690s onwards. For over twenty years—from the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution in 1688, through two long and expensive wars against Catholic France, into the reign of George I after 1714—nearly all roads in British politics and culture led through the Kit-Cat Club, or took their direction in opposition to it.

That is the most objective explanation of why I wanted to write the first full biography of the Kit-Cat Club, but there were other reasons. This is, above all, a book about friendship. Having previously written on a female friendship in the early eighteenth century—the relationship between Queen Anne and her favourite, Sarah Churchill—I wanted to examine the more reticent but equally powerful male friendships of the same period. I was also interested in universal questions of how much we should be in business for ourselves, or how far we should be prepared to broker favours for friends, and nothing could better dramatize these dilemmas than the Kit-Cats' relationships with one another.

Of the fifty-odd Kit-Cat members, I have concentrated on a dozen, and within that dozen, on a literary quintet who are relatively well known today: Joseph Addison, William Congreve, Richard Steele, John Vanbrugh and the publisher Jacob Tonson. This is therefore also a book about being a writer. Those who look back to some hypothetical golden age, before commercialism corrupted the arts, will be consoled by how similar the anxieties of the Kit-Cat authors were to those of many authors today. The Kit-Cat Club existed at the threshold between aristocratic and professional writing, and so developed a form of collective patronage for literary production that was suited to both. I was first drawn to the Kit-Cat authors by the fact that theirs were hardworking writing lives, supplemented by day-jobs and by a sense of wider public duty. I was curious to examine creative lives unprejudiced by the later Romantic cult of the artist, which still has us largely in its thrall.

Richard Steele once called for readers of his paper, The Spectator, to send in descriptions of their working lives, to ‘give a lively Image of the Chain and mutual Dependence of Human Society’. This book traces the chain of dependency that connected the Club's writers and patrons; at times, researching it felt like drawing one of those diagrams in magazines showing how everyone successful in British culture is privately linked to everyone else. As an exposé of such connections, this is also a book about class in Britain. As an immigrant to Britain myself, I share the Kit-Cats' interest in the nature of ‘Englishness’, particularly the origins of the London elite that defines itself by education and cultural appreciation, while my own lack of strong national identity means that those who hold strong communitarian values, whether in relation to a club or a country, always intrigue me.

To write a book about the Kit-Cat Club is to describe a fabulous conversation extending over two decades, not one word of which is reliably recorded. Many of Jacob Tonson's papers were pulped by the 1940s. Addison asked that most of his personal letters be destroyed, and his correspondence with Steele seems to have suffered this fate. Robert Walpole destroyed many of his personal papers and ordered the confiscation and destruction of many left by other Kit-Cat politicians. William Pulteney destroyed papers that might have shed light on the Club's final days. There is, moreover, no surviving rule or minute book for the Kit-Cat Club. Not one regular diarist has emerged from among its members. The Club's authors seldom wrote autobiographically, and when they did, they rarely described interior worlds or private feelings. In this sense, however, a group biography is an apt form for a book about the Kit-Cats: they believed creative forces came from the ‘commerce’ or ‘intercourse’ between men's minds, as opposed to later beliefs in subconscious, individual sources of creativity. They believed that their Club was more, in other words, than the sum of its parts.

Viewing each life through the lens of the Kit-Cat Club is necessarily selective, as every man had many personal and professional relationships, and intellectual influences, unconnected with the Club. While I have occasionally mentioned the most important non-members so as not to skew the historical record, it has been impossible to give every non-Kit-Cat patron, relation, colleague and friend his or her full biographical due. I hope the champions of these figures will forgive me.

Note on Dates, Money, Spelling and Punctuation

Before the English calendar changed in 1752, New Year's Day was 25 March. To avoid confusion for modern readers, all dates in this book, unless indicated, take 1 January as the beginning of the new year, such that a date which would have been ‘5 February 1699’, for example, is given here as ‘5 February 1700’. In addition, the ‘Old Style’ (Julian) calendar was ten or eleven days behind the ‘New Style’ (Gregorian) calendar used on the Continent. Unless otherwise stated, all dates are Old Style.

I have often followed an original value in pounds, shillings and pence (or guineas) with an approximation of its relative purchasing power today, though such calculations are notoriously problematic.

I have followed modern usage with respect to spelling and punctuation, but—to keep a dash of original flavour—not always with respect to capitalization. Abbreviated words have been expanded in all instances except titles of printed works, or where poetic metre demands.

I have also, for the sake of efficiency, used a number of modern words that did not exist in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, such as ‘journalist’, ‘scientist’ or ‘publisher’ (Addison was the first to use the word ‘editor’ in its modern sense in 1712).

PROLOGUE DRYDEN'S FUNERAL, MAY 1700

Thy Wars brought nothing about;

Thy Lovers were all untrue.

'Tis well an Old Age is out,

And time to begin a New.

JOHN DRYDEN, Secular Masque (1700)

ON A WARM London afternoon, 13 May 1700, a crowd of mourners assembled beneath the turret and weathercock of the Royal College of Physicians, then a handsome brick building on the west side of Warwick Lane, near Newgate Prison. They were attending the funeral of former Poet Laureate, John Dryden. Among the writers, actors, musicians, patrons, politicians and publishers gathering to pay tribute to the man generally acknowledged as the greatest writer and critic of his generation were over a dozen members of a controversial dining society known as the Kit-Cat Club.

One of Dryden's patrons, Kit-Cat member Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, had earlier arranged for Dryden's embalmed body to be exhumed from the local churchyard of St Anne's in Soho, so that it could be reburied, with due pomp and ceremony, in Westminster Abbey. The Kit-Cat Club financed this second funeral at the suggestion of Dr Samuel Garth, another of the Club's members, who was both Dryden's personal physician and one of his literary disciples. Any of the aristocratic Kit-Cats with good credit could have single-handedly paid the funeral's bill, totalling only £45. 17s. (or around £5,500 today), but by transforming the occasion into a communal gesture the Club was demonstrating its generosity and good literary taste to Londoners. Though both Whigs and Tories attended the funeral, no public occasion could take place in the 1700s without one of these two political parties attempting to dominate it, and in this case the Tories resentfully acknowledged that the Kit-Cats were posthumously appropriating Dryden to their distinctively Whig narrative of English literature.

At four o'clock, Dr Garth and the other Fellows descended from the oak-panelled Censors' room on the Royal College's first floor to host a drinks reception, with music and ‘funeral baked meats’,¹ for the assembled mourners. Garth, who wore a distinctive red cloak, delivered a Latin oration that offended several attendees for being addressed to the ‘great god Apollo’.² Such an unchristian oration cleverly avoided the issue that the man whom the Kit-Cats were about to bury in an Anglican abbey had died a Catholic. One of Garth's literary enemies claimed the physician delivered the oration standing on a rotten beer barrel that collapsed halfway through. This slap-stick moment was probably a fabrication, however, since another anti-Kit-Cat observer, who said Garth ‘threw away some words and a great deal of false Latin’, fails to mention it.³

At five o'clock, the coffin—containing the body wrapped in a flannel shift, tied at the feet like a fishtail and packed in bundles of rosemary—was loaded into a horse-drawn hearse adorned with black feathers. Eight musicians in mourning scarves led the procession playing crape-covered oboes and trumpets. At the head of the cortège walked the College beadles, carrying staves. There were three other funeral coaches, one carrying Dryden's widow and son. Over fifty private coaches followed behind.

Departing the Royal College's forecourt, they processed down Warwick Lane and Ludgate Hill, passing the Fleet, a former tributary of the Thames that had dried into a fetid ditch. The carriages following the hearse became entangled with several ‘moveable Bawdy-houses’ (prostitutes in hackney coaches) as they passed Chancery Lane,⁴ the passengers bracing themselves as horses reared and carriages lurched against one another on the cobbles. The jam then cleared as they slowly proceeded west along the Strand, where gaps between the buildings offered glimpses of the equally traffic-clogged Thames below. At the hour Dryden's cortège passed, the Thames would have been at low tide, revealing the large mud-brown beach onto which shoeless children and scrap collectors were able to wander unimpeded, no embankments yet having been built. The procession finally turned down Whitehall, past the higgledy-piggledy buildings of Old Westminster Palace, towards the Abbey. In the surrounding streets, crowds gathered to watch the strange spectacle of England's nobility, dressed in unseasonably heavy wool mourning suits, paying their humble respects to a near-bankrupt author.

What really bothered several contemporary observers about this Whig-dominated event was the promiscuous mingling of England's social classes. As government ministers, dukes, earls and knights abandoned their carriages and liveried footmen in the Abbey's yard, they found themselves literally on an equal footing with tradesmen, actresses and lowly born ‘Playhouse Sparks’. Tom Browne, a satirist, mocked the impropriety of the motley congregation as ‘A Crowd so nauseous, so profusely lewd, / With all the Vices of the Times endued…’⁵

The procession was led through the Abbey by a figure whose runtish stature was undisguised by his high-crowned periwig and high-heeled shoes. This was Charles Montagu, King William III's former First Lord of the Treasury and another key Kit-Cat member. Tom Browne considered Montagu the epitome of what was loathsome about the new, affluent class of Whig politicians: ‘grown sleek and fat’, proud, corrupt and pretentious, flattering himself as the ‘Chief of Wits’.⁶ That Browne was able to publish such insults with impunity indicated, however, the reality of Montagu's situation in May 1700: he had fallen far enough from the King's favour that he would be openly attacked in the next parliamentary session. Montagu's Kit-Cat colleagues, who knew his virtues of generosity, loyalty and intelligence, probably granted him pride of place in the procession to demonstrate their support for him during this difficult time.

Hobbling behind Montagu, leading a ‘Troop of Stationers’, came Dryden's half-crippled publisher and the Kit-Cat Club's founding father, Jacob Tonson. Tonson was grieving for the loss of his most lucrative and prestigious author, whose poem Absalom and Achitophel had launched Tonson's publishing career two decades earlier. Dryden had recognized Tonson as a cut above the Grub Street printers who seemed to ‘live by selling titles, not books’,⁷ telling Tonson: ‘I find all of your trade are Sharpers & you not more than others; therefore I have not wholly left you,’ and signing a letter ‘not your Enemy & maybe your friend, John Dryden’.⁸ The longevity of the two men's collaboration, on numerous publications and as co-editors on a series of best-selling poetic Miscellanies, suggested an intellectual empathy greater than they had ever openly acknowledged to one another.

Next came Dryden's fellow authors, not yet recognized as a professional category and considered by many onlookers as even lower than the tradesmen: ‘such as under Mercury are born, / As Poets, Fiddlers, Cut-purses and Whores’.⁹ Pre-eminent among these was Kit-Cat playwright and poet, William Congreve. Congreve was an insouciant, cynical young Irishman, armoured by quiet confidence in his own talent. He had known Dryden since at least 1692, by which date Congreve had assisted the older poet with various Latin and Greek translations. Dryden quickly felt that in Congreve he had found a worthy literary heir, and, in begging Congreve to be ‘kind to my Remains’,¹⁰ Dryden had effectively designated the young man his literary executor.

After Congreve, Dr Garth was considered next in line to inherit Dryden's poetic mantle, having published The Dispensary the previous year: a much-applauded mock-epic poem about Garth's battle to persuade the Royal College to dispense free medicine to paupers. Congreve and Garth had been among Dryden's circle at Will's Coffee House, the social centre of London's literati before the Kit-Cat Club. The death of Dryden, ‘To whom the tribe of circling Wits, / As to an oracle submits’,¹¹ was a blow from which Will's Coffee House's ‘Witty Club’ would never recover, clearing the way for the rise of the Kit-Cat Club.

Rather than Dryden's favourites, Congreve or Garth, however, another Kit-Cat author, John Vanbrugh—36 years old and with four plays under his belt—had been the one to offer practical assistance when Dryden lay dying. Vanbrugh organized a benefit performance, knowing Dryden would otherwise have little to leave his wife and children. Dryden's last dramatic work, his Secular Masque (1700), took new beginnings as its theme and was intended to be performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 25 March 1700: that is, on New Year's Day according to the Old English calendar—the first day of the new century. The production was not ready for this historic opening night, however, and the masque was probably not performed until after Dryden's death, when the third-night profits, which traditionally went to a play's author, would have been donated directly to Dryden's widow.

A number of other Kit-Cat members—including Members of Parliament, army officers and diplomats—accompanied Dorset, Montagu, Tonson, Garth, Vanbrugh and Congreve as they paced through the dimly lit Abbey to the solemn knelling of bells. When the mourners were all assembled under the Abbey's vast transept, a prebend began to read the service, and the choir sang an epicedium.

Several Tory eyewitnesses started the story, later repeated by Dr Johnson, that the funeral descended from a Christian solemnity into a kind of raucous party,¹² the playwright George Farquhar concluding with a sigh: ‘And so much for Mr Dryden; whose burial was the same as his life: variety and not of a piece—the quality and mob, farce and heroics, the sublime and ridicule mixed in a piece—great Cleopatra in a hackney coach.’¹³ Whether touching or absurd, sublime or ridiculous, Dryden's funeral served several purposes for the Kit-Cat Club: it raised the Club's profile with the man in the street; it claimed a Whig share in Dryden's reputation; and it expressed gratitude to a man who had mentored many of those present. The event further demonstrated that the Club was not cowed by the religious censors who had recently attacked the morality of Dryden's plays in the same breath as Congreve's and Vanbrugh's.

One of the mourners, frail old Samuel Pepys, would surely have thought back to another Westminster Abbey funeral he had attended in the company of the 27-year-old Dryden in 1658: that of Oliver Cromwell. Since then, England had seen a royal restoration and a revolution, but the turmoil and bloodshed of the Civil War still felt like recent history. Families and communities torn apart by the previous century's conflicts were still healing these divisions. With the new century only a couple of months old by the terms of their calendar, a sense of excitement hung in the air that spring, but the nation still lacked confidence, and feared the possibility of slipping back into barbarity.

Dryden's death proved a turning point for the Kit-Cat Club, after which it self-consciously set about trying to direct the course of English civilization in the new century, particularly the course of the two arts most beloved of Dryden: literature and music. None of Dryden's admirers, or ‘Apollo's sons’,¹⁴ not even Congreve, felt up to carrying this torch alone, but together—through subscriptions and collaborations—the Kit-Cats assumed what they considered their patriotic duty: to guide and nurture native talent. No grouping before or since has worked towards such an ambitious vision of national reform, encompassing every high art form and seeking to dominate every aspect of Britain's social and intellectual life.

By compensating for the especially sizeable gaps in royal patronage of English poetry, theatre and music, the Club would contribute to a shift in authority from the Court to private citizens. More than their monarchs, they would fulfil the country's need for new role models, in fashions, manners and morals. This helped turn the Court into ‘the highly symbolic, sober, secluded, and slightly strange institution it has since become’,¹⁵ while at the same time laying the foundations for the exponential growth of cultural consumption that would occur in the later eighteenth century. The Kit-Cat founders were born into an age of plague, fire and civil strife; the younger members would live to see the self-consciously ‘civilized’ age of Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Robert Adam.

Similarly, when the Kit-Cat founders were born, most Britons would have said their monarch ruled them, but by the time the youngest members died, the majority would have said they were governed by an elected House of Commons. The Club was to be both a cause and a symptom of this shift in the political culture, from individual to collective accountability, and its leading members would also be closely involved in turning Britain from a ‘ramshackle federal state’¹⁶ to something significantly closer to a modern ‘nation state’. The political stability of Britain after 1720 owed much to a sense of common purpose and values among those who wielded power, and the Kit-Cat Club was the prime example of a political grouping formed and sustained around shared ideological and cultural values, ‘Alike in Morals, and alike in Mind’,¹⁷ rather than around bonds of kinship. Its members would pursue an ultra-Whig political agenda for over twenty years, such that an opponent could plausibly describe the Kit-Cat in 1704 as a ‘Club that gave Direction to the State’,¹⁸ and such that its final generation of members, most notably Robert Walpole, came to dominate the first half-century of Georgian politics.

The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote in 1690 that, alongside Divine Law and Civil Law, the third type of law was ‘the law of opinion…praise or blame, which, by secret and tacit consent, establishes itself in the several societies, tribes and clubs of men in the world’.¹⁹ The Kit-Cat Club continued this seventeenth-century tradition of ‘clubs of men’ carving out negative freedoms from the state, not least of which was the right to hold meetings and discuss their opinions freely. Kit-Cat members would help shape the nation's taste, character and international image in the coming decades, planting a particular idea of ‘Englishness’ in the popular imagination and contributing to the building of a more prosperous, polite and self-confident society.

On this evening in 1700, however, the Kit-Cats were first and foremost a remarkable group of friends, several of whom had known each other since childhood. Self-identification by their Kit-Cat name, and demonstrations of unity such as the funding of this ceremony, were now public vows confirming the men's personal and professional commitment to each other—nuptials of Whig fraternity. Dryden's death, several years after the Kit-Cat Club's foundation, marked the Club's coming of age.

I SELF-MADE MEN

You will make Jacob's ladder raise you to immortality.

WILLIAM WYCHERLEY, addressing a poet

soon to be published by Jacob Tonson¹

ON ANY DAY but the Sabbath in 1690s London, ships from around the world disgorged Chinese tea, Indian sugar cane, Japanese porcelain, South American medicines and Persian silk at the eastern docks. Many of these cargoes were then carried by barge and cart to the Royal Exchange, ‘a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth’, built a couple of decades earlier between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street.² Entering the Exchange from the south, the visitor faced an elegant chessboard courtyard surrounded by two-storeyed arcades, containing over two hundred stalls, with the Mediterranean merchants to the right and American plantation traders to the left. At ‘high exchange’ (that is, in the early morning) the courtyard thronged with brokers, salesmen and ‘stock-jobbers’ trading in both tangible products and grand ideas. Upstairs, young girls sold ribbons and other ‘toys’ for ladies' dresses, while downstairs old beggar women sold the morning shoppers warm bags of walnuts, their shells littering the floor. Beadles patrolled, on the look out for trouble from the ‘mumpers’ (beggars) or the crowds of haggling Armenian, Jewish and Dutch merchants. For those unthreatened by London's role as a leading global centre of trade and commerce, in these years before there was a British Empire, the Exchange was a place to throw oneself into the urban melting pot.

Around 500,000 people lived in London at the end of the seventeenth century, out of five to six million in England as a whole. The city's population was densely packed into a small area of low buildings with only a few high steeples rising clear of the rooftops. One particularly large windmill sat on the south bank of the river close to the site of today's London Eye. Brick buildings were replacing wood after the Great Fire, and the West End was just beginning to emerge from open countryside. The Thames' northern bank was the southern perimeter of the city proper, with the old borough of Southwark south of the river, filled with prisons, shipyards, seedy inns and brothels, stinking tanneries and breweries. The other perimeters of London were the several royal palaces of St James's to the west, Old Street and Holborn to the north, King's (later Soho) Square to the northwest, and Whitechapel to the east. It was a time of thriving property developers: ‘New squares and new streets [are] rising up every day to such a prodigy of buildings that nothing in the world does, or ever did, equal it,’ Daniel Defoe declared.³

The Glorious Revolution of 1688—the armed invasion that deposed the Catholic James II and installed a Protestant Dutchman, William of Orange, and his wife (James's daughter), Mary, on the English throne—had had social repercussions as profound as its constitutional consequences. Ordinary people began to re-examine and loosen the bonds that had tied them to their homes and class. For thousands of ambitious younger sons and rural labourers in search of trades or professions, this meant migrating to London, where everything seemed up for grabs—and within reach. Records for 1690 show three-quarters of London apprentices were born outside the city. London was also simmering with energy thanks to an influx of skilled Huguenot refugees and Dutch immigrants, as well as soldiers and sailors on their way to or from William's current war against France, the War of the League of Augsburg, then being fought in Flanders and Ireland. Army and navy commissions were briskly traded, allowing many men to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Financing the war, meanwhile, required landowners elected to Parliament to start coming into the capital every winter (rather than merely every few years, as during previous reigns) to vote through the army supplies. These landowners were building townhouses and inventing new urban pastimes to amuse themselves through the long, cold parliamentary season.

William's government, as an institution, was itself a social parvenu, and the image of William as a foreign occupier, rather than rightful king, still flashed dangerously in the corner of the English people's collective vision. What mattered was that educated Englishmen should not question the legitimacy of the new regime, nor view the post-Revolutionary constitutional balance, with its greater emphasis on the House of Commons, as too nouveau or alien. Everything had to be overhauled, and new authorities made palatable. Adherents of the Whig party, on the whole more ideologically comfortable than the Tories with the Revolution and the post-Revolutionary social mobility, put their shoulders to this wheel.

Two such self-made Whigs were John Somers, one of the King's leading ministers, and Jacob Tonson, London's most prestigious publisher. Both were flourishing and fattening into comfortable middle age in the 1690s. Their characters were perfectly suited to the times—ambitious and ingenious, yet fundamentally pragmatic—and each was willing to play his part in the national effort of self-reinvention.

Tonson had grown up in central London. A 5-year-old in 1660, the year of Charles II's Restoration, Tonson's father was a barber-surgeon, a freeman of the City of London and a constable of High Holborn, while his mother's family were booksellers with successful shops at the gates of Gray's Inn. At 15, Jacob was apprenticed to the stationer Thomas Basset, where he laboured for the next eight years, elbow-deep in printer's ink and bookbinding resin from morning to night. Tonson read the books in Basset's shop voraciously, acquiring a love of literature, a dose of Latin and a practical understanding of the book trade. The world of books absorbed and comforted Tonson because he was lame in one leg and less physically able than other young men his age. That his nickname ‘left-legged Jacob’⁴ signified more than mere clumsiness is confirmed by a physician's reference to Tonson's conscience being ‘more paralytic and lost to all Sense of Feeling than his Legs’.⁵ Tonson was also teased throughout his life for his ginger hair and wide, freckled face ‘With Frowsy Pores that taint the ambient Air’.⁶

After completing his apprenticeship, Tonson immediately established his own firm, with premises at the Judge's Head in Chancery Lane. Kit-Cat authors later feared sending their manuscripts to this chaotic office in case they were lost amid all the ‘lumber’.⁷ Tonson was determined from an early age to buy rights to the work of major authors, living and dead, and so establish his reputation as a professional—some say the first professional—English publisher.

Tonson was the first to commission critical editions of Milton's poetry, notably Paradise Lost, and to make substantial profit from a literary backlist. He also had a nose for new talent. Alexander Pope later wrote of ‘genial Jacob’ bringing forth poems and plays from ‘the Chaos dark and deep, / Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep’.⁸ This idea of a publisher bringing forth creativity—rather than being merely a mechanical maker of books—was unprecedented. That the same publisher should be trusted to make critical amendments to manuscripts was even more unheard of. While Victorian antiquarians would snobbishly try to portray Tonson as merely a grubbing tradesman, there is clear evidence he was a man of great intellect and wit: Tonson later boasted, for example, that in the 1680s he had written various commendatory verses for new editions and passed these off as the work of his star authors, John Dryden and Edmund Waller. (This is also evidence, of course, that the publisher was not above corrupting the corpus of his authors' works in order to boost sales.)

Being published by Tonson was soon seen as an author's shortcut to the richest, most powerful readers, thanks to the publisher's gift for networking. Tonson aspired to be considered a gentleman, on a level with his clients and authors, and so would have felt insulted when called the ‘chief merchant to the muses’⁹ or a great ‘wit-jobber’ (that is to say, no better than a City ‘stock-jobber’).¹⁰ He wished to set himself apart from other publishers and booksellers who were increasingly sullied by association with the hack writers of ‘any mean production’ in Grub Street.¹¹

Though one contemporary bitingly remarked that Tonson ‘looked but like a bookseller seated among lords, yet, vice versa, he behaved himself like a lord when he came among booksellers’,¹² Tonson, in fact, succeeded in his social climbing: his correspondence shows that his authors accorded him the same terms of politeness that they employed to address their aristocratic patrons.¹³ He was treated as their friend, not their servant. There is some disagreement as to how Tonson won this respect—one fairly impartial contemporary called Tonson a man who would ‘Flatter no Body’,¹⁴ while another described him as shamelessly obsequious whenever there was a profit to be gained.¹⁵ Certainly, from early in his career, Tonson made extravagant but well-calculated gestures of hospitality to both social inferiors and superiors. A bill survives for a 1689 dinner at a French-run ‘ordinary’ (a restaurant, usually run by Huguenot refugees) at which Tonson helped pay for a ‘great table’ of food, along with 20 gallons of claret, 6 of ‘Canary’, 4 of white wine, unspecified quantities of ‘Rhenish’ and champagne, 42 bottles of ale, musicians, servants, a constant fire, candles, pipes and tobacco, as well as a hired coach to pick up and deposit the guests—which, when added to compensation for ‘glasses broke’, came to £31. 8s. 6d. (around £4,000 today).¹⁶

John Somers was one of those invited to Tonson's parties before the Revolution¹⁷—one of the ‘gentlemen of genius and quality’ Dryden complimented Tonson on cultivating so assiduously.¹⁸ Born in 1651 to the son of a Worcestershire attorney, Somers had quickly established a reputation as a brilliant legal mind while studying at Middle Temple—an Inn of Court that the sons of professionals ‘ambitious of rule and government’¹⁹ were attending in increasing numbers. Somers' father had stood on the Parliamentary side during the Civil War, and, in the same spirit, Somers fell into the Whig party's political camp. The Whigs opposed James II's moves towards Catholic emancipation during the 1680s, and so, in June 1688, Somers acted as counsel for seven bishops who signed a petition against James's order for a pro-Catholic Declaration to be read from pulpits. Somers distrusted this Declaration because it was brought in by royal prerogative rather than parliamentary statute, and because of his deeply ingrained prejudice that the Catholic Church—with its centraliz ation to Rome and absolutist principles—was intrinsically ‘unenlightened’. The invitation to William of Orange to invade was carried from a set of Protestant English nobles on the very day that the seven bishops' acquittal was celebrated in the streets by ordinary Londoners.

Following the Revolution, Somers' Whig credentials and intellectual reputation ensured his rapid promotion in government. He chaired the committee that drafted the Bill of Rights, the cornerstone of the new constitutional monarchy, and guided William towards accepting its limitations on royal prerogatives. Somers helped mount a retroactive public relations campaign, portraying the change of monarch as the triumph of ‘Reason’—a simple expression of John Locke's ‘contract theory’, whereby unworthy rulers deserved to be deposed. In reward, Somers was appointed Solicitor General and then, in 1692, Attorney General, the latter a profitable office with extensive scope for patronage. Less than a year later, Somers was made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, in charge of the Court of Chancery, and Speaker in the House of Lords, though he himself did not yet have a peerage. By 1695, Somers was one of four men who formed the ‘Junto’ of leading Whigs—the Cabinet within the Cabinet when in the King's favour, and when out of it, a kind of unofficial opposition or ‘shadow’ Cabinet. The Junto's power came from its ability to form block votes in the Commons and to raise from the City of London the extra funds necessary to supply William's costly war.²⁰ Somers was a particularly talented fundraiser, having no prejudice against the City's ‘money men’. He was appointed one of the Lord Justices or regents entrusted with the administration of the kingdom whenever the King was on the Continent running the war.

At home, Somers was an incurable bibliophile. His library in Powys House, the impressive brick residence the King had granted him in Lincoln's Inn, was dominated by the legal texts in which the Tonson family firm specialized. Like Tonson, Somers' claim to gentility depended on his display of learning, and this library was the most tangible proof of that education. Tonson was careful not to lose touch with his increasingly powerful friend. He kept Somers' shelves well stocked and met him regularly to ‘unbend’ over an after-work drink in a tavern near Temple Bar, where the commerce of the City intersected with the politics and law of Westminster.

Tonson also flattered Somers' learning by offering the statesman opportunities for dispensing patronage to various authors in Tonson's publishing fold. Being unmarried and without significant extended family to support, Somers was free to put his patronage to such use. His beneficiaries included Dryden, though Somers allegedly authored an anonymous poem critical of Dryden's Catholicism and regretting, ‘The knot of friendship is but loosely tied / Twixt those that heavenly concerns divide.’²¹ Dryden in turn introduced younger authors to Tonson and hence to Somers' purse. Two such authors who arrived in London during these exciting post-Revolutionary years would quickly become the leading playwrights of their generation: William Congreve and John Vanbrugh.

Congreve had been 4 years old when his father, an English army officer, was posted to Ireland in 1674. A perk for those, like Congreve's father, in nominal service to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was free education for their sons at the best Irish grammar school, Kilkenny. Some sixty pupils were enrolled at the school in the early 1680s and Jonathan Swift was enrolled two years behind Congreve. Congreve went on to Trinity College Dublin at age 16 in 1686, with Swift following a few years later; these two talented young men lived together in the small community of students for several years without leaving any surviving trace of a particular attachment to one another.

Beyond Trinity's Elizabethan red brick walls, Dublin remained something of a frontier town, a place of opportunity for entrepreneurs and rough justice for criminals, including pirates, smugglers, deserters and horse-thieves; a place where disgraced Englishmen bought cheap land and acquired new identities. The Glorious Revolution was neither quick nor bloodless in Ireland. Instead, it haemorrhaged into the War of the Two Kings (between William III and James II, or ‘Liam’ and ‘Seamus’), with violence that pushed out large numbers of Anglo-Irish refugees. When Trinity College closed in 1689 because of the upheavals, Swift fled to England, where he found his first job as secretary to a retired diplomat. That spring, as the deposed King James tried to retake Ireland with the aid of French troops, 19-year-old Congreve likewise fled to England where his family had well-off relatives happy to put them up. Congreve lodged first with his grandfather in Staffordshire, where, recuperating from an illness, he picked up a pen and began to compose his first play.

Two years later, Congreve arrived in London, a fresh-faced 21-year-old looking for an edgier and more fashionable existence than that on offer in Staffordshire. He was admitted to study law at Middle Temple in March 1691, but was described by a friend as having ‘a wit of too fine a turn to be long pleased with that crabbed, unpalatable study’.²² Middle Temple was not overly concerned if he neglected his legal studies to pursue a ‘coffee house education’ instead, since for many so-called ‘amateur’ students the Inns of Court were merely gentlemen's finishing schools, providing congenial central London lodgings.²³ Congreve himself described the education of Middle Temple as being more social than professional—‘Inns o’ Court breeding', he said, was mainly about learning to snub one's country relations when they came to town.²⁴

Congreve's wit quickly made him many friends among his fellow students—several of whom would end up as his fellow Kit-Cats in the years ahead. He went drinking with them in the self-consciously literary taverns and coffee houses of Covent Garden, northwest of the Temple. In that neighbourhood, according to one Kit-Cat poet, lawyers traded their robes for the lace coats of dandies, country girls lost their noses to syphilis, ‘Poets canvass the Affairs of State’, and all classes ‘blend and jostle into Harmony’.²⁵

In the centre of Covent Garden was Will's Coffee House, where Dryden held court among literati of all political shades. Congreve was probably introduced to this circle by one of the other ageing Restoration dramatists of London: Thomas Southerne or William Wycherley, whom Congreve knew through some cousins. Dryden's court at Will's was imperious: those allowed to take a pinch from his snuffbox comprised his inner circle, while his special chair had a prescribed place by the fire in winter and on the balcony in summer, which he called ‘his winter and his summer seat’.²⁶ Yet, at the same time, Dryden carried himself with a charming humility that impressed Congreve deeply: Dryden was, Congreve remembered, ‘of all the Men that ever I knew, one of the most Modest’.²⁷ The next generation of writers would say much the same of Congreve.

Dryden soon declared ‘entire affection’ for Congreve: ‘So much the sweetness of your manners move / We cannot envy you, because we love,’ he wrote.²⁸ Congreve, in return, said he was ‘as intimately acquainted with Mr Dryden as the great Disproportion in our Years could allow’, concluding quite simply that he ‘loved’ the old man.²⁹ Congreve showed his Staffordshire manuscript to Dryden, who declared he had never seen ‘such a first play in his life’, but added that ‘it would be a pity to have it miscarry for want of a little assistance’. What the comedy, entitled The Old Batchelor, needed, Dryden declared, was only ‘the fashionable cut of the town’.³⁰ Though ostensibly a plot of romantic intrigues, the real seduction of the play lies in the enviably quick wit exchanged between its male characters—it is a love letter to the urbane world Congreve must have imagined in his teens and in which he was now becoming accepted. Taking Dryden's suggestions on board, Congreve spent summer 1692 in Derbyshire reworking the text. By Michaelmas, thanks to Dryden's endorsements, Congreve was directing rehearsals of The Old Batchelor at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane.

It was likely during these rehearsals that Congreve fell in love with the woman who would become his muse throughout the next decade: the actress Anne Bracegirdle, or ‘Bracey’. Since adolescence, Bracey had acted under the tutelage of Mr and Mrs Betterton, two experienced members of the United Company, the theatre company based at the Theatre Royal. A brunette with dark sparkling eyes, a blushing complexion and a miraculously perfect set of even white teeth, it was said of Bracey that ‘few Spectators that were not past it could behold her without Desire’.³¹ Congreve met her when she was ‘blooming to her Maturity’³² and already a star.

It was more respectable to claim infatuation with Bracey than with most actresses, since she was reputed to be as chaste as the virgins she played. She lived with her mother in rented lodgings on Howard Street, where Congreve paid drawing-room visits. If their Northamptonshire family was related to the Staffordshire Bracegirdles, they may even have been distantly related to Congreve. But away from the decorum of Howard Street, backstage at the theatre, Congreve pursued Bracey with fervour, writing her a love poem that lamented her chastity:

Would I were free from this Restraint,

Or else had hopes to win her;

Would she could make of me a Saint,

Or I of her a Sinner.³³

The Old Batchelor opened in March 1693 to a ‘Torrent of Applause’ that would have fulfilled any young writer's most immodest fantasies.³⁴ The debut was such a success that ‘many persons of Quality cannot have a Seat, all the places having been bespoken many days since’.³⁵ Jacob Tonson needed no further persuasion to become Congreve's publisher. Tonson printed, then quickly reprinted, the text of The Old Batchelor; he would thereafter hold exclusive rights to all Congreve's plays.

Around Michaelmas 1693, Tonson moved from above his shop in Chancery Lane to a house at the south side of Fleet Street, near the gate of Inner Temple. Soon after, according to poll tax records, Congreve moved out of Crane Court and became Tonson's lodger at this Fleet Street house. The two men, publisher and author, lived together, along with their several domestic servants, for seven years, until 1700. A later imaginary dialogue, written by a mutual friend of theirs, has Tonson exclaiming to Congreve that during these Fleet Street days, ‘While I partook your wine, your wit and mirth, / I was the happiest creature on God's earth!’³⁶

As Congreve's Old Batchelor had its debut on the London stage, 29-year-old John Vanbrugh arrived in the city, in circumstances unlike those of most other ambitious young newcomers. His boat had come from France, where since 1688 Vanbrugh had spent the best part of his twenties, detained without trial and on charges that had been forgotten almost as soon as the key turned in his cell door. The French had arrested Vanbrugh because they had miscalculated the status of his family, believing he would make a valuable bargaining chip to trade for a high-profile French prisoner. Though Vanbrugh's mother did have various noble relations, his late father had been a merchant in Chester, trading in property, lead, grain and Caribbean sugar, and his grandfather was a penniless Flemish refugee. When Vanbrugh's father died soon after the Revolution, Vanbrugh had inherited only a small sum and the burden of responsibility for his numerous siblings.

Some of Vanbrugh's captivity was spent in the Bastille, where his health suffered. Now, in 1693, having been traded for an insignificant Frenchman thanks to his mother's tireless lobbying, he returned to England a free man and, to use his own phrase, as ‘sound as a roach’.³⁷ Imprisonment was a formative experience for Vanbrugh: it gave him a real appreciation of what arbitrary government could mean, and a violent aversion to boredom. He was determined not to waste another minute of his life.

After his return from France, Vanbrugh stayed in London for only a year before leaving ‘that uneasy theatre of noise’³⁸ to join a marine regiment. Purchasing an officer's commission both advanced his social position and promised a secure income. In wartime, however, it was also an act of patriotism: Captain Vanbrugh saw action at a disastrous naval battle and was lucky not to be recaptured by the French. He borrowed some money from a fellow army officer, which he repaid when back in London by writing a play for the Theatre Royal, where his creditor was a patentee. The Relapse opened there in November 1696 and proved an overnight sensation, reviving the sinking fortunes of the United Company and more than repaying Vanbrugh's debt. Its success inevitably introduced Vanbrugh to Tonson and the coveted cultural patrons—like Somers—for whom Tonson acted as gatekeeper and broker. Congreve and Vanbrugh therefore started climbing ‘Jacob's ladder’ to fame and fortune as undeclared rivals, with only three years between their brilliant entrances into the London theatre world and Jacob Tonson's circle of highbrow friends. Soon, however, Tonson would find a solution to make the way less steep for them both: he and his patrons would found the Kit-Cat Club—an institution which would support the two authors throughout the rest of their lives.

II FRIENDSHIPS FORMED

[W]e very often contract such Friendships at School as are of Service to us all the following Part of our Lives.

The Spectator no. 313, 28 February 1712¹

THE SENSE of unbounded possibility felt by many individual Englishmen in the 1690s owed much to what one historian has dubbed the ‘educational revolution’ of the earlier seventeenth century.² A surprisingly high proportion of England's sons (though none of its daughters) attended grammar schools, dissenting academies or the liberally endowed foundation or charity schools, so that teaching was no longer the preserve of the clergy and private tutors in noble households. For the generations of boys who enjoyed this expansion in primary and higher education, there were lifelong side effects: the formation of friendships that felt as important to them as family bonds, and a lasting enthusiasm for all-male camaraderie that would express itself subsequently in all-male clubbing.

Westminster School, refounded by Elizabeth I, was a private London school that was now expanding its intake and supplying a new breed of gentleman to government offices and the professions. Jacob Tonson once explained that whereas Eton was ‘very much filled by the Sons of Quality & who are not to be much pressed to study’, Westminster produced ‘manly Orators, & the very air of London brings on the Improvement of Youth for any business of the world…’³ There, in around 1680–2, a gang of three schoolboys, known among themselves as ‘Matt’ (Matthew Prior), ‘Chamont’ (Charles Montagu) and ‘Cat’ (George Stepney), formed a bond of friendship that would not weaken for a full two decades, until the day when one of them dramatically betrayed another.

The three boys slept in a dilapidated former granary next to Westminster Abbey, where, in fireless rooms reeking of damp wool socks and cheap candles, they spent their evenings translating and memorizing passages from classical authors, preparing to be tested at six the next morning. Amid mild malnutrition, older boys could receive extra food from the table of the headmaster, Dr Busby, if they composed particularly well-turned Latin epigrams. The template was set: food in exchange for wit. ‘Chamont’ shared the scraps of meat his epigrams won with his two younger friends, and with his earnest little brother ‘Jemmy’, also at the school.

Enduring the hardships of Westminster's regime not only formed firm bonds of male friendship but also made the three boys mistake themselves for social equals, despite widely varying family backgrounds. Matt Prior had by far the humblest origins and was only at the school thanks to a fairytale stroke of good luck. One day in the 1680s, he had been working at the Rhenish Wine House, a fashionable Whitehall tavern owned by his vintner uncle, when the ageing Restoration rake, Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, came in with some friends and noticed that Matt was working behind the bar with a copy of Horace in his hand. To test whether the boy understood what he read, the noblemen asked him to translate one of Horace's odes into English, and they were impressed when he quickly returned with a translation in metric verse. No matter how many times they repeated the test, Matt delivered. Dorset learned that Matt's joiner father had sent him to Westminster School some years earlier, where he had been taught Latin, but then, when his father died, his uncle had withdrawn him ‘in the middle of the third form’ to work at the Rhenish.⁴ Dorset remedied this situation by asking the Dean of Westminster to readmit Matt to the school at the Earl's personal expense, thereby becoming Prior's first patron.

At the other extreme, Charles Montagu was the grandson of the 1st Earl of Manchester, whose London residence, Manchester House, stood imposingly across from the Rhenish Wine House. Despite his venerable family name, however, Montagu was a younger son of a younger son and knew his future would depend largely upon his own efforts. George Stepney (nicknamed ‘Cat’ because he always seemed to land on his feet) similarly had no expectation of a significant inheritance, while being acutely aware of his own intelligence. Stepney's father, though briefly a Groom of Charles II's Privy Chamber, had essentially been a grocer and died in debt. His widowed mother survived by renting out properties in Scotland Yard. Stepney's rank therefore fitted roughly equidistant between Prior's near-total obscurity and the ancient lineage of the Montagus.⁵

Montagu, Prior and Stepney resolved to stay together at university. As Westminster's top scholar, Stepney could afford to turn down a place at Christ Church, Oxford, to join Montagu at Trinity College, Cambridge, to which Montagu had been elected some years earlier. In 1683, Prior joined them in Cambridge, attending St John's, where he was able to gain a scholarship and so save Lord Dorset considerable expense. Matt's background would have been less unusual at Cambridge than at Westminster since the majority of Cambridge students were non-gentry by this date. Prior had several advantages over most of his ambitious fellow students: Dorset's vested interest in his future, a naturally magnetic wit, and epicene good looks, with bright blue eyes under a mop of dark hair.

While he was at Cambridge, Prior maintained his connection with Dorset, sending an epistolary poem comparing the poor mutton at St John's with the ‘kindest entertainment’ he had enjoyed at his patron's table.⁶ Then, in February 1685, Montagu, Prior and Stepney decided to build on Lord Dorset's interest in Prior and bring themselves collectively to the Earl's notice. It was a good moment to apply to Dorset as he had recently inherited his family seat at Knole in Kent, and expected further enrichment through his second marriage to a 17-year-old heiress. Prior, Stepney and Montagu therefore each wrote Dorset a poem on the death of Charles II, criticizing the accession of his crypto-Catholic brother James. These poetic offerings led Dorset to invite Prior's two chums to London to receive the benefit of some high society introductions. Montagu accepted Dorset's invitation, but Stepney believed he could not afford to enter London society without an income. Montagu therefore used his family contacts to help Stepney find a diplomatic posting in Hamburg, to which he travelled directly from Cambridge. The pretence of the boys' social equality was already beginning to wear thin.

In 1687, Montagu and Prior sat over a bottle in the Middle Temple rooms of Montagu's brother Jemmy and composed a parody of a recent Dryden poem about the Catholic and Anglican churches. They correctly guessed that the Whiggish Lord Dorset would be pleased by such a parody, which they entitled The Hind and the Panther Transvers'd To the Story of The Country-Mouse and the City-Mouse. Dorset circulated the poem widely among his political allies who opposed James II's religious policies during the tense year preceding the Revolution. Prior later claimed he did nothing more than take dictation from Montagu when they collaborated on the Mouse poem, but it is hard to know whether this was just Prior's way of flattering his friend after the latter became a rich and powerful man. If true, it would be less unjust that Dorset's recompense for the poem was to promote Montagu but not the more needy Prior, prompting the wry observation that ‘one Mouse ran away with all the Bacon, whilst the other got Nothing but the empty Cupboard’.⁷ When William arrived in England the following year, the Dutchman already knew of the poem; Dorset introduced the impish 27-year-old Montagu as its author, ‘Mouse Montagu’, and the soon-to-be-crowned King gave ‘the Mouse’ £500 ‘to make a man of him’.⁸

From this point on, Montagu determined to follow Dorset's example and be more statesman than struggling poet.⁹ Montagu left a frank explanation of this choice, in which he is likeably without illusions:

I less affect to fiddle than to dance.

Business and Poetry do ill agree,

As the World says, and that's enough for me;

For some may laugh and swagger if they please,

But we must all conform that Love our Ease.¹⁰

Montagu also made an advantageous match in 1688 to a rich sexagenarian widow whose first marriage (six years before Montagu's birth) had been to his relation, the 3rd Earl of Manchester. When Prior heard the news, he composed a poem about how ‘Chamont’ would be elevated above his reach by the marriage, comparing the wedding to an apotheosis: ‘Pleased that the Friend was in the God improved.’¹¹ Montagu, however, sent his old school friends assurances that the married state would not lessen his desire for ‘a constant friendship and correspondence’ with them.¹²

In reward for having escorted James II's younger daughter, Princess Anne, in her midnight escape to join the rebel forces in 1688, Dorset was appointed King William's Lord Chamberlain, the Court's chief functionary. Montagu, Prior and Stepney became popularly known as ‘Lord Dorset's Boys’, though Stepney at first received favours and ‘protection’ from Dorset only indirectly, and may not have met the Earl in person until a visit home from the German states in 1693. Prior remembered ‘Sneaking…among the Crew’ of ‘Crowding Folks with strange ill Faces’ who came to beg favours from Dorset after his appointment.¹³

While Prior was ‘sneaking’, Montagu's career advanced at speed, thanks to brilliant performances in the Commons. By 1692, Montagu was a Privy Counsellor, alongside Somers and Dorset, a Lord of the Treasury, and the youngest addition to the Whig Junto. Montagu won the King's particular favour by loyally supporting the army supply Bills and promoting a Treasury plan to raise a million-pound loan for the government—a loan identified by the nineteenth-century historian Macaulay as the ‘origin’ of England's national debt, and still admired by recent historians, such as D. W. Jones, for its ingenuity.¹⁴ Montagu thereafter became a dispenser of patronage in his own right—someone to whom Prior addressed epistolary poems, seeking patronage, much as Montagu had addressed Dorset only a few years earlier.

Montagu was also responsible for shepherding through Parliament the Act founding the Bank of England in 1694, in return for which he would gain the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Montagu personally pledged £2,000 (equivalent to some £235,000 today) to the Bank's first subscription, and was joined by many friends. Tonson, probably at the encouragement of Somers, subscribed £500. The new institution was closely tied to the interests of the Whig party, and to financing the Anglo-Dutch alliance. The Tories were less invested (literally and metaphorically) in finance capital. They felt increasingly insecure in the midst of this 1690s financial revolution, and Montagu was an easy figurehead for them to attack. His Tory enemies said Montagu was ‘a party-coloured, shallow, maggot-headed statesman’¹⁵ who caressed those who approached him with projects until he had all the details then mysteriously cooled towards them before stealing their ideas. Montagu thought of it merely as keeping an open door to proposals that might benefit the new nation.

While Montagu helped Stepney advance his diplomatic career, Dorset found a diplomatic posting for Prior in The Hague, the Anglo-Dutch allies' headquarters. Stepney often broke his journeys from Berlin back to England with a visit to Prior in The Hague, where the two would sit before ‘a good turf fire’,¹⁶ roasting chestnuts, getting drunk and offloading their professional and private problems. Prior's lover at the time, a cook-maid nicknamed ‘Flanders Jane’ whom Prior declared he loved ‘above Interest or lust’,¹⁷ would have refilled their glasses on these occasions. Stepney was meanwhile sowing his wild oats across central Europe during the early 1690s, writing frankly to a lady in Dresden who had romantic designs on him: ‘[T]o make love perfectly, methinks Body is as necessary an Ingredient as Brandy is in Punch. Your Wit and Friendship are very good sugar and nutmeg, but there must go something more to make the Dose complete.’¹⁸

At their sessions before the turf fire, Prior and Stepney also discussed the financial strain of living like gentleman-diplomats when they were entirely dependent upon the Treasury to reimburse their expenses. Both were aware that their humble births mattered more in Europe than at Westminster or Cambridge. Prior referred to himself as ‘Albion's meanest son’,¹⁹ while Stepney was hurt when someone told the Elector of Saxony he was not of noble birth, which prevented the Elector from inviting him to dine for a month. In answer, Montagu and Dorset had Stepney made a Gentleman of King William's Privy Chamber, and Montagu arranged an advance on Stepney's salary, for which Stepney thanked Montagu warmly, calling him his ‘good Angel at the Brink of the Pool’.²⁰

On another occasion, Stepney told his mother he had declined a £1,000 personal loan from Montagu for reasons that show the men remained, in the early 1690s, more old school friends than patron and client: ‘[I]t is the last use any man should make of his friend, & which I should be sorry to be reduced to,’ Stepney declared.²¹ Prior had less scruple about begging for cash from his old friend: ‘If you can get me any ready money, it would be more charity than to give alms to the poorest dog that ever gave you a petition; if not, patience is a virtue, and a scrap or two of Horace must be my consolation.’²²

Like Somers, Montagu believed in the Ciceronian ideal that literary endeavour was an essential qualification for being a great statesman, and if one was not writing oneself, then playing patron to poets was the next best thing. Montagu and Dorset therefore ensured that Tonson published the witty, self-mocking verses that both Prior and Stepney continued to write in between the ‘prose affairs’ of international diplomacy.²³ Pursuing identical courses, and consulting one another on their poems in manuscript, they would not have guessed that Stepney would be remembered as one of England's first modern diplomats, while Prior would be remembered primarily as a poet.

Montagu, Prior and Stepney all wrote elegies on the occasion of Queen Mary's death in December 1694, to demonstrate their loyalty to the widowed King. The Tories had always felt more at ease with Mary, as a Stuart daughter, than with her husband's largely parliamentary claim to the throne, and Mary's death now meant William had to renew his bid for popular support. William's childlessness also placed increased importance on Mary's sister Anne, now William's heir apparent, and on Anne's choice of friends. From The Hague, Prior observed the political upheavals consequent upon Mary's death in a letter to Montagu:

These matters will be decided before the King's coming over, so we must have a vigilant eye. I call it ‘we’, for you, Sir, have always regarded my interest as if it were your own; and when I consider that you have taken your poor neighbour and made a friend of him, and solicited for that friend as if he had been your brother, I doubt not but you will have the reward you deserve (though a good while hence) in the Court of Heaven; and I the credentials I do not deserve to some Court or Republic a little nearer.²⁴

Another writer to produce an elegy on Mary's death, published by Tonson, was a young Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, named Joseph Addison. Addison was, like Prior and Stepney, a product of the late seventeenth century's widening access to education. He had attended Charterhouse, a charitable school and hospital then located near to today's Barbican Centre that was considered one of the best grammar schools in England. It took in forty nominated scholars for free, alongside sixty fee-paying non-boarders or ‘town boys’.²⁵

Like Westminster, Charterhouse ran a long, spartan day from six in the morning to six in the evening in summer, with an hour's later start in winter, and taught the classics (mainly Cicero and Horace) with a heavier dose of stick than carrot.

Entering as a scholarship boy in 1686, the 14-year-old Addison formed a close friendship with another scholar the same age, who would become his lifelong companion and collaborator. This boy, Richard (or ‘Dick’) Steele, had already been at the school for two years when Addison arrived.

Steele's father, an Anglo-Irish gentleman from Dublin, died in his early childhood, a fact Steele believed left him calamitously hypersensitive forever after. Steele dramatized the event in a later essay:

I remember I went into the Room where his Body lay, and my Mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my Battledore [a toy] in my Hand, and fell a-beating the Coffin, and calling Papa; for I know not how I had some slight Idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her Arms, and transported beyond all Patience of the silent Grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her Embrace, and told me in a Flood of Tears, Papa could not hear me and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under Ground, when he could never come to us again.²⁶

Steele's mother—whom he remembered as ‘a very beautiful Woman, of a Noble Spirit’²⁷—sent him away from Ireland, to live with his wealthier, childless aunt and uncle in England, and it was they who entered him at Charterhouse in 1684. His mother died that same year, orphaning him fully.

Steele's uncle was private secretary to the 1st Duke of Ormonde, the same Lord Lieutenant of Ireland served by Congreve's father, and it was Ormonde who, as a governor of Charterhouse, arranged for Steele's admittance. One letter from the schoolboy Steele to his patroness-aunt survives. It includes a formal apology for not writing more often, mixed with a pained awareness of his dependency, expressed with less than complete humility: ‘Madam, should I express my gratitude for every benefit I receive at Your Ladyship's and my good Uncle, I should never sit down to meat but I must write a letter when I rise from table.’²⁸ Steele addressed successive patrons with similarly mixed feelings throughout his life.

Their intellects, and the loss of their mothers when they were 12, were what Addison and Steele had in common; the rest was all contrast. Steele was short and square-bodied, with a ‘dusky’ complexion that, combined with his fading Irish accent, would have been interpreted by contemporaries as indicating lowly birth;²⁹

Addison was tall for his age, with pale blue eyes and the pallor of a bookworm. Soon the advantage of Steele's previous years at the school was erased as he came to idolize his new friend.

Addison invited Steele home for the holidays. Addison's father was Dean of Lichfield, having settled there after an exotic life as chaplain to the British garrisons at Dunkirk and Tangier. Addison had immense respect for his father, who imbued him with a profound belief in selfcontrol. In 1686, the Dean was raising four children alone—three boys and a girl, of whom Joseph was the oldest. Steele admired how the Dean taught his sons to vie for his favour and called it ‘an unspeakable Pleasure to visit or sit at a Meal in that Family’.³⁰ Steele was warmly welcomed into the Lichfield deanery that school holiday, and recalled how Addison's father ‘loved me like one of them’.³¹

Addison only stayed at Charterhouse for a year before being elected to his father's former Oxford college, Queen's, at the age of 15. This confirmed Steele's belief in Addison's superiority; Steele remained ever after several steps behind his friend academically. Steele entered Christ Church, Oxford, in December 1689, by which time Addison had been elected to one of the ‘demyships’ (scholarships offering free lodging) at Magdalen College. Christ Church, to which Steele was sent thanks to his uncle's connections, did not suit him well. It had stood on the losing side of the previous year's Revolutionary politics (in contrast to Magdalen, which had resisted James II's demands) and contained more nobly born students than the rest of Oxford's colleges. When Steele went up, his aunt gave him a pair of gloves and a sword to help him fit in.

After a year, Steele asked his uncle to pull strings with the Dean of Christ Church to get him a scholarship, reporting that though he had gained his tutor's respect, ‘these places are not given by merit but are secured by friends’.³² When his uncle's efforts failed to produce the scholarship, Steele moved to Merton College to accept one there instead. Steele left Merton in May 1692 and enlisted in the army as a ‘wretched common Trooper’,³³ since he lacked the funds to buy an officer's commission. Years later, Steele recalled Oxford students who window-shopped, played billiards and bowls, and who were ‘seized all over with a general Inability, Indolence and Weariness, and a certain Impatience of the Place they are in’.³⁴ Steele sounds as though he was well acquainted with these ‘loungers’, but he probably left university voluntarily, out of patriotic duty, rather than because he was expelled, as Jonathan Swift later hinted. Steele would have watched the fireworks in Oxford celebrating the Treaty of Limerick after William's victory in Ireland, and the troops returning from the Irish wars. Though Steele missed his chance to participate in this Protestant victory in his homeland, he could still serve the Protestant cause on the Continent. Since the regiment he joined belonged to his uncle's patron's son, enlisting may also have been a direct order from his uncle that Steele could not refuse.

Addison did not feel a similar pull towards the adventure of war. He remained to wander the water walks and gardens of Magdalen, translating and composing Latin poetry to the acclaim of his fellow academics. These pastimes between teaching duties sound more plausible from what we know of Addison than his later confessional lines referring to his ‘heedless steps’ upon ‘the slippery paths of youth’.³⁵

One thing Addison never let himself be was heedless, and his decision not to enlist was decidedly careful of his own person.

When Addison sent a poem flattering Dryden's talent to the poet in London, Dryden and Tonson included it in the Miscellany Poems they co-edited in 1693.³⁶ Addison's 1694 poem, ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets’, then summarized the history of English poetry, culminating—implausibly to modern judgement—with Charles Montagu at its pinnacle. Addison immediately found a flattered benefactor in the 33-year-old Chancellor of the Exchequer. Steele later recalled that Congreve was the instrument of Addison's ‘becoming acquainted with’ Montagu.³⁷ How Congreve and Addison first met, however, is uncertain. Most likely it was through Dryden and/or Tonson, following Addison's inclusion in the Miscellany, or perhaps Tonson invited Addison home to the Fleet Street house the publisher then shared with Congreve. Either way, there was soon mutual respect between Addison and Congreve, whose respective specializations in Latin and Greek literature spared them direct rivalry.

By 1695, Addison was studying to take orders, though he increasingly wished neither to follow his father into the Church nor to remain a university tutor. Addison therefore sought to add a further patron to his portfolio and did so in the traditional way: by poetic tribute. His verse ‘On His Majesty, Presented to the Lord Keeper [Somers]’ was a bold move on the young academic's part, since he had never met Somers, and had no family connection to justify the presentation. Somers must not have minded, since he let Tonson and Congreve bring the poem's author to meet him. Until now, Addison had been not so much a Whig as Whig-leaning, but these two poems, courting Montagu and Somers, marked his first clear declaration of political allegiance.

Addison's friend Steele had more enthusiasm but less opportunity to serve William's government. Steele too wrote an elegy for Queen Mary: ‘The Procession: A Poem on Her Majesties Funeral, By a Gentleman of the Army’. Steele's, however, was not printed by Tonson, but by a lesser firm, probably at Steele's own expense. If Addison and Steele corresponded during these years while following such starkly divergent paths, the letters are lost. Addison seems not to have shared any of his impressive new literary contacts with his former school friend.

Steele had by this time seen active military service in Flanders during 1692–4, for a salary of about 4 shillings (now around £20) a day. Steele had thereby ‘wiped off the Rust of Education’,³⁸ and depended, as a soldier puts it in one of Congreve's plays, ‘upon the outside of his head [rather] than the lining’.³⁹ Nonetheless, in the army as in international diplomacy, promotion could be secured by demonstrating literary wit in flattery. As a result of dedicating his elegy on Queen Mary to Baron Cutts, a war hero turned governor of the Isle of Wight, Steele was permitted to switch to the Coldstream Guards, a more elite regiment that provided security at the royal palaces. Steele was made a captain, and, though Cutts was the Guards' nominal commander, much of the actual commanding was left to Steele, especially in early 1697 when he served as Cutts' private secretary. The prospect of a peace to end the War of the League of Augsburg spelled an end, however, to further army promotion for Steele.

Dick Steele would soon prove himself, like Tonson and Prior, an extremely enterprising man, in tune with this enterprising period of British history. This was the legacy of each of these three men's childhood struggles, in contrast to the more complacent confidence of Congreve and Addison—both of whom, despite the forced migrations of the Congreve family and the early death of Addison's mother, came from relatively stable and financially secure homes. Belonging to a club (or a political party) would always be a more primal need for Prior and Steele, both parentless, than for Congreve or Addison. Kindred spirits become far more important than kin if you have fewer kin to begin with.

III THE SCENT OF THE PIE-OVEN

Who knows but by the dint of Kit-Cat's Pies, You may, e'er long, to Gods and Monarchs Rise.

NED WARD, The Secret History of Clubs (1709)

A CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNT by a writer named Ned Ward states that the Kit-Cat Club originally convened at the Cat and Fiddle, a London tavern owned by one Mr Christopher (or ‘Kit’) Cat (or ‘Catling’¹), a pastry cook from Norfolk, whose supposed portrait shows a gnarly man with a white knotted handkerchief on his head. The Cat and Fiddle was on Gray's Inn Lane, a street then noted for its fresh air blowing down from open fields to the north of the city.² As a ‘kit’ was slang for a small fiddle, the Cat and Fiddle's signboard, jutting into the lane with its painted emblem of a fiddle-playing puss, may have been a punning reference to the tavern's proprietor.³

Ned Ward's account describes the meeting of this ‘greasy’ piemaker, Mr Cat, and the ‘amphibious’ publisher-cum-bookseller, Tonson, when they were neighbours in Gray's Inn. Ward envisaged Tonson, his aspiring writers and wealthy patrons gathered sweatily together within the scent of Mr Cat's pie-oven to eat a ‘collation of oven trumpery’—mutton pies, cheese-cakes, golden custards, puff-pastry apple tarts, rose-water codling tarts, and other ornate dishes requiring engineering in dough. As they became drunk, the guests composed doggerel in praise of Mr Cat's pastry creations. The ‘voracious mouth’ of the flaming oven swallowed what they bothered to write down on paper, suggesting it was as near to hand as a spittoon or wastepaper basket.⁴

The Kit-Cat Club thus began as an eccentric publishing rights deal, cooked up by Tonson,⁵ and has also been called ‘the first expenseaccount publisher's dinner on record’.⁶ The publisher ‘very cunningly’ resolved to feed a gang of ‘poetical young sprigs’—including his Fleet Street housemate Congreve—on a regular basis, with Cat's baked goods, provided the poets ‘would do him the honour to let him have the refusal of all their juvenile productions’.⁷ Beyond first options on the works of new authors, Tonson wished to forge professional loyalties in the heat of Cat's pie-oven, with an eye to longer-term profits.⁸ Ever since Tonson's earliest ventures, he had been securing authors' loyalties through gifts of food and wine—sending exotic melons to Dryden when first wooing the dramatist into his publishing fold, for example—and hiding commercial motives under a veneer of pseudo-baronial hospitality. As early as the 1680s, Tonson had organized what he called ‘Clubbing with Ovid’⁹—that is, assembling networks of translators to produce collaborative publications. Now he was simply clubbing men in the same way as he had previously anthologized their writings.

The exact date at which the semi-professional friendships between Tonson, his patron-readers (such as Somers, Montagu and Dorset) and his young authors (such as Congreve, Vanbrugh, Prior and Stepney) turned into ‘The Kit-Cat Club’ is unknown, but it was certainly during the final years of the seventeenth century. Thanks to his family's bookshops in the Gray's Inn neighbourhood, Tonson would have frequented the Cat and Fiddle long after moving his own premises from the area. Whereas Tonson's biographers tend to credit him with the foundational love of pies,¹⁰ Somers' biographers claim it was the Lord Keeper who discovered Cat's bakery and took his drinking companion Tonson there one day to taste them.¹¹

Although there had been clubs in England before, the Kit-Cat Club would be the first to have such wide-ranging interests and in-fluence, combining cultural, political and professional purposes. Previously, trade and craft guilds, political cliques and literary coteries had kept to their own relatively distinct spheres—so, for example, Will's Coffee House had been the venue one evening for Dryden's ‘Witty Club’ and for the politicians' ‘Grave Club’ another.¹²

The Kit-Cat Club would draw many of its literary members from the Witty Club, but whereas the Witty Club members were both Whigs and Tories, being a Whig was to be as essential a qualification as wit when it came to joining the Kit-Cat. The republican and Whig clubs of the Civil War and Restoration periods had been notorious as hotbeds of subversion, insurrection and treachery. King William, who relied on the Whigs but ‘believed the Whigs…did not love monarchy’, remained suspicious of any club that might engender new republican conspiracies.¹³ The Kit-Cat Club, through its emphasis on literature and other highbrow culture, would strive to shake off these inherited associations, and make clubbing into a respectable pastime for a post-Revolutionary Whig gentleman. In doing so, it would provide the template for the literary and cultural clubs that proliferated later in the eighteenth century, of which Dr Johnson's is the most famous.

Though the origins of the Club's name were disputed even within the members' lifetimes,¹⁴ the majority of primary sources support Ward's assertion that it came from Mr Cat's mutton pies, known as ‘Kit Cats’,¹⁵ on which the Club originally dined.¹⁶ The contemporary poet Sir Richard Blackmore writes, for example:

Indulgent BOCAJ did his Muses treat,

Their Drink was gen'rous Wine and Kit-Cat Pies their Meat,

Here he assembled his Poetic Tribe,

Past Labours to Reward, and New Ones to Prescribe.¹⁷

A half-pun on the Club's name may also explain why it was adopted. A 1711 letter allegedly written by Mr Cat is signed with the variant spelling ‘Ch Chatt’.¹⁸ The slang ‘chit-chat’ for small-talk was commonly used, and practising the art of conversation was a central preoccupation of the Kit-Cat Club, so this name may have been thought amusingly apt. In addition, the name contained a classical allusion pleasing to the founders' Whiggish tastes: in ancient Rome, cats symbolized liberty since no animal less likes to be caged, and the goddess of Liberty was often represented with a cat at her feet. Though Tories and Whigs competed to claim many of the same patriotic principles, liberty was one rhetorical term used far more frequently by the Whigs.

The heat of the scene before the pie-oven, as evoked by Ned Ward, was similarly symbolic. Warmth was considered a Whig characteristic, as shown by the anecdote in which the Kit-Cats asked Mr Cat to bake some pies with the poetry of the comic dramatist Thomas D'Urfey used as baking paper, to test that poet's Whig principles and fitness for membership. The story goes that the members complained when the pies were not baked through, to which Mr Cat replied that D'Urfey's writings were so cold they were cooling the dough. They were not, in other words, sufficiently Whig.

Pies were certainly baked on discarded bits of writing in that paper-frugal century. Dryden described worthless pieces of poetry as ‘Martyrs of Pies’¹⁹ and Addison later mused with false modesty that his journalism would ‘make a good Foundation for a Muttonpie, as I have more than once experienced’.²⁰ The nice image of Mr Cat's customers picking the last of the ‘kissing crust’ (the old name for the soft under-crust of a pie) off a piece of blank verse, the ink transferring from browned paper to golden pastry, was not fanciful but real.

As pies and puddings were considered the best of English cookery, the Club's favourite dish would have signified the founders' selfconsciously English, as opposed to French, tastes. The pies were also regarded as humble fare symbolizing the condescension (in its archaic, entirely positive sense) of aristocrats conversing with struggling, lowly born authors. This was made clear by one playwright's hope that his play, even if lacking in delicacy, might nonetheless suit the taste of great men just as ‘A Kit-Cat is a Supper for a Lord’.²¹

The Kit-Cat authors were never literally starving for a meal, but they were certainly hungry for recognition and fame. Patrons such as Dorset, Somers and Montagu were therefore essential guests at Mr Cat's table. Throughout the Kit-Cat Club's several incarnations, from its 1690s' foundation to its demise some two decades later, patronage was to remain the single most important constant in the Club's story—the mechanism that made it tick.

Whereas writing for money was condemned by Renaissance critical theory as limiting an author's imaginative freedom, patronage allowed its recipients to profit without feeling sullied by the pecuniary motives of Grub Street hacks (one of whom, in their eyes, was Ned Ward). The Kit-Cat Club provided, in other words, the same ‘cover’ as verse letters—mimicking an earlier, courtly way of doing things. Verse letters in the 1690s pretended to have a readership of one, the aristocratic addressee, while actually having print runs of hundreds. The Club's authors pretended to be a carousing circle of amateurs with private incomes, when really they were piecing together their livings out of day-jobs, book sales and audience figures.

They hoped to be permitted exceptions to the rules of class, familiarity being among the most valuable gifts that a noble patron could bestow. For a writer to be admitted into a nobleman's ‘conversation’ implied a rise in status with tangible benefits in terms of one's creditors. It was not simply a flattering attention from a social superior; it was an asset that could be spent afterwards as though it were hard cash.

The tantalizing promise of patronage was meant to guarantee a certain level of conversational virtuosity at the Kit-Cat Club, in contrast to the conversation at the Witty Club, where Dryden's approbation was the only reward on offer. Though Will's Coffee House was supposed to be an ‘Exchange for Wit’, the fact that there was more profit in publishing a good line than throwing it away on one's friends caused the ‘Wit-Merchants’ to meet there, it was said, ‘without bringing the Commodity with them, which they leave at home in the Warehouses’.²² A character in one of Congreve's plays similarly refers to wit as an alternative currency, in which writers are naturally richer than their patrons: ‘None but dull rogues think; witty men, like rich fellows, are always ready for all expenses; while your blockheads, like poor needy scoundrels, are forced to examine their stock and forecast the charges of the day.’²³

A later satirical play about the Kit-Cat Club referred to certain members ‘who only listen in it’²⁴—these were the aristocratic patrons who came in the spirit of an audience, ready to exchange one currency for another. It was a fair exchange, in so far as a poet might determine a patron's reputation among contemporary readers (and voters) and in the eyes of posterity. Tonson shrewdly realized that busy, wealthy and powerful men would gladly pay for the glamour of association with popular writers such as Vanbrugh and Congreve, or at least would prefer to play patrons than become targets of their satire. As Ned Ward put it, some Whig grandees joined ‘in hopes to be accounted wits, and others to avoid the very opposite imputation’.²⁵

The Kit-Cat authors, in their poetry and classical translations, self-interestedly perpetuated the idea that a well-rounded nobleman must be a generous patron. They constantly reminded their superiors that there was a parallel value system, independent of inheritance, in which the nobly born were expected to compete, if not with their own literary talent then at least as discerning patrons. The Kit-Cat Club's broad membership implied a hierarchy based on values other than birth and wealth: ‘Though not of Title, Men of Sense and Wit.’²⁶

Prior and Stepney, for example, showed an imaginative sensitivity throughout their writings and classical translations to the theme of ‘meanly born’ men who led virtuous lives, or proved themselves great senators, lawyers or soldiers. In his translation of Juvenal's Eighth Satire, Stepney contrasted the great achievements of lowborn Cicero, or Tully ‘the native mushroom’, to highborn Rubellius whose useless life was no better than that of ‘a living statue’.²⁷ It was an old Christian idea, given a fresh political edge: the natural corollary, or ultimate logic, of the Whig theory of kingship, that each man had to earn his own honour in this world.

Lord Dorset was flattered as ‘bountiful Maecenas’, especially after his appointment as the King's Lord Chamberlain. This was a reference to the Roman patron whose circle had included Virgil and Horace, and who was therefore the prime classical model for Kit-Cat patronage. Dorset had been a patron to Tonson's authors, including Dryden, since before the Revolution, and when Tonson published Congreve's second play, Love for Love (1695), it was with a dedication to Dorset attached—a transparent bid by Congreve to become another of the Earl's favoured ‘Boys’. The publisher tended to broker the patronage of Somers when one of his prose authors needed subsidy, but that of Dorset when it was an aspiring poet or playwright.

The contemporary writer John Macky emphasized Dorset's role as one of the Kit-Cat Club's ‘first founders’,²⁸ alongside Tonson and Somers, and if this was indeed the case, then Dorset's motives were largely nostalgic and escapist. By the mid-1690s, Dorset was in his late fifties and his second marriage was souring because of quarrels over his wife's estate. He was therefore spending more time in town, pretending to a bachelor's lifestyle. At Charles II's Restoration Court, Dorset had enjoyed a dissipated youth, one of the ‘Merry Gang’ of poets and rakes alongside the infamous Earl of Rochester. Dorset had fought in street brawls and duels, been Nell Gwynn's lover and survived nearly fifteen years of nocturnal, riotous, self-destructive living. He had escaped frequent brushes with the law, including charges of murder and of gross indecency after a drunken appearance stark naked on a tavern balcony. Now in the 1690s, having a mid-life crisis, Dorset wanted to recapture the carefree spirit of his youth, or at least help the next generation of poets enjoy a similar camaraderie.

For Montagu, as for Prior and Stepney, nostalgia for the collegiality of Westminster and Cambridge was a significant motive in their clubbing. These men treasured memories of sharing the life of the mind, before the realities of the world had separated them. To their eighteenth-century minds, family was directly associated with nature, in contrast to friendship, which they associated with the power of reason to make discerning, civilized choices. Montagu, at least, sought a place where his intellectually noble friendships with Prior and Stepney might be preserved, despite all that had changed in their relative circumstances since Cambridge. He also sought to extend his reputation as a patron by supporting other authors beyond his childhood friends. The Old Batchelor, for example, had won Congreve Montagu's patronage and friendship—something that may have aroused some jealousy from Prior and Stepney, since Prior once complimented Stepney's poetry by comparing it favourably to Congreve's weaker efforts.²⁹

For the Whig government ministers, furthermore, solidifying friendships through new clubs and associations was part of a wider civic duty to resolidify the nation. Civil turmoil had meant not knowing who your friends were from one day to the next; post-Revolutionary peace and prosperity now required rebuilding trust between like-minded men. When Dorset or Montagu was flattered as a modern Maecenas, it was not simply because they were each generous literary patrons, but because their aims resembled those of the Roman governor who, via his literary circle, had tried to reconcile a fractured society and forge ideals of ‘Roman-ness’ in the decades following a civil war.

Over the years, many observers would complain that the Kit-Cat Club monopolized literary patronage. One imagined Tonson boasting:

I am the Touchstone of all Modern Wit,

Without my Stamp in vain your Poets write.

Those only purchase ever-living Fame,

That in my Miscellany plant their Name.³⁰

Another saw the Club's monopoly of literary fame as a corruption of literary justice: ‘But Mastiff Poets oft are doomed to Starve, / Whilst Lapdog Wits are hugged, who less deserve.’³¹ Cognoscenti have been envied in every age, but the Kit-Cat Club's networking was more acutely resented because it was unapologetically partisan. The Whigs recognized, years before the Tories, the benefits of creating a ‘sympathetic climate of opinion’ through art, and set about establishing a patronage network to incubate this ‘climate’.³² Dr Johnson called Dorset and Montagu ‘universal’ and ‘general’ patrons, meaning they rewarded writers of either party, but the majority of their largesse was dispensed within their own political fold.³³ They did not regard the exclusion of Tory writers from the Kit-Cat Club as a corruption of the arts by politics, since they shared a belief in ‘amicitia‘—a community in which political fellowship flowed naturally from virtuous characters thinking and acting in perfect accord. The Tories of the 1690s may have shared the same classical reference points, but their power base, centred on country squires and clergy, was—for the time being at least—intrinsically less ‘clubbable’ than that of the more metropolitan Whigs.

Another motive of the Kit-Cat patrons, to which Blackmore alluded in his verse account of the Club's foundation, was that ‘warlike William’ had no interest in English literature, so that authors ‘met with small Respect’ at Court and felt they must seek their rewards elsewhere. It had been, in fact, a deliberate policy on William's part to present himself as a warrior-king, too busy saving the Protestant world to bother with flattering poetic dedications. William avoided literary patronage partly in order to imply he had no need of propagandists—as a providential leader who needed no help but God's—and partly because he had little love for a language that was not his own. Hampton Court's competition with Versailles motivated royal patronage of the visual arts and architecture, but no similar royal bounty flowed towards English authors to match Louis XIV's patronage of writers such as Racine and De La Fontaine. Though the relative beneficence of previous English Courts to poets may have been exaggerated, the rising numbers of men attempting to pursue writing careers without private incomes under William III made it appear as if royal reward for wit was in short supply. This was the gap the Kit-Cats felt it their patriotic duty to fill.³⁴

The Kit-Cats' sense of patriotic duty was linked to their sense of historical continuity with previous literary clubs during what they regarded as England's last golden age: the reign of Elizabeth I. They had in mind the legendary ‘merry meetings’ of Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson and others at the Mermaid tavern, or the ‘Apollo’ wits Jonson gathered around himself at the Devil tavern in Temple Bar. This latter club fascinated Richard Steele (he described taking a party up to the Devil in 1709 and finding ‘the rules of Ben's Club’ were still to be seen ‘in gold letters over the chimney’³⁵), and Tonson once received an unsolicited poem that flattered the Kit-Cat Club by comparison to Ben Jonson's club at the Devil.

The dating of the Kit-Cat Club's foundation to the second half of the 1690s would place it in the context of a significant relaxation in attitudes to the public exchange of opinion. Sixteen ninety-five saw the second lapse of England's Licensing Act, after which there was a huge surge in the number of books, papers and pamphlets flying off London's presses—especially pamphlets which debated public affairs or satirized public figures.

Authors and printers could still be prosecuted under blasphemy, obscenity and sedition laws, particularly if they expressed Jacobite views (that is, supportive of James II's restoration), but there was now a feeling that just about anyone and anything could get published. It was no coincidence that the Kit-Cat's members chose Tonson as their chairman and secretary, emphasizing this link between their Club and the power of England's comparatively unfettered printing presses.

By the 1710s, there would be some 21,000 books published in Britain—far more than in any other European country—and, by approxim ately the same date, clubbing would be seen as a quintessentially English activity, John Macky observing: ‘[A]lmost every parish hath its separate Club, where the Citizens, after the Fatigue of the Day is over in their Shops, and on the Exchange, unbend their Thoughts before they go to bed.’³⁶ Freedom of commerce, association and expression went hand in hand.

The Kit-Cat Club, like many of the clubs that would follow it, had an ambivalent relationship to the birth of the new style of financial capitalism around it. On the one hand, the Club was a way to preserve the ancient loyalties and hereditary customs that its members feared the new modes of commerce might extinguish. London's worlds of politics, publishing and commerce were ruthless and unregulated, making people seek refuge in the gentler ideal of ‘clubbability’. At the same time, as Whigs who generally appreciated and exploited the benefits of credit-based commerce and urban life, its members recognized that they needed to invest in social capital as much as financial capital, and the Club was formed to assist with such investment. This meant acquiring a reputation for learning and taste, and securing well-connected friends with inside information about both stocks and politics.

This was a period of great social anxiety, as boundaries between classes became increasingly blurred and the concept of gentility increasingly uncertain. In the seventeenth century, a ‘gentleman’ had been a man entitled to bear arms and with no need to work for a living, but by the 1690s gentility was becoming a more fluid matter of education, manners and taste. Outward indicators of a genteel education, such as the great private libraries of Somers and Montagu, could be imitated by anyone with money, as when a character in one of Vanbrugh's plays mocked the way gilt-covered books were valued as interior décor by the nouveau riche. Another Vanbrugh character was a ‘fake’ peer who purchased his peerage from the Crown for £10,000. To be a Kit-Cat, in this context, was to wear a badge of cultural honour that could not be faked or debased by imitation. For the first time, membership of a particular club became a recognized social credential.

It would be unfair, however, to describe the Kit-Cat Club as concerned only with preserving the reactionary cultural credit of the aristocracy in the face of entrepreneurial capitalism and social mobility. As would become clear in the following decade, the Club promoted a very particular, patriotic agenda, slicing through every art form, to raise the nation as a whole up to their cultural level, and for that they had to look outwards, far beyond their own charmed circle. Tonson's presses, pouring forth their texts for the literate public, were the first evidence of this engagement with the wider world.

It was not self-interest, self-improvement or civic duty that made these men leave their homes and go out to a tavern on a cold wet night, however, but rather a longing for relaxation, amusement and the sympathy of friends. The tasty wine and pies of Mr Cat and the enticingly warm wit of Congreve or Prior, were as crucial to the successful foundation of the Kit-Cat Club as any social or economic cost-benefit analysis at the back of its founders' minds.

IV THE TOAST OF THE TOWN: A KIT-CAT MEETING, 1697

We taught them how to toast, and rhyme, and bite, To sleep away the day, and drink away the night.

WILLIAM SHIPPEN, Faction Display'd (1704)

IN THE FADING light of a Thursday afternoon during the winter of 1697–8, the Kit-Cat members made their way—by foot, coroneted coach, carriage and swaying sedan chair—towards the Cat and Fiddle tavern in Gray's Inn, to attend a Club meeting that would end with an unusual visitor.

Tonson would have arrived early to ready the room. As a later Kit-Cat advised: ‘Upon all Meetings at Taverns, 'tis necessary some one of the Company should take it upon him to get all Things in such Order…such as hastening the Fire, getting a sufficient number of Candles, [and] tasting the Wine with a judicious Smack.’¹

When the other members arrived, each bowed to the gathered company before being relieved of his outer jacket or cloak, hat, gloves, cane or sword by a waiting servant. Disrobing elegantly was an art, and Congreve mocked country bumpkins who went too far and pulled off their boots on such occasions.

It has been suggested that the Club's seating arrangements mimicked an Oxbridge college dining hall, with a ‘high table’ for the grandest nobles and lower tables at right angles for everyone else, but it is more likely that such a sharp distinction between aristocrats and wits was deliberately avoided, to the mutual flattery of both. The Club's presidential pride of place, a wooden ‘elbow chair’ (armchair) at one end of the table, was occupied not by the Club's highest ranking peer, but by Tonson, while Matt Prior mentions that it was unnecessary to sit in one's seat for the duration of a Kit-Cat meal.

The diners first washed their hands in a basin, then the highest ranking member said grace. In 1697, this was the Duke of Somerset, Charles Seymour, the second highest ranking peer in the kingdom. He was a vastly wealthy and notoriously proud man, who spoke with an affected lisp and had once disowned his daughter when he awoke from a nap and caught her seated in his presence. Only 35 in 1697, however, such caricaturish excesses lay ahead of him. Somerset was at this time renovating his stately home of Petworth in Sussex, where he and his wife had spent the preceding summer, and he was the Chancellor of Cambridge University, responsible for re-establishing that university's press. Tonson's firm was collaborating with it to produce a series of Cambridge classics: a canon-forming list first shaped by Dryden and, after Dryden's death, by the Kit-Cats. Somerset may also have been personally responsible for Montagu receiving the title of High Steward of Cambridge University earlier in the year.

By now the Club had expanded beyond the first huddle of friends before Mr Cat's pie-oven, though it is uncertain whether it had already reached its later cap of thirty-nine members. Certainly a number of other dukes and earls had been admitted, and after Somerset finished the grace, these nobles were first to offer their plates to the carving man. They also initiated all calls for wine throughout the meal. The Kit-Cats' belief that it was vulgar to over-emphasize such distinctions of rank, however, would have blunted many rules of 1690s etiquette, good English breeding showing itself ‘most where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least’.² The very English prejudice by which the confidence to flout class divides is considered the sign of real class was just emerging.

Some class divisions were beyond flouting, however: a number of waiters—footmen brought by the guests mixed with ‘drawers’ from the tavern below—would have stood discreetly against the walls for long hours. These silent observers took their opinions of the Kit-Cat Club to their graves, but one such ‘Spectator of Gentlemen at Dinner for many Years’ complained how masters expected their servants to be sober and chaste when the masters themselves—with the advantages of education and property—could not exercise the same self-control.³

The waiters would have laid out the first course, including ‘pottages’ (stewy soups) and large joints of meat, before the Club members arrived. Dorset, in line with his other Restoration tastes, loved lavish banquets where diners ‘devour Fowl, Fish and Flesh; swallow Oil and Vinegar, Wines and Spices; throw down Salads of twenty different Herbs, Sauces of a hundred Ingredients, Confections and Fruits of numberless Sweets and Flavours’.⁴ By mid-winter, however, the contributions of game and fresh produce, brought to town at the end of the summer from the landed members' estates, would have been running out. If there were a separate dessert course, it would likely have involved fruit and nuts in preserving syrups, or a spiced rice pudding called a ‘whitepot’.

The vogue for decorative dishes in symmetrical or pyramidical shapes did not start until the latter part of the eighteenth century, so the Kit-Cat pies, with their decorative pastry, would have been the likely centrepieces. The menu almost certainly included native oysters, available then like sturgeon and lobster in cheap plenitude from the Thames. Fish, such as anchovy, was also used to make salty relishes to accompany meat, and passed around, like salt, on the tip of one's knife. Cutlery was just becoming commonplace, but using fingers and fingerbowls remained perfectly acceptable.

Eating the main meal of the day with friends in the mid-afternoon was an increasingly fashionable pastime, but also a civilizing duty. Only beasts, Epicurus taught them, dined alone. Congreve reflected that he disliked ‘seeing things that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature. I don't know how it is with others, but I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a Monkey without very Mortifying Reflections, though I never heard anything to the Contrary, why that Creature is not Originally of a Distinct Species.’⁵ Kit-Cat dinners demonstrated, among other more overt purposes, the members' distance from the apes—or, more to the point, from the London ‘mob’ outdoors. Public dining also, implicitly, demonstrated men's distance from women. Being a lady in this period required rejection of physical appetites, for food as for sex. It was no more polite for a woman to say she was hungry, or let men see her eating in public, than to mention if she was sweaty or lustful. The fact that the Kit-Cat was a dining club should therefore be seen as the corollary of its exclusively masculine nature; the first in a long line of clubs where men went to escape their uneducated wives and what they regarded as the intellectual wasteland of the domestic dinner table.

The men seated around the tavern table in 1697 brought a variety of experiences, worries and needs to the Club. Montagu, now 36, had been appointed First Lord of the Treasury in May, following the removal of the Tory-leaning Sidney Godolphin (known to his contemporaries and throughout this book as Lord Godolphin). Montagu had received this post only after managing, by the skin of his teeth, to save the country from financial mismanagement. In 1695, he and Somers had hatched a plan for a national recoinage, intended to deal with the problem of clipped coins. The policy was a disaster, however, forcing the new-minted Bank of England to renege on contracts such that army paymasters could not obtain supplies. With troops and sailors on starvation rations and the verge of mass desertion, the Dutch had had to bail out the English for several months. Luckily, a parallel economic crisis broke in France, leading both sides to look with sudden favour upon peace talks. Montagu extended £5 million of debt for just long enough to conclude such talks at William's palace of Ryswick, near The Hague, where Prior acted as his eyes and ears, checking the draft treaty's translations and sending copies back to Montagu, alongside cases of duty-free wine. The Treaty of Ryswick was concluded in September 1697. Among its terms was the return of North America to its state of pre-war division between France and England.

The conclusion to the War of the League of Augsburg, however, left Montagu in an even more difficult economic position than before: peace did not immediately reduce the national debt, while making it harder to justify the taxation of landowners needed to service that debt. Physically and mentally exhausted, Montagu would therefore have come to the Kit-Cat that winter from his townhouse on Jermyn Street not only hoping to consolidate his political support but also to find solace in his old hobby of poetry and in his childhood friends.

This winter was the first time the Earl of Dorset and his three ‘Boys’ had been reunited in London for several years. Dorset, still at the Kit-Cat Club's ‘suckling centre’,⁶ had been sanguine when the King paid him off handsomely to resign as Lord Chamberlain in April, so that the place could be given to a Dutch royal favourite. Dorset was relieved, in fact, to relinquish a post that required him, against his nature (and ironically in light of his past indiscretions), to play state censor of the theatres. The resignation, however, left Dorset with fewer occasions to see his Privy Council friends and greater interest, like Somerset, in attending the Kit-Cat Club to hear Court and Commons gossip. By 1697, several of Dorset's other old friends from his days of youthful debauchery were also members. Most notable among these was John Vaughan, 3rd Earl of Carbery, described by Pepys as ‘one of the lewdest fellows of the age’⁷ and particularly notorious for having sold his Welsh servants into slavery in Jamaica.

Dorset's original ‘Boy’, Matt Prior, was now one of the most dominant, entertaining personalities at the table, said to leave ‘no elbow room for others’.⁸ He was in London only briefly, having returned from the Peace Congress at Ryswick and expecting to be sent next to a position in Ireland he had pulled several strings to obtain. He had pleaded with Montagu for a post lucrative enough that he could ‘come home again to dedicate the rest of his life amicitiae aeternae, and to the commands of my Master’.⁹ Clearly, Montagu's rapid rise had altered their relationship: they were no longer pretended equals, but master and servant. In January 1698, however, Prior went not to Dublin but to the English embassy in Paris. By the time he departed for France, he would be suffering from weak lungs, which smokefilled nights at the Kit-Cat had aggravated.

Stepney was also enjoying a brief sojourn in London, having returned in September after a series of postings in Hesse-Cassel, the Palatinate and Trier. By this time, Stepney was considered an expert on tumultuous central European affairs. He was, therefore, an important international informant to the Whig Junto, though his London bosses thought he cared too much about his own popularity in foreign Courts, to the possible detriment of England's interests. At the beginning of the year, travelling back and forth across central Europe between Anthonie Heinsius, Grand Pensionary of Holland, and the various German rulers (‘Electors’) within William's alliance, Stepney had told Montagu he could not take much more of ‘this vagabond life which is full of care and I fear will end in nothing but debts’.¹⁰ Such complaints, combined with the end of the war, provided an excuse to bring Stepney home and remind him of his native loyalties. There were few better places to do this than at the Kit-Cat Club.

Prior and Stepney had profited from Montagu's rise to power. Montagu ensured Stepney was admitted to the Commission for Trade and Plantations (or ‘Board of Trade’), which Somers had helped establish the previous year, and of which Montagu was an ex officio member. The Commission later became the administrative foundation of Britain's colonial empire. Stepney received his place in June 1697, with a £1,000 salary, and attended his first meeting after returning to London that September. It happened to be a historic meeting: the first time that independent statistics were presented to a government body with the intention of guiding economic policy along scientific lines.

Montagu also admitted Prior and Stepney as Fellows of the Royal Society, of which he was President. The Society had started as a private members' club, dedicated to furthering scientific knowledge, in a London tavern in 1660. After 1677, however, the Society had published no reports for nearly forty years, even though 1687–97 was a decade of high-voltage scientific and mathematical creativity following the publication of Newton's Principia. Though the Kit-Cat Club existed on the verge of the first mechanical-industrial age, none of its members were what we would consider scientists. Dorset and Somers were also Royal Society Fellows, but such Kit-Cats were so honoured because they had influence at Court, not because they were engaged in the work of empirical or experimental discovery.

Since 1695, Somers had been among the seven regents administering England during the King's absences, and his loyalty was rewarded in December 1697 when he finally accepted a barony, alongside valuable estates in Surrey to finance the expense of this peerage. Somers was by then Lord Chancellor, overseeing the appointment of all judges and Justices of the Peace. He had spent the summer in retirement at Clapham and Tunbridge, in poor health, but by the winter he was back at Powys House, in daily contact with Montagu and the two other Junto lords. The Kit-Cat Club was one of the key venues where three of the four Junto lords conferred outside Whitehall. Its congenial, alcohol-mellowed atmosphere no doubt minimized the risk of division while they argued policy and political strategy.

The third Junto Kit-Cat, attending this dinner besides Montagu and Somers, was Baron Wharton. A 49-year-old, large-souled man with a pock-scarred, open face that his contemporaries felt better suited to a tavern keeper than a baron, ‘Tom’ Wharton had composed a marching tune called ‘Lillibullero’ that became the popular anthem of the Glorious Revolution. Afterwards, it had been he who proposed that William and Mary should reign jointly, and, for the better part of the decade, Wharton was Somers' and Montagu's closest political ally and the Whig party's unofficial manager. Wharton and Montagu defined the Junto's tactics by leveraging their way into power through the collective strength of their followers in the Commons. Now, in 1697, Wharton remained a man to be reckoned with, thanks to extensive electoral influence derived from his estates and income (some £13,000 per annum, equivalent to around £1.2 million today).

His influence also derived from his leadership of the Dissenters' wing of the Whig party. Raised a Calvinist in the era of Charles II's anti-Dissenter Test Acts, young Wharton had been barred from attending Oxbridge, and educated at home by tutors and among the Huguenots in France. Throughout his career, promoting toleration of Dissent was his personal crusade, even as he embraced the apparent hypocrisy of ‘conforming’ to the Church of England in order to hold public office himself. Sitting at this Kit-Cat dinner, however, Wharton was not feeling at the top of his game; he had not won a place in the King's recently reshuffled ministry. Wharton was Comptroller of William's Household and was given various appointments in April—Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, Chief Justice of Eyre, and Warden of the royal forests south of the Trent—but these were far from the real power he coveted. Compared to his younger Junto colleague Montagu, Wharton felt underappreciated.

To be a Kit-Cat now required more, in terms of political allegiance, than being a Whig: it required allegiance to the Junto (although the fourth Junto member, Lord Orford, was never a Kit-Cat). Accordingly, the six or so young MPs who belonged to the Club during these early years were each aligned to a Kit-Cat patron.¹¹ At this dinner, they would have tried to impress their patrons when the Club's conversation turned to politics and discussion of the war's end. Despite public celebrations around a temporary triumphal arch constructed in St James's Square, and celebratory poems on the new peace, insiders like Montagu and Somers understood that the peace of Ryswick was merely a breathing space in which to rearm. Louis XIV had recognized William III as lawful King of England, and promised not to aid any further Jacobite invasions like the attempt he had funded in 1692, but too much remained at stake for the peace to be more than an uneasy truce.

The Treaty of Ryswick left unresolved the fundamental question of who would succeed the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, Carlos II, and so control the balance of power in Europe. William therefore wished to maintain a ‘standing army’ of over 24,000 men, but needed Parliament's consent. The Junto members supported this policy, and were therefore considered leaders of the ‘Court Whigs’, while a number of other ‘Country Whig’ MPs formed an opposition coalition with the Tories. The Country Whigs opposed the standing army, believing that the King might abuse it and turn it into a tool of domestic tyranny, while the Tory landowners opposed the tax burden of paying for it. The young MP Robert Harley headed this anti-Junto coalition, and exchanged fierce words with Montagu over the issue in the Commons that winter. Montagu argued ‘that the Nation was still unsettled, and not quite delivered from the Fear of King James; that the Adherents to that abdicated Prince were as bold and numerous as ever; and he himself [James II] still protected by the French King, who, having as yet dismissed none of his Troops, was still as formidable as before’.¹²

Harley and his followers, who met at the Grecian tavern on the Strand, organized propaganda, calling for the army to be reduced to its 1680 levels. In response, Somers authored an anonymous pamphlet, in the form of a letter to the King, defending the royal policy. In it he argued that, in the end, ‘we must trust England to a House of Commons, that is to itself’.¹³ It was a debate about the balance between national security and civil liberties. The Kit-Cat Club was a place for Somers to run this pamphlet's arguments past his friends, and to encourage others to pick up a pen in service of Court policy. Prior supported Montagu and Somers with A New Answer to An Argument against a Standing Army (1697)—a poem that asked:

Would they discreetly break that Sword,

By which their Freedom was restored,

And put their Trust in Louis' Word?

It concluded that those opposing a standing army in the name of limiting William's powers would ironically find themselves responsible for the return of the more absolutist Stuarts. Organizing production of such propaganda was one of the Kit-Cat Club's earliest collective political activities.

The standing army debate was the first face-off between Harley and the Junto—a foretaste of the rivalry that would flare over a decade later and almost destroy the Junto Whigs and the Kit-Cat Club. In 1697, Harley had triumphed: a Commons resolution was passed that a Disbanding Bill should be introduced. This crisis, and analysis of the Junto's tactics in the press and in the Commons, would therefore have carried the Kit-Cats' conversation through several courses.

The literary conversation of the Club that winter is equally easy to deduce. Around half of the members had just subscribed to Dryden's new translation of the Works of Virgil, which Tonson had published with an introduction by Addison. Dryden said the book was only for the ‘most Judicious’ audience. Though the 500 subscribers were both Whig and Tory, and Dryden, with his Jacobite sympathies, gave the work several Tory dedications, the publication still had a distinctly Whiggish colouring; the author was grimly amused, for example, to find Tonson had made an illustration of the hero Aeneas bear a marked resemblance to King William.

Subscription editions were a bargain way for the nobility to patronize writers: a hybrid solution at a time before the general public was literate and prosperous enough to act as the greatest patron of them all. By advertising their names as subscribers in the publications, aristocrats shifted from commissioning books towards being their celebrity promoters. This was Tonson's answer to issuing more specialist or scholarly works with high unit costs. In the case of Dryden's Virgil, besides the deluxe editions sent to the subscribers, Tonson also published a cheap edition, for the general public to buy from his shop. Dryden and Tonson's collaborations before the Kit-Cat's foundation had helped popularize classical translation in England, and Dryden and Congreve's translation of Juvenal and Persius in 1693 ushered in the notion of the translated author, as Dryden put it, ‘speak[ing] that kind of English, which he would have spoken had he lived in England, and Written to this Age’.¹⁴ Such accessible publications, with their attractive illustrations and lack of scholarly paraphernalia, were part of the Kit-Cat's patriotic agenda to better educate their literate countrymen and did much to pave the way for the neoclassical populism of the later eighteenth century.

One Kit-Cat subscriber to The Works of Virgil, whom Dryden described as ‘without flattery, the best Critic of our Nation’,¹⁵ was William Walsh. Walsh's reputation as a critic must have been based on his conversation at the Witty Club rather than his writing, since what little Walsh had published (through Tonson) was mostly amorous poetry and boasts of his exploits with women. Walsh was an object of ridicule for his excessive love of fine clothing and his wig containing over three pounds of powder that produced little puffs of cloud with every sharp movement of his head. In 1697, Walsh was in his mid-thirties and beginning to suspect his name would not become immortal. His estate, by this date, was reportedly ‘reduced to about £300 a year, of which his mother has the greatest part’.¹⁶ Though he had been seeking patronage from Somers since 1693, this winter marked a turning point, after which Somers' support was decisive in getting Walsh elected to a parliamentary seat for Worcestershire.

At Dryden's Witty Club, Walsh had drunk and quipped with Dr Samuel Garth, who was now also his fellow Kit-Cat. Garth attended that winter, eager to see Stepney and Prior after their long stints overseas. Garth had known ‘Lord Dorset's Boys’ at Cambridge and had written a poem praising Prior and Stepney as the best and brightest hopes of English literature. Like them, Garth had had to make his own way in the world after receiving a mere £10 legacy from his family. Now, at 37, he was a respected physician, but still writing poetry—largely revisions of his mock-epic Dispensary. He had subscribed five guineas (some £700 today) to Dryden's Virgil.

Though many Kit-Cat patrons dabbled in authorship, there was no real risk of confusing the bluebloods with the literary thoroughbreds at the Club's table. At this meeting of 1697, Congreve was the leading literary man. He was overseeing a new production at Inner Temple of his three-year-old hit, Love for Love (1694). This play, his third, was originally the debut production of a new theatre company that had splintered off from the United Company in 1695. The defection had been led by Bracey's mentors, the Bettertons, so she went with them, and her suitor Congreve devotedly followed, promising to write for the new company. More importantly, Congreve used his credit with Dorset to obtain an audience with the King for Bracey and the Bettertons, thereby gaining a royal charter for their new company. Congreve was offered shares in it by way of thanks.

Betterton's company set up in an old tennis court building at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the King himself was in the audience on the opening night. Bracey played the complex lead role of Angelica in Love for Love, and also spoke the Epilogue, in which Congreve had her complain of men who ‘wanting ready cash to pay for hearts, / They top their learning on us, and their parts.’ There may have been self-mockery in this, given the lewd pun in ‘parts’ and the fact that Congreve certainly remained short of ‘ready cash’ at that date.

Montagu showed his approval of Love for Love by appointing Congreve in March 1695 to a commission for regulating and licensing hackney and stagecoaches, with a salary of £100 (around £10,000 today) plus a percentage fee for each licence issued. Congreve could lease out the actual work to a clerk at a much smaller salary, pocketing the difference. This commission was a clear example of the Kit-Cat Club's modus operandi for literary patronage, the patrons frequently dispensing public offices rather than cash from their own private pockets. (Such ‘jobs for the boys’ were, of course, of little use to the female authors whom Tonson published, the most notable of whom were Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips and Susanna Centlivre.)

In April 1697, Congreve was further made one of eleven managers of the Malt Lottery, a government scheme for raising duties on malt used for brewing and distilling. The following month, Montagu added yet another post for licensing hawkers and pedlars. All this added up to a secure but still modest income for the playwright. Congreve's work in progress that winter was a poem, ‘The Birth of the Muse’, which would be dedicated in gratitude to Montagu, ‘by turns the Patron and the Friend’, when Tonson printed it the following year.¹⁷

Congreve's involvement made Montagu into a ‘great favourer’ of Betterton's new theatre company, in preference to the United Company at Drury Lane.¹⁸ Though the two companies' rivalry was never partisan, both being essentially Whig, the Kit-Cats clearly backed the new house at Lincoln's Inn. Montagu, who, like Tonson and Somers, had taken a sudden interest in Vanbrugh's career after the success of The Relapse the previous winter, saw Vanbrugh's second comedy, The Provok'd Wife, in manuscript and persuaded (perhaps paid) the playwright to adapt it to better suit Betterton's company. For Vanbrugh, this was a smart move, as he now had access to a more talented cast: The Provok'd Wife's portrayal of marital misery was brilliantly brought to life by Mr Betterton, now in his sixties, and the ageing actress Mrs Barry. Bracey played Belinda.

In 1697, therefore, Congreve and Vanbrugh were showing their work on the same stage. They avoided direct competition thanks to the fact that Congreve produced a tragedy instead of a comedy for the same season as Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife. Congreve's tragedy was The Mourning Bride and, as usual, the lead role was written for his beloved Bracey. Both Vanbrugh's comedy and Congreve's tragedy were hits, with the playhouse ‘full to the last’.¹⁹ When his plays gained universal applause, Vanbrugh, flamboyant and sociable, relished the attention. Congreve pushed himself forward in less obvious ways: when he put his name as author on a playbill in 1699, Dryden remarked that this was ‘a new manner of proceeding, at least in England’.²⁰

A contemporary critic said Vanbrugh's writing seemed ‘no more than his common Conversation committed to Paper’.²¹ This is tribute to the artfulness of 1690s conversation as much as to the seeming artlessness of Vanbrugh's writing, and if conversation was an art form, the Kit-Cat Club was its medium—the reality that Vanbrugh and Congreve refined and amplified. Indeed, their shared love of writing in naturalistic speech explains their general preference for comedy over tragedy, a genre in which more formal verse was expected. The playwrights' writing methods, however, were stark contrasts: while Vanbrugh rapidly churned out ‘new’ plays translated from classical or French sources, Congreve wrote and revised laboriously, relying on original if convoluted plots.

The surprising absence of reference to one another's work in their critical writings, and the fact that Congreve's library did not contain a single Vanbrugh play when it was sold after his death, suggest rivalry between the two men. On the other hand, there are generous compliments to Vanbrugh's ‘sprightly’ talent in two anthologies by Congreve's close friends,²² and Congreve would have a middle-aged portrait of himself painted reading a Vanbrugh play.

Congreve explained to an old friend from Kilkenny School, Joe Keally: ‘I need not be very much alone, but I choose it, rather than to conform myself to the manners of my Court or chocolate-house acquaintance.’²³ It was as if Congreve found adopting his public mask—his Kit-Cat persona as a ‘man of wit’—almost an insult to his intelligence; as if he hated to feel like a trained monkey brought in for the amusement of his literary patrons. Congreve's plays contain characters that can be viewed as at least partial caricatures of the less intellectual Kit-Cat patrons: in The Double Dealer, for example, Congreve presents the peers of England as sexually and intellectually impotent. Their pretensions as wits and writers are the idle pastimes of trivial minds, and Lord Froth fancies himself a theatre critic who thinks he will look more knowledgeable if he does not laugh at a play's jokes. In Love for Love, Sir Sampson mocks the servant Jeremy for having ideas above his station, yet Jeremy is better educated than a ‘gentleman’ named Tattle, who thinks the head of the Nile is a Privy Counsellor. Such were the literary messages by which Kit-Cat authors began to detach class from birth, and pin it more squarely on a person's taste and education. It was not a new comedic device to show servants sharper than their masters, but this time it had a fresh and more pointed cynicism. At the Kit-Cat that evening in winter 1697, however, the dukes and earls seated around Congreve detected no disdain or boredom lurking beneath his indulgent smile and patient remarks: ‘No one, after a joyful Evening, can reflect upon an Expression of Mr Congreve's that dwells upon him with pain,’ Steele later recalled.²⁴

The end of the meal would have been signalled by Tonson, as Secretary, or by Somerset, as highest in rank, throwing down his napkin and calling for a larger washbowl. Then, after the board was cleared of the final course, the servants brought ‘every man his bottle and a clean glass’,²⁵ and Tonson turned the diners' attentions to the only official order of business: the nomination of ‘beauties’, and the recitation of light verses in their honour. Tonson, as one of Prior's poems put it, ‘bawls out to the Club for a toast’.²⁶

As a drinking and dining society first and foremost—Addison called it a club ‘founded upon Eating and Drinking’²⁷—the Kit-Cat Club was contemporaneous with another known as ‘The Knights of the Toast’ or ‘The Toasters’. These Toasters raised their glasses to nominated ‘beauties’ among the ladies of the town, without, it would seem, any ulterior political or cultural motive. They were just men who fancied themselves gallant connoisseurs of fine wine and women, as mocked by a 1698 ballad depicting them flirting outrageously during a church sermon. At least seven men were members of both clubs. Many Toasters never joined the Kit-Cat Club, however, disqualified from the latter by their Toryism.

Steele wrote the most famous description of how toasting a beauty worked:

The Manner of her Inauguration is much like that of the Choice of a Doge in Venice; it is performed by Balloting; and when she is so chosen, she reigns indisputably for that ensuing Year; but must be elected anew to prolong her Empire a Moment beyond it. When she is regularly chosen, her Name is written with a Diamond on a Drinking glass. The Hieroglyphic of the Diamond is to show her that her Value is imaginary; and that of the Glass, to acquaint her that her Condition is frail, and depends on the Hand which holds her.²⁸

A manuscript letter confirms that this passage describes not only the Toasters' but also the Kit-Cats' ritual and that a complimentary verse on each toasted beauty was engraved beside the name on each glass.²⁹ No glass complete with lady's name or verse appears to have survived the centuries. (The glasses today known as ‘Kit-Cat’ style are erroneously named and date from the later eighteenth century.) That the toasting was in absentia allowed toasts to be made by married men, to married women. A Tory authoress named Mary Astell sarcastically rebuked the Kit-Cats for how their toasting could bring respectable society ladies unwanted attention: ‘When an Ill-bred Fellow endeavours to protect a Wife, or Daughter, or other virtuous Woman from your very Civil Addresses, your noble Courage never fails of being roused upon such great Provocations.’³⁰

The only two essential qualifications to be a Kit-Cat toast were beauty and Whiggery. Many women were chosen as toasts purely as compliments to their fathers, uncles or husbands. Many were girls in their teens, toasted unashamedly by middle-aged men in a period when the legal minimum age for marrying or having sex with a girl was ten, and when a male reader could write a letter to a paper protesting that it was a gentleman's natural privilege to fornicate with ‘little raw unthinking Girls’.³¹

Steele's statement that women should ‘consider themselves, as they ought, no other than an additional Part of the Species…shining Ornaments to their Fathers, Husbands, Brothers or Children’³² may be belittling, but an ornamental role was for many women an improvement upon living as victims of casual molestation or beating. The Kit-Cat members set themselves up as gallant models for reforming men like Vanbrugh's character Sir John Brute in The Provok'd Wife, who beats his wife simply because he has the right to do so. Their rituals were the beginnings of a more ‘polite’ and chivalric treatment of women that would become codified in the later eighteenth century. A few of their toasts contain salacious puns, but they are relatively lacking in libido compared to the verses of the earlier Restoration rakes. Dorset when young, for example, had asked: ‘For what but Cunt, and Prick, does raise / Our thoughts to Songs, and Roundelays?’³³

Now the answer seemed to be that the one-upmanship of literary competition was as rousing as lust. A 1700 poem, The Patentee, contrasts the Kit-Cats ‘swollen with wit’ to the Knights of the Toast ‘with lechery lean’,³⁴ suggesting not only that the Toasters were less overweight, but also that they composed toasts to seduce women, while the Kit-Cats wrote more for the sake of impressing one another.

As a prologue to the nominations of toasted beauties for 1697, Congreve would have recited a standard ‘Oath of the Toast’:

By Bacchus and by Venus Swear

That you will only name the fair

When chains you at the present wear

And so let Wit with Wine go round

And she you love prove kind and sound.³⁵

No list of toasted beauties exists this early in the Kit-Cat Club's history, though it is likely that one of the five surviving verses dedicated to Lady Carlisle dates from this period. She was the wife of the 28-year-old Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, having married him when he was 19 and she just 13. Dr Garth sought the patronage of Carlisle when he composed and recited the following toast to Lady Carlisle:

Carlisle's a name can every Muse inspire,

To Carlisle fill the Glass and tune the Lyre.

With his loved Bays the God of day shall Crown,

Her Wit and Beauty equal to his own.

It is uncertain how boisterous Kit-Cat toasting became. If the texts of the Kit-Cat toasts are anything to go by, the atmosphere was ludic but not lewd. When Montagu once sent poetry to Stepney in Hamburg, however, he had added with a wink that ‘There are some others which are fitter to create mirth over a glass of wine than to be put into writing.’³⁶ One example may be a poem that survives among the Kit-Cat manuscripts about a lady's use of a massive candle as a dildo. Such poetry, produced alongside the toasts but unfit to be published by Tonson's press, would have been another obvious reason for keeping women away from Kit-Cat meetings. This evening, however, an exception would be made.

Though there seems to have been a rule that members could not toast their own wives, one member decided that evening, ‘on a whim’, to make the unusual nomination of his own daughter. The member was a widower named Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl of Kingston-upon Hull. Kingston argued that his daughter, Mary Pierrepont, though not yet 8, was far prettier than any of the candidates on the list. No objection was made to Mary's age, but there was another rule that forbade members from electing a lady whom they had never seen. ‘Then you shall see her,’ declared the Earl, and ‘in the gaiety of the moment’ sent orders to a house in the village of Chelsea, where Mary was then lodging, to have the child finely dressed and brought to him at the tavern.³⁷

By the time Mary reached Gray's Inn, the other toasts had been balloted and drunk. Entering the sybaritic atmosphere of that tavern room was, by her own account, an overwhelming experience for the sheltered girl: dozens of men around the table and spitting fire, all eyes fixed on her, greasy chins shining, like the silver and pewter, in the guttering candlelight, the stinking smoke from their long thin pipes mixed with the stew of their bodies and the whiff of the piss-pot in the corner. She must have first gone to curtsy to her handsome 30-year-old father, seeking his approbation for her outfit, which, in the style of the 1690s, was much like a grown woman's in miniature. Her heart beat nervously against her stays.

Years later, Lady Mary recalled she was received ‘with acclamations’ and ‘her claim [as a toast] unanimously allowed’.³⁸ The members, raising their brimming glasses in her direction, then drank her health. Pride blushed over the little girl's face under the spotlight of the men's attentions and stayed with her for years afterwards as a vivid memory—a highlight, she said, of her life: ‘Pleasure…was too poor a word to express [my] sensations. They amounted to ecstasy; never again…did [I] pass so happy a day.’³⁹ She is the only Kit-Cat toast to leave us a proud record, albeit verbal and repeated perhaps inaccurately by her granddaughter, of how it felt to be so honoured.

Lady Mary's name was then ‘engraved in due form upon a drinkingglass’.⁴⁰ She certainly saw the glasses, since in one of her private letters as an adult she laughs about a chamber pot being engraved like a Kit-Cat glass. She was also, it seems, toasted by the Club as an adult, in 1712 and 1714, though no verses in her honour have survived.

The image of the 8-year-old ‘kitten’ being handed round by the Kit-Cats, including so many members of the King's Cabinet, is a striking embodiment of patriarchy. A woman's beauty equated to tangible value on the marriage market, and Mary Pierrepont would later confound her own beauty's ‘value’ in this sense by eloping with her preferred suitor, who could not pay her father's asking price. Under her married name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, her poetry, letters and conversation would then win her a reputation as the most brilliant female wit of her generation.

Lady Mary attributed her own wit partly to Congreve, who was to take as much interest in her mind as her beauty as she grew up, and whom she described as her wittiest friend. Though her father was, like most gentlemen of his generation, unconcerned with his daughter's education, Mary secretly educated herself to a high level starting the year after she visited the Club. Lady Mary is also remembered for bringing the concept of vaccination back to England from Turkey, introducing this practice into British society by convincing her aristocratic friends to try it. She thereby saved future generations from smallpox's life-threatening risk and the disfigurement she herself suffered in 1715, a year after she was last toasted as a beauty by the Kit-Cats.

Writing three years before this 1697 meeting took place, Mary Astell asked her fellow Englishwomen: ‘How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden, to make a fine show and be good for nothing?’⁴¹ Astell believed the way forward was through female education and therefore tried to form an early female academy. It would not be until the succeeding generation, however, that women would see far greater, albeit short-lived, educational opportunities. By the mid-1760s, Elizabeth Montagu and her bluestocking friends would be able to sit and discuss books and politics with willing men, in imitation of the French salons; in 1697, such a mixed gathering was unthinkable.

We know the Club could carouse until the early morning hours. Dawn may even have been breaking by the time Kingston took his daughter home. Tonson would not have covered the enormous bill of every meeting now that the Club was so rich in noble patrons. Ned Ward said the Kit-Cat wits performed their verses and then the richer members ‘would manifest by their Liberality, when the Reckoning came to be paid, the Satisfaction they had found in the witty Discourses of their wiser Brethren’.⁴²

Stupefied with wine, the members said their loud farewells, leaving the exhausted servants of the Cat and Fiddle to deal with the feast's debris. Linkmen carrying lanterns were waiting outside to escort those who did not have carriages. From the overheated tavern, the Kit-Cats emerged into the damp, foggy night air in the labyrinthine alleys south of Gray's Inn. Wharton headed back to Gerrard Street, Somers to Powys House, Somerset to Northumberland House on the Strand, Carlisle to King's Square, Vanbrugh to his lodgings next to the Banqueting House in Whitehall, and Congreve and Tonson returned together to their shared house on Fleet Street. Unified by their Whig beliefs and an implied promise of mutual support, they had fortified themselves against the political risks that the final years of the 1690s would throw at them.

V CULTURE WARS

There the dread phalanx of reformers come,

Sworn foes to wit, as Carthage was to Rome,

Their ears so sanctified, no scenes can please,

But heavy hymns or pensive homilies.

DR SAMUEL GARTH,

Prologue to Squire Trelooby (1704)¹

THE KIT-CAT MEMBERS' relaxed attitudes to religion and morality were both ahead of their time, predicting later Georgian rationalism, and a remnant of the Restoration rakes' godless cynicism. As opinion-makers, the Kit-Cats tried to promote religious tolerance and moderation, in reaction to the ‘enthusiasm’ (fanaticism) they felt had inflamed the Civil War, the persecution they associated with Catholicism, and, as Voltaire noted when he saw the crowds in the Royal Exchange, because toleration was good for business. Although there was ‘less Appearance of Religion in [England], than any other neighbouring State or Kingdom’,² many of the ‘middling sort’ who were profiting most from the growth of trade and commerce in the 1690s were devout Protestant churchgoers who felt they were clinging to the remnants of Christian morality amid a ‘debauched age’.³

The beginning of a correlation between one's faith and social position showed itself in the theatres where there was a mismatch between the censorious bourgeois audiences after 1688, on whom the permanently near-bankrupt theatres were dependent, and the authors who were still writing for a small, elite intelligentsia of morally and religiously liberal patrons. The Kit-Cats and their friends could support a playhouse for one night, but theatre managers needed the plays to be uncontroversial to draw regular crowds. All this came to a head in the Kit-Cats' battle with clergyman Jeremy Collier.

In April 1696, Collier, a middle-aged Cambridgeshire clergyman, attended the Tyburn execution of two men condemned for plotting to assassinate King William. Alongside his fellow ‘non-jurors’ (clergymen who had refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchy), Collier ascended the scaffold and, by laying on hands, offered the plotters absolution for their treachery. Since this was a serious crime under English law, Collier thereby condemned himself to living as an outlaw. Over the following months, he published, semianonymously and from hiding, views that challenged King William's ‘false’ authority and the Church of England's feeble acceptance of this authority. Collier portrayed post-Revolutionary England as in need of urgent salvation.

Many non-Jacobites agreed with Collier on the last point. The first Society for the Reformation of Manners was established in the Strand roughly contemporaneously with the Kit-Cat Club's foundation in Gray's Inn. This society vowed to spy out and report offenders against the laws on immoral behaviour, and monitor which Officers of the Peace were effective or negligent in enforcing these laws.

After Queen Mary's death in 1694 and the end of the War of the League of Augsburg in 1697, William needed a new way to legitimize his rule and was fearful of alienating or antagonizing the Society for the Reformation of Manners' army of grassroot Christian activists. He therefore deliberately set about becoming the leader (rather than target) of those seeking to reform the loose morals of the age. In December 1697, to offset the unwelcome news that peace with France would not bring a drop in taxes, he promised the Commons that he would commence a kind of Kulturkampf at home—a crusade against ‘Prophaneness and Immorality’.⁴ This encouraged certain zealous MPs to present an address to him in February 1698 concerning suppression of unchristian books and punishment of their authors, ultimately resulting in ‘An Act for the more effectual suppressing of Atheism, Blasphemy and Prophaneness’.

The previous month, on a freezing day in January 1698, a fire destroyed most of Whitehall Palace. Certain Jacobite pamphleteers, including Collier, played upon people's Sodom-and-Gomorrah-ish superstition that God had frowned upon the Williamite Court. Some suggested William enjoyed sodomy with his male favourites. Vanbrugh faced a similar accusation of bisexuality in an anonymous poem alleging that the playwright did ‘Active and Passive, in both Sexes Lust’.⁵ Vanbrugh was specifically accused of sodomy with Peregrine Bertie, with whom he lodged in Whitehall, and therefore blamed for the fire that destroyed the Palace.⁶ While a manuscript of 1694 confirms Bertie and Vanbrugh were intimate friends, nothing more is known of their relationship.⁷

Vanbrugh's sexuality was attacked because his satirical plays had made plenty of enemies in church pulpits. When The Relapse (1696) was first performed, with its comparison of church congregations to social clubs and its depiction of a careerist chaplain, Vanbrugh was saved from the Bishop of Gloucester's wrath only by his friends' ‘agility’.⁸ In the Preface to the first printed edition of The Relapse, Vanbrugh answered his attackers:

As for the Saints (your thorough-paced ones I mean, with screwed Faces and wry Mouths) I despair of them, for they are Friends to nobody. They love nothing, but their Altars and Themselves. They have too much Zeal to have any Charity; they make Debauches in Piety, as Sinners do in Wine, and are quarrelsome in their Religion as other People are in their Drink: so I hope nobody will mind what they say.⁹

Vanbrugh's scepticism about the moral conversion of the husband in The Relapse implied allegorical scepticism about the country's moral reformation, but it was a scepticism he could not afford to voice more openly.

Immediately after the Whitehall Palace fire, capitalizing on London's fin de siècle mood, Collier published A Short View of the Immorality and Prophaness of the English Stage (1698). This book censured immorality and profanity in recent plays by the so-called ‘Orange Comedians’,¹⁰ foremost among whom were Congreve and Vanbrugh. It did so in a style of close textual analysis that would be highly influential on future critics, both Christian and secular. It opened with the premise that ‘The business of Plays is to recommend Virtue and discountenance Vice’, and ended with a section complaining that sinful characters were escaping dramatic justice. A Short View was rancorous, pugnacious and literal-minded, but also intelligent and biting. It was an instant bestseller.

As an outsider, ostracized by Williamite society, Collier did not hesitate to attack the biggest literary names of the day, including Dryden, Congreve and Vanbrugh, whom he called ‘snakes and vipers’. Though Collier said he wanted only to reform the theatres, his Short View fanned the flames of a popular movement driven by an abolitionist impulse. It was not the first shot fired in the culture wars, but it was the loudest, and the one aimed most directly at the Kit-Cat Club's authors. The Club's own name was not yet, in 1698, well known enough for its members to be attacked as a collective entity, but the battle against Collierite attitudes was one of the struggles that helped bond the Club's friendships in these early years.

Collier attacked the representation of women in the plays of Vanbrugh and Congreve as bold, libidinous and knowing creatures. He blamed the playwrights for allowing women to act these roles on stage, ‘to make Monsters of them, and throw them out of their kind’.¹¹ As early as 1693, when Congreve's Double Dealer was first performed, ladies were so outraged by the realism of his female characterization that, in ironic defence of their modesty, they shouted out protests during the performance and hurled things at the stage. Congreve responded that the ladies in his audiences could no more expect to be flattered by a satire than ‘to be tickled by a surgeon when he's letting 'em blood’.¹²

Collier particularly criticized the Orange Comedians' disparaging view of marriage. In one sense, the Orange Comedians' attitude was simply an old joke inherited from Restoration drama, but they treated it with greater seriousness, bringing out the true dramatic tension of claustrophobic, bitter marriages. As one critic has observed, if today we are living through the death throes of the nuclear family, the Kit-Cat authors were living through its birth pangs,¹³ and Vanbrugh and Congreve explored their fears of this new social unit in their work while assiduously avoiding such commitment in their own private lives. In Congreve's Old Batchelor, Bellmour summed up the author's own attitude to the married state:

Bellmour: Could'st thou be content to marry Araminta?

Vainlove: Could you be content to go to heaven?

Bellmour: Hum, not immediately, in my conscience, not heartily.

Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife leaves its marital problems unresolved at the end of the play—a radical ending for a comedy but also a bitter truth in an age when divorce was a great rarity. Whether or not he was bisexual, Vanbrugh was certainly a confirmed bachelor in the 1690s, morbidly mocking his Kit-Cat friends whenever one of them became engaged. He gossiped to a fellow Kit-Cat, for example, that another Club member, Anthony Henley, was tying himself to ‘a mettled jade’¹⁴—this was, in fact, Mary Bertie, a cousin of Vanbrugh's friend Peregrine. Mary's chief attraction for Henley was probably her fortune of some £30,000 (well over £3.6 million today, and more than enough to cover Henley's debts of £10,000). Surrounded by mercenary matches, Vanbrugh's cynicism was understandable.

The Junto members conducted their love lives not unlike the libertine characters in a Restoration or Orange comedy, and Collier's criticism of the theatre was fired by rumours about the conduct of playwrights' patrons. Wharton was described as ‘something of a libertine’, and an anonymous satire referred to his whoring.¹⁵ He kept a mistress for many years during his first marriage, then in 1692, at 44, he married 22-year-old Lucy Loftus, who became a Kit-Cat toast in 1698 and was referred to as ‘the witty, fair one’.¹⁶ Though Wharton seems to have been unfaithful to his young wife, Lucy was rumoured to be just as ‘abandoned’ as her husband.¹⁷

Montagu, similarly, never treated his marriage to the dowager Lady Manchester as any impediment to his long-standing affair with a Kit-Cat toast named Mrs Catherine Barton, the niece of Sir Isaac Newton. The Duchess of Marlborough laughed at Montagu's playing the ladies' man, with ‘a great knack at making pretty ballads’, though he was so short and ‘hideously ugly’.¹⁸ A Tory satire accused Montagu of lining his pockets with public funds that he ‘whored away or pissed against the walls’.¹⁹ That this accusation may not have been simple libel is suggested by a Whig friend's joking remark that, when Prior and Stepney left London in 1698, Prior for Paris and Stepney for Saxony, their departures caused the business of a certain London brothel to nosedive.

Collier attacked the Kit-Cats not just for being sexual liberals but also for their godlessness. Beyond their anti-clerical one-liners, the plays of Vanbrugh and Congreve contain a fundamentally secular and cynical worldview that challenged Collier's religious faith to its core. Congreve's Way of the World has a character swear an oath on Tonson's Miscellany rather than on the Bible. While his plays epitomized the grace and elegance of the coming eighteenth century, Congreve's philosophy, at its darkest, was closer to twentieth century nihilism. He believed social conventions and good humour kept a thin lid on dark passions and the ‘power of baseness’.²⁰ Vanbrugh's view of life, meanwhile, was more martial and combative—a constant struggle in which God's mercy and justice played little part: ‘Fortune, thou art a bitch by Gad!’ exclaims Young Fashion in The Relapse.²¹

There was virtually no avowed atheism (any more than avowed republicanism) among Whigs, yet this was the obvious accusation for Tory satirists to hurl. These satires claimed the Kit-Cat Club fomented ‘free-thinking’: one written in the voice of a Kit-Cat founder, for example, recalled that ‘'Twas there we first instructed all our youth, / To talk profane and laugh at sacred truth.’²² Another later proposed that the ‘great discoveries’ of atheism ‘be adapted to the capacities of the Kit-Cat…who might then be able to read lectures on them to their several toasts’.²³ Individual Kit-Cat patrons notorious for irreligion included: Wharton (who never repaired the damage done to his image by a notorious incident in 1682 when he and some friends allegedly urinated and defecated on the altar and pulpit of a Gloucestershire church); Somers, who, though a member of his local vestry, was branded a deist (that is, one sceptical about revealed religion though not the original existence of God); and Dr Garth, whose choice of profession derived from, or reinforced, his innately sceptical outlook. One Tory satire imagines Garth speaking to a dying clergyman: ‘“Why, Sir, have you the vanity to think that religion ever did our cause any service?!…I'll tell the Kit-Cat Club of you, and it shall be known to every man at C[our]t that you die like a pedant.”’²⁴

In May 1698, inspired by Collier's attack and the King's call for moral reform, the Middlesex Justices of the Peace prosecuted Congreve for having written, five years earlier, The Double Dealer. Tonson and the printer Briscoe were prosecuted for publishing the play. Nobody was imprisoned or fined, but Congreve was forced to revise the play to prevent further prosecution. These revisions involved the character of the chaplain, Mr Saygrace, and deletion of allegedly profane and indecent language.

Congreve, embittered by this interference in matters literary, published Amendments of Mr Collier's False and Imperfect Citations (1698) in reply to A Short View. His main line of argument was that his words should not be judged out of context: the same justification often used against censors today and an early instance of a writer complaining against deconstruction of his text. Congreve added wit by emphasizing that smut was in the eye of the beholder: ‘[T]he greater part of those examples which he [Collier] produced are only demonstrations of his own impurity; they only savour of his utterance and were sweet enough till tainted by his breath.’²⁵ The charge of prurience was fair—Collier did seem to take great pleasure in spying out immorality—but Congreve's defence was weakened by the need he felt to claim some alternative reforming purpose for his satire.

Vanbrugh was thicker-skinned than Congreve (‘Fortunately, I am not one of those who drop their spirits at every Rebuff—If I had been, I had been underground long ago’²⁶) but his own response to Collier, A Short Vindication of ‘The Relapse’ and ‘The Provok'd Wife’ (1698), got off on an equally wrong foot by accepting Collier's premise that the purpose of theatre was to ‘recommend Virtue and discountenance Vice’.²⁷ King William had expressed approval of A Short View to demonstrate his sympathy with the moral crusaders, even permitting its Jacobite author impunity to come out of hiding. Knowing the King was content to see the theatres gagged, playing to the vocal Christian reformers, must have forced Vanbrugh to pull his punches and choose his words carefully.

Whereas Congreve pretended Collier's insults were too exaggerated to be wounding (‘He would have poisoned me, but he overdosed it, and the Excess of his Malice has been my Security’²⁸), Vanbrugh admitted A Short View's undeniable popularity now made it, as another Kit-Cat admitted, a ‘thing no farther to be laughed at’.²⁹

More self-confident defence came from a non-Kit-Cat writer also targeted by Collier, the neoclassical critic John Dennis. A friend of Congreve's since 1691, Dennis suffered from an absurd prickliness of temper, a quality that probably disqualified him from Kit-Cat membership, if he sought it. Dennis' response to Collier's Short View rightly linked the ‘high flying’³⁰ Jacobite author with those censors at the opposite end of the religious and political spectrum: the Puritans.³¹ Dennis defended the stage without denying its appeal to ‘passions’ above reason, and did not bother to claim that drama need serve a reforming purpose. One enemy asserted Dennis ‘sat at the head of a Club’ to ‘impeach’ Collier,³² which suggests that the Kit-Cats deferred to an ad hoc grouping of anti-Collierites to handle the matter. In his Defence of the Short View (1699), Collier stated he would only continue the debate with writers like Congreve and Vanbrugh, not with small fry like Dennis.

By 1699, there were nine Societies for the Reformation of Manners working across London, and by 1701 there would be almost twenty. Moral reformers in the Commons and Lords continued to introduce legislation that intruded into the private sphere, with the King's approval. Somers and his Kit-Cat colleagues in the Lords were among those to vote down a 1699 Bill to make adultery a misdemeanour punishable under the common law, for example. Somers had personal reasons for doing so: from as early as 1694, he had been the lover of his Herefordshire ‘housekeeper’, Mrs Elizabeth Fanshawe Blount, whose husband was in prison. One Tory satire accused Somers of having had Mr Blount arrested in order to bed the wife, whereas Somers' friends portrayed him as having rescued her from a negligent, shiftless husband.³³

In February 1699, William proclaimed that actors must avoid using profane and indecent language—disregarding the role of his own Cabinet ministers, Somers and Montagu, in encouraging and financing the writing of the allegedly profane and indecent plays in the first place. When Congreve's Double Dealer was revived in March 1699, it was in the expurgated version.

The Kit-Cat Club survived Collier's attacks on its members because it did not attempt to defend the imaginations of Vanbrugh and Congreve as they really deserved to be defended. Instead, the Kit-Cat critics emphasized the points on which they agreed with Collier: that wit without decency is not true wit; that smut should not be used to compensate for a deficit of ‘sprightly Dialogue’,³⁴ and that mobbish audiences needed elevation and education, for the whole nation's sake. While the Kit-Cat patrons supported the Club's authors in defiance of the censors, the more ambitious Whig politicians also recognized that they needed to work on their public image, and that a new, more ‘improving’ literature was required to win the moral highground back from the Tories. Congreve and Vanbrugh were not, however, willing to produce it.

It would be the stars of the following generation of Kit-Cat authors—Addison and Steele, not yet members in 1698—who succeeded in bridging the gap between the Club's libertine, Restoration founders, led by Dorset, and Collier's puritanical strictures. Steele, who was at heart a faithful Christian, later admitted to having privately admired much that Collier preached, ‘as far as I durst, for fear of witty Men, upon whom he had been too severe’.³⁵

In 1698, at the height of the culture wars, Steele was known as ‘Captain Steele’—one of the many demobilized officers whose uniforms reddened the theatre audiences after the peace of Ryswick. Steele was then living either with his aunt and uncle at their Bond Street house, or at the Whitehall home of his boss, Lord Cutts. Steele said Cutts treated him like a son and provided him with ‘an introduction into the world’, so it may have been through this military patron that Steele first entered Dryden's outer orbit at Will's Coffee House. There was already, of course, the connection established with this circle through Addison, though Addison lived in Oxford until 1699.

Steele seems to have charmed Congreve, in particular, with whom he passed ‘many Happy Hours’.³⁶ This was quite an honour, since Congreve confided to Joe Keally that he was ‘not apt to care for many acquaintance, and never intend to make many friendships’.³⁷ Steele, for his part, said that he felt the ‘greatest Affection and Veneration’ for Congreve, admiring, in particular, Congreve's poem ‘Doris’.³⁸ No evidence survives to tell us whether Steele felt a similarly warm regard for Vanbrugh in the late 1690s; as a soldier-turned-playwright, Vanbrugh was the obvious role model for Steele at this juncture.

Steele also appears to have befriended Congreve's housemate, Tonson, by 1698. That year, Tonson moved his firm's offices from Chancery Lane to his family's old premises in Gray's Inn, where they would remain until 1710. A satirical advertisement appeared cruelly referring to Tonson's ‘Sign of the two left Legs, near Gray's Inn BackGate’.³⁹ Steele was often to be found at this shop during 1698. There he could sit for hours and read for free, with a glass of wine by his side, as bookshops then were more like paying libraries where, for a small subscription, one could read the most recent publications on the premises, leaving a bookmark in a volume if not finished at a single sitting.

An additional attraction at Tonson's shop was the publisher's 18-year-old niece Elizabeth, an assistant in the business. In 1699 or 1700, she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter by Steele, christened Elizabeth and given the surname of ‘Ousley’, after Dorothea Ousley, a nurse who raised illegitimate infants and orphans in the neighbourhood. How Tonson felt about Steele, an insolvent Irishman, ex-soldier and aspiring playwright, having impregnated his unmarried niece is not recorded, nor is there evidence that Steele's guardian aunt and uncle ever found out about the baby.

Steele felt that an illegitimate child was deeply shameful, not an everyday occurrence. He must have known how Addison disapproved of the ‘Vermin’ who carelessly produced bastards and whose punishment should be, Addison joked, transportation to a colony in need of population.⁴⁰ The person to whom Steele therefore turned during the crisis was not Addison, nor any of his witty male friends, but Mrs Mary Delariviere Manley, an unconventionally worldly woman who had been a confidante to Charles II's mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland, and who had lived with several men in London, starting with John Tilly, a lawyer and warden of Fleet Prison. Steele met Mrs Manley through Tilly, who in the mid-1690s had joined Steele and another old university friend as gullible investors in some alchemical research.

Manley claimed Steele dealt with two unwanted pregnancies in the late 1690s—one baby died, the other was presumably Elizabeth Ousley. It is unclear whether Elizabeth Tonson was the mother in both instances. Mrs Manley explained that she had stood as guarantor for Steele when he needed credit with a midwife, though whether for an abortion or a birth is unclear. Steele never paid the midwife's bill, so she threatened to sue and make the matter public. A note in Steele's hand confirms this story, referring to blackmail by a Mrs Phip[p]s in Watling Street, near St Paul's, ‘at the sign of the Coffin and Cradle’, through her ‘threatening to expose the occasion of the debt. It is £22.—£5 of it is paid’.⁴¹

Steele's refusal to return the favour and lend Mrs Manley some ‘trifling sum’ ended their friendship some years later.⁴² She complained of his ingratitude, to which Steele responded that he only refused because he did not have the ready cash to lend. He still had, he insisted, ‘the greatest Sense imaginable of the Kind Notice you gave me when I was going on to my Ruin’.⁴³

This guilty sense of his own ‘ruin’ was the source of Steele's sympathy for Collier's coinciding jeremiads about national ruin, though Steele was too much of a Whig to think the Williamite world any more sinful than its Restoration predecessor. Steele's comment about Collier having been ‘too severe’ on witty men was similarly born of his growing friendship with Collier's targets, Congreve and Vanbrugh. Steele recognized that Tory efforts to caricature the Whigs and their wits as unfaithful individuals, both sexually and politically, ignored a certain code of honour upheld by these men, who proved, in fact, as emotionally loyal to their mistresses as they were to their ‘Revolution Principles’.⁴⁴ Their fidelity to one another as friends, through the Kit-Cat Club, was also an important way in which they sought to counter these Tory accusations and attest their virtue.

During the first five years of the new century, the Collierites and their allies did not slacken in their efforts to force moral reform on the theatres and society as a whole—over thirty pamphlets on the controversy would be published by the end of 1700 alone, including A Second Defence of the Short View by Collier himself. This pushed the Kit-Cat Club to display its defiance of these repressive religious forces more overtly, as on 9 January 1700, when the Club went to the theatre ‘in a body’, to see a performance designed as a rebuff to denunciations of the Whig theatres. The day before, Matt Prior, in London, wrote to Abraham (‘Beau’) Stanyan, one of Congreve's friends from Middle Temple student days and now a fellow Kit-Cat, serving as a diplomat in Paris: ‘Tomorrow night, Betterton acts Falstaff, and to encourage that poor house the Kit Katters have taken one side-box and the Knights of the Toast have taken the other.’⁴⁵

The two clubs were, it seems, putting on a show of friendly rivalry for a common cause. The ‘poor house’ was Betterton's theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, under the patronage of Montagu and the rest of the Kit-Cat Club. Betterton's low rumbling voice and round belly made him perfect for the part of Shakespeare's Falstaff. Prior, meanwhile, had penned ‘a Prologue for Sir John [Falstaff] in favour of eating and drinking’,⁴⁶ which teased the Knights of the Toast for living on ‘meagre Soup and sour Champagne’ instead of good English fare like Falstaff. It also teased Jacob Tonson as looking like ‘old plump Jack [Falstaff] in Miniature’.⁴⁷

It is significant that the Kit-Cats so honoured Falstaff, a character moderating tragedy with comic excess and abundance, resilient in his frivolity, regenerative in his adaptability, and a patriotic nobleman who fondly mentors young Hal, the future King of England. Falstaff could be viewed as a hero of English paternalism and materialism, while his love of food and drink was a straightforward connection to Kit-Cat dining. As A Kit Cat C—b Describ'd (1705) put it: ‘None but Sir John Falstaff's of the Party: Fat, Corpulent Lords, Knights and Squires, were to be Admitted into [the Kit-Cat] Society by the Laws of its First Institution.’⁴⁸ Falstaff's capacious love of life was contrasted to images of rectitude, chastity and neo-Puritanism in the performance. The Club, which counted ‘keeping up good Humour and Mirth’ as an objective equal to ‘the Improvement of Learning’,⁴⁹ was making the case for a new style of Whiggism—with hedonistic appetites, yet with heart, honour and national pride.

The plan for the 9 January theatre outing was for the Kit-Cats to dine at Dorset's townhouse then proceed to Lincoln's Inn. Prior had had difficulty breathing a few days earlier, so he went to the dinner intending only to ‘sit down to table when the dessert comes, eat nothing but roasted apples, and drink sack and water’.⁵⁰ The others would have honoured the Falstaffian spirit of the evening with a hearty meal. Their drunken posse, when it turned up at the theatre, must have looked the epitome of privileged debauchery to the servants sent ahead to save their seats. A satirist described Montagu in the theatre ‘sitting on the Kit-Cat side, and Jacob T[onson] standing Door-Keeper for him’.⁵¹ The Toasters, on the other side, were led by the Earl of Carbery, acting as ‘general of the enemy's forces’, despite also being a member of the Kit-Cat Club by this date.⁵²

Congreve described the theatre as an open arena full of ‘washy rogues’ to whose semi-illiterate judgement he reluctantly submitted his ‘repartee and raillery’.⁵³ Elsewhere, he despised the ‘swarm of Scribblers’ and City men who arrived before three o'clock to make sure they had enough elbow room, and who ate plum cake while watching the play.⁵⁴ If the people in the pit did not approve of the performance they blew on little toy whistles called ‘cat-calls’.

The constant, defensive reference to the verdict of the pit by Congreve, Vanbrugh and other Kit-Cats hints at major tension between these writers and their audiences, and reflects their anxiety about the coarsening of the culture. The Kit-Cat Club emerged while popular culture was perceived as expanding at an unprecedented rate, and highbrow authors sought to cling to the opinions of the tasteful, educated few. The Kit-Cat critics were unified, for example, in their distaste for the popular entr'acte entertainments (rope dancers, singers, trained animals, tumblers and acrobats) added to even the most serious plays. They also distrusted mechanical innovations in scenery and special effects that appealed to the pit. Prior's Prologue for Falstaff, in this case, urged the audience to ‘save the sinking stage’ by preferring English comedy to the ‘Apes’ of French farce.⁵⁵

Watching this performance, which probably consisted of extracts featuring Falstaff rather than an entire history play, the Kit-Cats would have been as much part of the show as the actors: Dorset boasting his ribbon of the Garter; Garth in his distinctive red cloak; Walsh with his heavily powdered wig. The key difference between theatres in this period and those in the Restoration was a larger forestage, so most of the action took place in the middle of the audience. Theatres remained well lit throughout the performances, and after 1690 there was some reintroduction of seating on the stage itself, further blurring the demarcation between the play's intrigues and those in the audience.

The plan to assist Betterton's theatre succeeded beyond expectations. Nearly three weeks later, a Londoner wrote: ‘The Wits of all qualities have lately entertained themselves with a revived humour of Sir John Falstaff…which has drawn all the town more than any new play that has been produced of late.’⁵⁶

The Kit-Cat Club continued its outings to the theatre over the next few years. In 1700, one satire referred to the Dorset Garden Theatre on the Thames at Whitefriars, ‘Where Kit-Cats sat, and Toasters would be seen.’⁵⁷ They could attend either the opening night and support the theatre and its company, or the third night to support the playwright. Such excursions were an ideal way for the Club to publicize itself and its patronage, showing London society it was no gang of political conspirators skulking down a back alley like the regicide, republican clubs of the seventeenth century, and that the Kit-Cat's members refused to be cowed by the Collierites' moral condemnation of their dramatic poetry.

Congreve's new comedy of manners, The Way of the World, began rehearsals at Lincoln's Inn soon after the Falstaff performance closed. Again, the hopes and incomes of Betterton's company were pinned on the new play, with Vanbrugh remarking that ‘if Congreve's Play don't help 'em, they are undone’.⁵⁸ The play, however, though costing its author some ‘care and pains’ to write,⁵⁹ was a risky work which Congreve said he doubted London's degenerate audience would appreciate, rather than one designed for popularity. Betterton's actors no doubt felt some ambivalence about the work—so brilliant, yet so difficult—as they rehearsed it. Congreve knew that parts of the play were provocative: two fingers stuck up to those who wanted less cynicism and more moral certainties on the English stage. The Prologue, for example, to be spoken by Betterton and concerning the author's intentions to entertain rather than reform, addressed itself sarcastically to any Collierites in the audience:

Satire, he [Congreve] thinks, you ought not to expect;

For so reformed a town who dares correct?

To please, this time, has been his sole pretence,

He'll not instruct, lest it should give offence.

The Way of the World, like Congreve's earlier plays, reflected the author's view of the urbane society in which he moved: the primacy of male friendships, bonded as much by clubbing and card-playing as business contracts and kinship. Congreve complicates theatrical stereotypes by making the play's hero, Mirabell, one of these suave and socially adept young London gentlemen—qualities traditionally belonging to morally suspect stage villains. Mirabell's final proof of integrity in the play, furthermore, is his kindness to Mrs Fainall, his former mistress. Even today, the question of one's moral duties to one's ex-lovers would be subtle territory for a play; in 1700, facing an audience of Collierites, it was an astonishing question to pose.

Congreve laughs at the affectations of Mirabell's friends, in the characters of Witwoud and Petulant, yet at the same time invokes sympathy for the social insecurities that require such pretences, as when Witwoud laughs at Petulant's attempts to feign popularity by saying he will dress up in costume and ‘call for himself, wait for himself, nay and what's more, not finding himself [at home], sometimes leave a letter for himself’.⁶⁰ The mutual exposure of faults and fears is simultaneously cruel and affectionate, as male friendships so often are. The author showcases the men's conversation, and hence his own, while implying that they are balancing on their tightropes of wit above great social uncertainty.

When the play moves on to women, courtship and marriage, it mixes traditional complaints against the marriage yoke with a more honest account of which partner really lost their rights through marriage in the 1700s. In the famous ‘proviso scene’ where Millamant and Mirabell lay out their conditions of engagement, Millamant tries to preserve her rights, while her lover, Mirabell, tries to encroach upon them. The scene has often been complimented for showing equality between the sexes, yet it is a deceptive sort of equality: the couple are well matched in their knowledge of literature and parity of wit, but for Millamant her wit and coquetry are her only means of exercising some small power. She asks for a less conventional marriage because she fears to ‘dwindle into a wife’.⁶¹

Congreve was troubled by the discordance between patriarchal laws and the reality of several strong women he knew and admired. In 1695, he wrote, ‘We may call them the weaker Sex, but I think the true Reason is because our Follies are Stronger and our Faults the more prevailing.’⁶² In The Way of the World, Congreve emphasizes that women are often less delusional in love than men, and in Millamant—a part written with Bracey specifically in mind—he celebrates the attractions of an intelligent, spirited woman. Mirabell's speech explaining why he loves Millamant is the writing of an author who loved, at this point, without illusions: ‘I like her with all her faults, like her for her faults. Her follies are so natural, or so artful, that they become her; and those affectations, which in another woman would be odious, serve but to make her more agreeable.’⁶³

As late as September 1698, nearly six years since their first meeting, Congreve was still being teased that he ‘need not covet to go to Heaven at all, but to stay and Ogle his dear Bracilla, with sneaking looks under his Hat, in the little side Box’.⁶⁴ Tom Browne commented sceptically on Bracey's famed chastity, noting that Congreve ‘dines with her almost every day, yet She's a Maid; he rides out with her, and visits her in Public and Private, yet She's a Maid; if I had not a particular respect for her, I should go so near to say he lies with her, yet She's a Maid’.⁶⁵ Several later satires suggested Congreve and Bracey secretly married, though this is improbable since, when Bracey died in 1748, her will described her as a ‘spinster’.⁶⁶

The Way of the World went over the heads of its first audience in March 1700, as its author had expected, one observer saying it was ‘hissed by Barbarous Fools in the Acting; and an impertinent Trifle was brought on after it, which was acted with vast Applause’.⁶⁷ Dryden was too ill to attend its opening night, but there is something poignant about the fact that Congreve's masterpiece, so far ahead of its time and predictive of so much later eighteenth-century literature, was one of the last works Dryden read before he died. He recognized its genius, and told Congreve not to mind its disappointing reception by everyone but, as Steele put it, ‘the Few refined’.⁶⁸

The Way of the World was to be Congreve's last play; he retired from dramatic writing at 30. This was not a fit of pique because his masterpiece failed to gain universal acclaim, as is sometimes said. Rather, he felt he had reached the height of his powers and had nothing further to prove to an audience becoming increasingly censorious, bourgeois and unimaginative.

Just as the play's early closure was a blow for Betterton's struggling company, so too Congreve's retirement from playwriting in 1700 must have been a blow for his publisher, Tonson, so close upon the death of Dryden. Dryden's name had been a critical seal of approval on any book that bore it in the preface or dedication. The editions of Miscellany Poems Dryden had edited for Tonson since 1684, for example, had become the most prestigious anthology of England, such that Tonson continued to produce the series long after Dryden's death. As one poem in the third Miscellany put it, Dryden's opinion was like a monarch's face stamped on a coin, giving value in an otherwise uncertain age.

A Satyr against Wit (1699), by Richard Blackmore, reversed this metaphor to mock the authors mentored by Dryden and the patrons assembled by Tonson. Describing the writings of those Montagu patronized as being like clipped or devalued coin, a sideswipe at Montagu's failed recoinage scheme of 1696, Blackmore suggested that Congreve and Vanbrugh would be left with little reputation were their work cleansed of its impurities. Blackmore further proposed Somers, Dorset and Montagu should underwrite a ‘bank of wit’ to reform the currency of English poetry, meaning that they should give their support to worthier poets, like him.⁶⁹ Garth, Steele and Walsh contributed, on behalf of Dryden and his Witty Club, to a collected volume of verses as a counter-attack to Blackmore,⁷⁰ and this literary skirmish on the eve of Dryden's death did much to consolidate the Kit-Cat Club's sense that it must ensure Dryden's critical standards for English literature were not forgotten. In June 1700, a young man wrote to Garth on behalf of a group of unknown poets who had compiled a collection of elegies for Dryden, asking forlornly, ‘who shall make us known, and stamp Esteem, / On what we write…?’ He begged for the book to be commended by Dr Garth, even though the young man and his friends had no ‘swelling Kit-cat’ patron on their title page.⁷¹

After Dryden's death, Tonson used the Kit-Cat Club's collective opinion as a replacement for Dryden's critical taste when evaluating works submitted for publication or when compiling the Miscellanies, letters of acceptance from Tonson to various writers often referring to work having passed the test of the ‘best judges’.⁷² One Tonson biographer has even conjectured that the anonymous poems in the later Miscellanies ‘as a whole represent the literary activities of the Kit-Cat Club’.⁷³

Critical taste was understood to require cultivation, so that a true critic was made, not born. The paradox that this was believed by some of the highest born men in England was awkwardly explained by another shared belief: that a gentleman who had no need to work or seek a patron should, thanks to such independence, be the most impartial critic and arbiter of taste. Fresh works were therefore submitted to the Kit-Cat Club's ‘peer review’ not merely to seek patronage but also because of a residual respect for aristocratic opinion, according to classical theory. In an age that believed ‘Fame consists in the Opinion of wise and good Men’,⁷⁴ the Kit-Cat Club sought to be the makers of fame. As its own fame grew, the Club became a whetstone for sharpening its members' critical faculties, and a practical help to Tonson's publishing firm in the absence of paid editorial staff.

Dryden's Witty Club had been attacked for being self-serving, selfimportant and malicious. The Kit-Cat Club now became the new target for such envy and resentment, as it sat and decided what writing should go to Tonson's presses and what into the tavern fireplace. Ned Ward was among those who questioned the Whig lords' right to sit as the self-styled custodians of English literature and who complained that the Kit-Cats, unlike Dryden, now made the critical process too Whiggishly ideological: ‘[T]hey began to set themselves up for Apollo's court of judicature, where every author's performance, from the stage poet to the garret-drudge, was to be read, tried, applauded, or condemned, according to the new system of Revolutionary Principles.’⁷⁵

Soon the Kit-Cats were to give the same ideological treatment to other art forms, including architecture.

During the summer of 1699, while Somers and Montagu were visiting Somerset and others at their country seats, and several fellow Kit-Cats were touring France, Vanbrugh—who had seen enough of France during his long captivity there—toured the great houses of northern England. He travelled by high-speed ‘calash’ (a light twowheeled carriage with a removable hood) and stayed with at least two Kit-Cat friends: William Cavendish at Chatsworth for four or five days, then, in July, with his distant kinsman, Carlisle. Carlisle's membership of the Kit-Cat Club rested on his proven influence in the 1695 Cumberland election, and on the fact that, though Carlisle's Howard ancestors were prominent Catholics, his grandfather and father had been Whigs and his own Whiggery was fervent. Carlisle's love of books would also have recommended him to Tonson and the Kit-Cat collectors; he catalogued his family's libraries and added to them constantly. In the summer of 1697, Carlisle had stayed with the Somersets at Petworth and admired it with an envious eye, developing his own ambitions to become an architectural patron—ambitions that would be spectacularly realized in his later building of Castle Howard.

By 1699, Carlisle had been appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber—a Court place to add to his other honours: Governor of the town and castle of Carlisle, Lord Lieutenant of Cumberland and Westmorland, and Vice Admiral of the seacoasts for those two counties. Thinking his future income secure, and eager to lend additional status to his title, which dated back only as far as his grandfather, Carlisle decided to build the Howard family a new seat, on a scale that would allow him to entertain royalty.

Carlisle had already invited the architect William Talman to develop plans for a house at Henderskelfe, northeast of York. Talman, who designed much of Chatsworth, was Carlisle's first choice because he was the King's favoured architect, and the project could demonstrate shared tastes with William III in one of the few artistic spheres where the King took interest. By July 1699, however, when Carlisle invited Vanbrugh to the same site, it appears Talman had been dropped. Whether Talman's designs simply disappointed Carlisle, or whether Kit-Cat favouritism displaced a more qualified man, is hard to know. Talman, at any rate, thought he had been unfairly dismissed and threatened to sue.

The ebullient Vanbrugh, who seemed to have no fear of failure despite his near-total lack of architectural experience, described his earliest designs for what would become ‘Castle Howard’ to one of the Kit-Cat patrons as being for ‘a plain low building like an orange house’.⁷⁶ This does indeed describe Vanbrugh's earliest, amazingly plain sketches. Such consultations with Whig patricians were probably the source of the legend that Vanbrugh designed Castle Howard on a napkin or scrap of paper during a Kit-Cat Club dinner. It is true that Vanbrugh designed the house by committee—a way for Carlisle to enjoy the prestige of undertaking such a project long before there was a finished product to show off—but there is no specific Kit-Cat dinner that can be credited with the house's conception. As Vanbrugh wrote, ‘There has been a great many Critics consulted upon it since, and no objection being made on't, the Stone is raising and the Foundations will be laid in the Spring [of 1700].’⁷⁷ This prediction was, as Vanbrugh's predictions of time and cost almost always were, unrealistic. The foundations were not laid until the spring of 1701. First the villagers and small farmers of Henderskelfe had to be evicted and the property enclosed. (A contemporary said Carlisle was zealously concerned for those on his lands, but this was more a concern for their obedience at the polls than their rights.) During the two years between the first designs and the first work on site, the Kit-Cats were consulted and various elaborations added.

King William also reviewed the plans in June 1700. As with a poem dedicated to a monarch or noble patron, so architecture was not only an expression of status and power but also a bid to obtain them. To build on such a scale, albeit in the Continental baroque style, was seen as a patriotic act that ought to bring cultural prestige to the nation and royal favour to the owner. The English baroque expressed the ‘communal will’ of the Kit-Cat Club in architectural form, taking ‘its emotion from the sense of grandeur and confidence enjoyed by the old Whigs of the 1688 revolution’.⁷⁸ Carlisle was 30 when he commissioned Castle Howard, five years younger than Vanbrugh. So, although of the ‘old Whig’ generation, Carlisle acted in the ambition of youth. He was the first and most important of six Kit-Cat architectural patrons who would help make Vanbrugh into one of Britain's greatest architects.

For all his social climbing, Vanbrugh knew how to pull someone else up the ladder behind him. He introduced the experienced builder and designer Nicholas Hawksmoor to Carlisle, and got him a salary almost twice what the average craftsman was paid. Vanbrugh was not paid at all; his rewards consisted of jobs and sinecures. Not only did this shift the expenditure from Carlisle's pocket to the Crown, but it also permitted discretion within the Club: the tactful illusion that members were not divided into employers and employees.

Vanbrugh used the time between first design and commencement of building, while living on half-pay from the Second Marine Regiment, to gain some little experience by building himself a house in London. In July 1700, soon after he reviewed the plans for Castle Howard, the King granted Vanbrugh permission for what would be the first of a series of private houses on the burnt-out ruins of Whitehall Palace. Private property was replacing royal property in much the same way that privatized aristocratic patronage was replacing royal patronage.

Vanbrugh's townhouse was built quickly during 1701. When complete, it served as a life-sized demonstration model and advertisement for his skills. Jonathan Swift (by this time a clergyman and published author, ambiguously seeking Court Whig favour in London while writing anonymous lampoons against the same Whigs) described it as ‘resembling a Goose Pie’ and sneered at Vanbrugh turning to architecture ‘without Thought or Lecture’. He suggested Vanbrugh had been inspired by watching children build houses of cards and mud. Swift also emphasized, enviously, that the architect of the ‘Goose Pie’ house had enjoyed a meteoric professional and social ascent, thanks solely to whom he knew in London high society: ‘No wonder, since wise Authors know, / That Best Foundations must be Low.’⁷⁹

At least Vanbrugh was finding that his architectural designs, no matter how lusty, were not, like his plays, subject to accusations of blasphemy and immorality. Neither Vanbrugh nor Congreve stopped writing as abruptly as sometimes portrayed, but both lost interest in dramatic writing at the height of their literary careers thanks in part to unrelenting pressure from the Collierite censors. When Betterton's company revived Congreve's 1695 hit Love for Love in Easter 1701, a legal action was brought against the players for ‘licentiousness’,⁸⁰ despite the fact that the production had been staged for a Christian charity (for ‘the Redemption of the English now in Slavery…in Barbary’⁸¹). Similarly, when Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife was revived, both the author and the players (including Bracey) were charged with using indecent expressions and sentenced to fines of £5 (almost £700 today) each.⁸² The old fear of the semi-illiterate audience acting as judge and jury was becoming a sinister reality.

As Vanbrugh shifted his energies to architecture, Congreve likewise turned after 1700 to art forms less scrutinized in terms of morality: music and lyric poetry.⁸³ Both men's diverted careers, however, continued to be bound closely to the political fates of their patrons in the Kit-Cat Club; in the political situation of 1700, those fates seemed extremely uncertain.

VI THE EUROPEANS

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

E. M. FORSTER, Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

THE KIT-CATS CONSIDERED themselves not only urbane but also cosmopolitan sophisticates, looking beyond England's shores culturally and politically, and defining themselves in comparison to other nationalities. Theirs was an outward-facing club, trying to build an outward-facing nation, and trying to stereotype their Tory rivals as old-fashioned, parochial isolationists (despite, paradoxically, the Jacobites' supranational loyalties to the Pope in Rome and the exiled Stuart Court in France). Being ruled by a Dutchman underscored the extent to which England's domestic politics were enmeshed with the struggles between the major Continental powers: France on the one hand and the Habsburg realms on the other. When this clash of empires was temporarily paused after the 1697 peace, several Kit-cats seized the opportunity to expand their education of European languages and politics through travel. Others—Lord Dorset's Boys —continued working on the Continent as a new breed of professional diplomat. For one of them, parliamentary debates about England's international relations would dramatically reveal his betrayal of his fellow Kit-Cats.

The culture wars raging in England at the turn of the century formed the backdrop to more straightforward political confrontations between parties. Spring 1698, for example, saw the Kit-Cats and other Court (Junto) Whigs preparing for a general election at a time when England's Protestants were feeling reprieved from the potential dangers of a Jacobite assassination plot against the King (the so-called Fenwick Affair of 1696) or the spectre of a French invasion (no longer an immediate risk during the peace). The Junto Whigs' power and influence disintegrated alongside this lessening level of public alarm, and the Tories' ambitions rose in inverse proportion. The Junto Whigs therefore knew they had an electoral fight on their hands, despite the fact that they now had the King's backing, William having been deeply angered by the 1697 opposition call for a Disbanding Bill. The Kit-Cat politicians took concerted actions across a number of marginal constituencies. Somers, for example, gifted legal title in Reigate burgages (freehold properties) to his friends, including Congreve, Tonson and several other Kit-Cats, so that they became propertied voters, able to win that seat to his interest. Despite such dubious tactics, however, the Junto lost control of the Commons in July to Harley's alliance of Country Whigs and Tories.

Montagu kept his seat representing the borough of Westminster only after an expensive campaign. On the same night as his embarrassingly narrow victory was announced, so too was the death of his elderly wife, Lady Manchester. This meant the loss of an annual £1,500 (today £142,000) jointure, which automatically transferred to Montagu's stepson. This stepson was another Kit-Cat, also named Charles Montagu, who was exactly the same age as his stepfather, cousin and namesake. He had inherited the title of 4th Earl (later 1st Duke) of Manchester, and is hereafter referred to as ‘Manchester’ to avoid confusion.¹

The King was losing patience with Montagu's inability to muster parliamentary support to defend the Court and defeat the Disbanding Bill. Before the election, Montagu had succeeded in raising revenue for the King and army by navigating through the Commons a £2 million flotation of a New East India Company. The Old East India Company, the only major London corporation run by Tories, was forced to invest in the New, which became a rich source of employment and dividends for Montagu's Kit-Cat friends. After the Whig election defeat, however, the Old East India Company took advantage of the King's impatience with Montagu and petitioned for a renewed right to trade. At the same time, a passionately argued pamphlet in favour of disbanding the army, A Short History of Standing Armies, seemed to win the press war over that issue in favour of Harley's opposition. Prior reported from Paris that the Jacobite Court-in-exile at Louis' chateau of St Germain-en-Laye was rejoicing at the prospect of the English army dismantling itself, and in January 1699, the Disbanding Bill passed, despite all Montagu's blocking efforts. To the King's outrage, England's army was required to reduce itself to 7,000 ‘native born’ men. Everything achieved by the Whigs in the first half of the 1690s seemed to be unravelling.

During the long 1698–9 parliamentary session, therefore, the Kit-cat Club was an important forum for holding together the Junto Whig faction while it was under strain, and for monitoring the precarious international situation through its younger members' Continental travels and diplomatic postings. In this context, Montagu encouraged Addison, still a cloistered tutor at Magdalen College, not to enter the Church but instead seek a political or diplomatic career. ‘[H]is Arguments were founded upon the general [de]pravity and the Corruption of Men of Business [i.e. government], who wanted liberal Education,’ recalled Steele. ‘[M]y Lord ended with a Compliment that, however he might be represented as no Friend to the Church, he never would do it any other Injury than keeping Mr Addison out of it.’²

Addison at this time was struggling to reconcile his own worldly ambitions with his father's lessons in Christian humility. He wrote a draft sermon, published many years later as an essay on ‘The Folly of Seeking Fame’, asking whether God's purpose in giving us the ‘passion’ of ambition was to drive forward our ‘sedentary’ souls, and whether ambition is less sinful when it is commensurate with ability: ‘How few are there who are furnished with Abilities sufficient…to distinguish themselves from the rest of Mankind?’³ Ambition for fame, he wrote, is the same instinct that makes us vulnerable to criticism, and the pleasure of fame is inevitably ‘precarious’ because it rests on the fickle and fallible opinion of mortals, rather than God's judgement.

Addison seems to have reconciled his ambition with his conscience by his twenty-seventh birthday, which coincided with the 1699 May Day celebrations at Magdalen. The following morning, Addison caught a coach to London, quitting forever the university where he had lived and worked for over a decade. Through Montagu, Addison received a £200 (over £20,000 today) government stipend to travel and study French. Somers partnered Montagu in supporting Addison's European education, as a letter of thanks from Addison to Somers confirms: ‘I have now for some time lived on the Effect of your Lordship's patronage…The only Return I can make your L[or]d[shi]p will be to apply myself Entirely to my Business and to take such a care of my Conversation that your favours may not seem misplaced.’⁴

Addison's trip started, in August 1699, on a literal wrong foot, with a fall into the sea as he disembarked at Calais, a succession of ‘dismal Adventures’ (‘lame post-horses by Day and hard Beds at night’) and misunderstandings because of his feeble French. ‘I have encountered as many misfortunes as a Knight-Errant,’ Addison laughed in his first letter back to Congreve, adding that he liked French statues and paintings only because ‘they don't speak French’.⁵ Without the language, Addison was left to enjoy the sights of grand siècle Paris, with Louis XIV's magnificent, strictly regulated rebuilding projects making it appear unlike any city that had previously existed. The city's ramparts had only recently been dismantled to allow the building of the new boulevards, including the Grand Cours along the line of today's Champs Elysées, and the Place Vendôme was just about to be inaugurated.

Yet Paris, in contrast to London, did not feel like a city in its prime. The city's famous street life was increasingly policed out of sight, even in the Marais, and the social hierarchy had ossified around a limited number of titled families. The capital was also suffering from the absence of the Court, which had moved to the Palace of Versailles. Yet the Louvre and other royal buildings still stood, hollowly hogging land throughout the city's centre—a fact seen by another Protestant English visitor as symbolic of Louis' despotic disregard for his own people: ‘Here the palaces and convents have eat[en] up the People's dwellings and crowded them excessively together.’⁶

Addison soon sought familiarity and conversation among the expats at Paris' English embassy, which then had no fixed address but moved to each ambassador's private residence. At this date, Montagu's stepson Manchester had just been appointed ambassador, inheriting Prior as his secretary. The ‘docile’⁷ Beau Stanyan, who had already served as Manchester's secretary at the English embassy in Venice, arrived in Paris in June 1699 to replace Prior, but Prior remained for a period of handover. All three Kit-Cats—the ambassador and his two secretaries—were therefore working together at the Paris embassy when Addison arrived. Vanbrugh jokingly congratulated Manchester on fulfilling his ambition to host every English gentleman coming to France, but Addison would have been a particularly honoured guest as he carried introductions from Somers and the ambassador's stepfather, Montagu. Addison became good friends during this time with both Manchester and his wife. Lady Manchester was a beauty, reportedly toasted ‘with an Exemplary Constancy’ at the Kit-Cat Club by the Earl of Carbery.⁸ When Addison himself eventually joined the Kit-Cat, he would patriotically toast Lady Manchester's natural complexion in contrast to French ‘haughty Dames that Spread / O'er their pale cheeks an Artful red’.⁹

Prior likewise remarked on the overpainted Parisian women, with the result, he told Montagu, that French men ‘make love to each other to a degree that is incredible, for you can pick your boy at the Tuileries or at the play’.¹⁰ Prior seems to have preferred heterosexual flirtations with English ladies in Paris—a business as separate from his relationship with his live-in lover Jane, he told her, as love poetry is from prose:

What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows

The diff'rence there is betwixt nature and art.

I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose:

And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.¹¹

When a newspaper in London falsely reported that Prior was engaged to a certain Lady Falkland, Prior joked to Montagu that such a courtship was impracticable:

She is an old Troy that will not be taken in ten years, and though fifty strong fellows should get in to her by stratagem, they might even march out again at a large breach without being able to set her on fire; but one single sentinel as I am with a thin carcass and weak lungs might lie before her walls till I eat horse-hides and shoe-leather, unless you kindly sent me some refreshments from the Treasury.¹²

Prior thus used gossip about his own love life as an excuse to beg cash, and to all such requests Montagu remained a responsive friend: ‘Of all my correspondents,’ Prior told him, ‘you are certainly the best, for you never write to me, yet do always what I beg of you. I am extremely obliged to you for the two last hundred pounds.’¹³

On another occasion, not long before Addison's arrival, Prior begged Montagu: ‘For God's sake, will you think of a little money for me, for I have fluttered away the Devil and all in this monkey country, where the air is infected with vanity, and extravagance is as epidemical as the itch in Scotland.’¹⁴

Montagu never reproached Prior for these ‘dunning’ letters, though he once defined ‘men of honour’ as being those who asked no favours of their friends: ‘Free is their service, and unbought their love.’¹⁵ Prior required some finesse to keep the two relationships, of patronage and friendship, in balance; he signed off one letter: ‘Adieu, Master; Nobody respects the Chancellor of the Exchequer more, or loves dear Mr Montagu better, than his old friend and obliged humble servant, Matt.’¹⁶ Inversely, as Dorset moved into retirement, his relationship with Prior became more that of a friend than patron: ‘I could almost wish you out of all public affairs,’ Dorset told Prior, ‘that I might enjoy your good company oftener and share with you in that ease and lazy quiet which I propose to myself in this latter part of my life.’¹⁷

Steele once declared that a gentleman should travel ‘to get clear of national Prejudices, of which every Country has its share’,¹⁸yet Addison's time among the Kit-Cats in Paris only reinforced his pre judices. This experience underpinned Addison's lifelong patriotism and dedication to resisting the French model of unmediated and unlimited power, vested in a single monarch: ‘As a British Freeholder, I should not scruple taking [the] place of a French Marquis; and when I see one of my Countrymen amusing himself in his little Cabbage-Garden, I naturally look upon him as a greater Person than the Owner of the richest Vineyard in Champagne.’¹⁹

Addison adopted Prior's opinions on nearly everything they encountered in France, and most of those opinions were extremely critical. Prior complained to Montagu about the hypocritical pretence of cordial diplomatic relations with France during this lull before war was sure to resume: ‘We took our leave yesterday of this Court, from whom we had a great many compliments and a damned dinner…they are very obliging to us one day and the same to King James the next.’²⁰

Elsewhere he observed frankly: ‘These people are all the same: civil in appearance and hating us to hell at the bottom of their heart.’²¹ Prior described Louis XIV as living ‘like an Eastern monarch, making waterworks and planting melons’ while his nation starved.²²

He showed the elderly French king as a grotesque, vainly picking at his few remaining teeth, and described the exiled James II as ‘lean, worn and rivelled’²³—telling the English ministers, in other words, exactly what they wanted to hear: that their enemies were literally toothless and impotent. Addison, though wondering at the luxury of the French palaces, similarly criticized the disparity between rich and poor, and the displacement of whole villages at Louis' orders, just ‘for the bettering of a View’.²⁴

Addison's only concession to the French was that they had the advantage over the English in good humour. In rural France, he wrote, ‘Everyone sings, laughs and starves.’²⁵ The French were also much more at ease in their conversation, especially compared to Addison, whose natural reticence in groups was accentuated by his poor French. Later, in his essays, Addison would try to convert his own self-conscious personality into the general image of English national character, in contrast to the French: ‘Modesty is our distinguishing Character, as Vivacity is theirs.’²⁶

Addison was caught in the middle of a certain tension between Prior and Manchester during Prior's final months in Paris. Prior described how even the servants there, including his girlfriend Jane, considered Manchester's manners too crude for a diplomat—blowing his nose into his napkin, spitting in the middle of the room, or laughing too loudly. A rude letter from Manchester, complaining how Prior wasted money and left his post with tasks half-done, suggests the dislike was mutual. Though Prior had proved himself useful at Ryswick, Lord Manchester's diplomatic record in Venice had been less impressive—he was assessed as being ‘of greater application than capacity’ and ‘of good address but no elocution’.²⁷ Manchester's noble birth, however, protected him from explicit criticism, while Prior grew resentful at how little remuneration or simple thanks he received after compensating for the failings of his nobly born superior. When Prior returned to London, he travelled the last leg of the journey from The Hague in the company of both King William himself and the Tory Earl of Jersey, who had been Prior's boss at the Paris embassy before Manchester and was now allied to William's rising Dutch favourite, Arnold van Keppel. Prior not only caught a chill while crossing the Channel but also sensed which way England's political wind was blowing: away from the Junto Whigs. From this point onwards, Jersey, though in opposition to Prior's Kit-cat friends, superseded Montagu and Dorset as Prior's leading patron.

Addison lodged at the Paris embassy until October 1699, then retreated to study French at a remote abbey at Blois, in the Loire, for a year. Stanyan kept Addison supplied from Paris with updates on international developments, though it is likely neither man was informed of the most important but top secret development—the signing by France and England, in October 1699, of a ‘Partition Treaty’ to peaceably divide the Spanish Empire, including the Americas, after Carlos II's death. Earlier in the summer, Somers had used his power as Lord Chancellor to permit the King to negotiate such a treaty without informing Parliament. It was not illegal for Somers to do this, but it would create severe problems for Somers when the Treaty, and its successor, the second Partition Treaty signed in March 1700, were later discovered by Parliament.

Addison was in Blois when he belatedly heard news that, thanks to sustained pressure from Harley's opposition, his patron Montagu had resigned from the Treasury and hence as the King's chief minister. Montagu's resignation and move to a less powerful but more lucrative post (as Auditor of the Receipts of the Exchequer) was a blow to his friends and followers. It confirmed Prior in his decision to shift patrons, discarding the bonds of friendship formed by school, university and, latterly, by the Kit-Cat Club.

Prior said that after Montagu's resignation he expected Somers, the only Kit-Cat and Junto member remaining in the King's inner circle, to be next ‘fallen upon’ by the Tories, ‘though God knows what crime he is guilty of, but that of being a very great man and a wise and upright judge’.²⁸ Prior was prescient: when a Commons vote against Somers' probity was very narrowly defeated in April 1700, the King was reluctantly forced to dismiss Somers. Montagu's outrage at this decision showed his deep personal loyalty to Somers, yet neither he nor other politico Kit-Cats resigned en bloc to protest their friend's martyrdom. It would hardly help Somers if all his political allies fell on their swords and thereby left the King wholly in other hands: ‘You may easily think Lord Somers cannot but have a great many friends, but they may show their friendship and yet continue their duty to the King,’ Manchester advised Prior.²⁹ The Club instead showed its solidarity with both Montagu and Somers in more subtle ways—its members' show of public unity at the Falstaff theatre outing and at Dryden's funeral had this as specific political motive, alongside defiance of Jeremy Collier.

All three Lord Dorset's Boys were reunited in London at the time Somers was forced to surrender the Great Seal. Stepney was working on the Commission of Trade and Plantations, where in June 1700 he formed a sub-commission to negotiate the boundaries of Hudson's Bay in Canada with the French. Soon after, Prior, who had given little outward sign of his shift towards Jersey's patronage, was appointed to the same Commission of Trade, replacing the retiring Commissioner (and famous Enlightenment philosopher) John Locke. With Montagu a member of the same Commission, this was possibly the only time the three old friends worked side by side.

With his Commission income, Prior bought a large townhouse on Duke Street, overlooking the promenades and dairy fields of St James's Park, and he entertained there in a manner consistently beyond his means. He invited Dorset, Montagu and Stepney to dinners there of ‘Bacon-Ham and Mutton-shin’.³⁰ Such hospitality disguised Prior's deepening involvement with the Tories, and allowed him to gather information from his old Whig friends to pass on to the rival party.

That same summer of 1700, Montagu flexed the strained muscles of his remaining influence to procure another sinecure for Congreve: the post of Customer of the Poole Port—a post Congreve held for just over two years. Congreve's portfolio of sinecures, totalling just under £200 a year, now gave him some degree of financial security. He (and his beloved dog ‘Sappho’) moved out of Tonson's house, but he continued to live as a rent-paying lodger, this time with a married couple named the Porters who lived on Arundel Street. Mrs Frances Porter was Bracey's sister.

Congreve's move from Fleet Street did not signify any falling out with his publisher, as shown by the fact that the playwright accompanied Tonson to Europe in the summer of 1700. Congreve let his friends know of their safe arrival in Calais, after which he travelled to Het Loo (William's palace and hunting lodge in Guelderland), then Rotterdam. Congreve would have been quizzed by the Dutch courtiers about the latest news from England, which was causing disquiet among Europe's Protestants. Princess Anne's only son and heir, the 11-year-old Duke of Gloucester, had just died unexpectedly in July. This threw the English Crown's Protestant succession back into doubt, making the Whigs fear that the post-Revolutionary regime, under which, for all their present problems, they had generally thrived, could yet be reversed. In August, the Junto lords stayed together at a country house near Hampton Court, and they there decided that Stepney should take advantage of his good standing with Sophia, Electress Dowager of the German state of Hanover and the Protestant granddaughter of England's James I, to ask informally whether she and her heirs would accept the English succession. This letter, in Stepney's own humble name, was sent from London in late August or early September 1700.³¹

October 1700 saw another pivotal royal death: that of Carlos II of Spain. Carlos, it emerged, had bequeathed his Spanish Habsburg Empire, including its lucrative Spanish American trade, to Louis XIV's grandson, Philippe Duc d'Anjou, rather than to the Austrian Habsburgs. When Louis XIV decided to defend his grandson's inheritance, thereby disregarding the two Partition Treaties signed with England, the stage was set for a new European war. The English and Dutch saw that a merger of the French and Spanish empires would upset the balance of world power. The Junto Whigs in particular, being most closely allied with the Dutch and Dissenting interests, advocated mounting a new defensive war against Louis XIV. As the Tory Charles Davenant put it, the mood of the Junto Whigs in 1700 was all ‘“To your tents, O Israel!”’³²

Tipped that war would soon break out, Congreve and Addison accelerated their European travels. Addison gave up improving his French, ‘which has been a Rock in my way harder to get over than the Alps,’³³ and sailed for Italy. He travelled with a former Oxford pupil, named George Dashwood, son of the Lord Mayor of London and ‘un bon gros et gras bourgeois‘,³⁴ as well as Edward Wortley, a nephew of Montagu's, and former Middle Temple chum of Congreve's and Stanyan's. By chaperoning these two young men through Italy, Addison was paid enough to cover his own expenses. In Rome, Addison watched Pope Clement XI officiate for two hours at St Peter's, and purchased twenty volumes of European manuscripts for Somers.

Congreve was back in London by December 1700, at which time he gave an Irish friend advance notice of Montagu's elevation to the House of Lords as ‘Baron Halifax’. The patent for Montagu's title, drawn up by Prior, referred to Montagu having provided the ‘sinews of war’ by establishing the Bank of England and generally restructuring English commerce in the 1690s, which was no more than the truth.³⁵ The peerage, however, was less royal thanks for services rendered than acknowledgement of Montagu's growing impotence in the Commons since the last election.

It was said Lord Halifax (as Montagu shall henceforth be called) ‘brought up a familiar style’ to the House of Lords, which made the tone of debates there far more informal.³⁶ While the Kit-Cats admired this style, just as they admired Wharton's rumbustious colloquialisms whenever he spoke in the upper house, a Tory critic snobbishly described it as ‘Billingsgate rhetoric’, unfit for a peer.³⁷ Such remarks point to the close relationship between the conversational style of the Kit-Cat Club, which increasingly behaved like a mock-parliament in its meetings,³⁸ and the tone of actual parliamentary debate—one elite talking-shop echoing another.

Dickens famously remarked that the House of Commons was ‘the best club in London’.³⁹ With its nepotism, cronyism and oligarchic management, government at the beginning of the eighteenth century was indeed a giant club—MPs were not called ‘members’ for nothing, and those who held government places, voting with the Court in the Commons, were sometimes known as ‘the Club Men’.⁴⁰ Kit-Cat spirit translated to wider Whig party loyalty, which magnified itself into national patriotism, and collective identities forged in a tavern's backroom evolved into national identities. Such collective identity was formed most deeply during periods of political adversity, as during the winter of 1700–1.

The King was back to relying, against his own inclinations, on Tories like Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, and the Treasury management of Lord Godolphin. This necessity was confirmed by another Tory-dominated Parliament returned after the election in January 1701.

The Kit-Cat Club's lifespan was characterized by unusually frequent and highly contested elections, averaging one every second year. Individual Junto members' electoral influence, through direct patronage, but also through circular letters and regional party whips, was therefore key to the Club's wider influence. In particular, England saw a notable rise in ‘carpet-bagging’ and boroughs ‘succumb[ing] to affluent, absentee candidates in preference to indigenous minor gentry or merchants’.⁴¹ The Kit-Cat Club contributed to this, in so far as it established bonds between the nobility and London gentlemen who were not their kinsmen, which were then imported into Parliament.⁴² Not all MPs who were handed seats without contest failed to serve their constituents honourably, but nor was such an MP likely to challenge his patron's instructions. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, despite her personal fondness for the Club, remarked that its members were ‘dupes to their leaders’.⁴³

As in 1698, the Kit-Cats had tried to influence voters in 1701 in ways considered unconstitutional by many at the time: letters from Lord Carlisle to rally support for Whig candidates around the country, for example, led to a Commons vote against peers meddling in elections beyond the counties where they owned property. Halifax and Wharton so aggressively used their interests in Wiltshire to secure election of New East India Company supporters that the Tories afterwards sent the unlucky Whig election agents to the Tower.

After the 1701 election defeat of the Junto Whigs, Robert Harley's supporters nominated him for the Commons' Speakership. It is telling that the Junto did not organize its resistance to this move via the Kit-Cat Club but rather via another Whig club that ran in parallel—the Whig Rose Club, which met at the Rose tavern in Covent Garden. The Rose Club was a far less exclusive and yet more narrowly focused society than the Kit-Cat, founded at around the same time and used by Halifax and Wharton as a place to whip underling Whig MPs into line. Over seventy-five such MPs met at the Rose to co-ordinate their opposition to Harley's appointment as Speaker, but were defeated at the vote in February 1701.

The following month, the Commons passed the Act of Settlement, ensuring the English Crown would pass to the House of Hanover (Electress Sophia, followed by her son George) should both William and Princess Anne die childless. The ministry, including Lord Godolphin and Robert Harley, supported this crucial constitutional measure, and the Act was voted through ‘without any dispute’,⁴⁴ since no MP of either party could openly oppose the Protestant succession and hope to retain a career in Williamite government. Behind the scenes, however, certain Tories tried to obstruct the clauses intended to consolidate the Whig model of limited parliamentary monarchy, such as limits on any future monarch's power to dictate foreign affairs. The Junto argued to retain such limitations and so believed themselves the true defenders of English liberties (even against William, if need be). The Act also sounded the death knell for the old Stuart idea of the monarch as God's Anointed, ruling by Divine Right. The succession was explicitly being determined, after all, by an Act of Parliament, not by God. After 1701, allegiance to the Hanoverian succession became an inviolable tenet of the Kit-Cat Club, as for most Whigs—a tenet the Kit-Cats would need to defend with all their energy in future. The Act of Settlement had secured the succession on paper, but it was a long way from being secure in practice.

The inseparability of the Kit-Cat Club's cultural and political pursuits is well demonstrated by the relationship between the parliamentary debate over ‘election’ of England's royal heir and the debate then raging between subjective (Lockean) and objective (classical) theories of criticism. Congreve dramatized the subjectivists' viewpoint in March 1701, just as the Act of Settlement was being passed, in a new musical masque entitled The Judgment of Paris. Congreve turned this piece—about goddesses competing in a kind of beauty pageant—into an actual competition for English composers, with the London Gazette advertising for new songs, the best of which, as voted by the audience, would win £200 (over £26,000 today). Tonson administered the competition. As with the Falstaff performance and Dryden's funeral, the event was a way for the Club to reassert itself culturally during a time of political difficulty, while making a case among intellectuals for a particularly Whiggish theory of critical judgement. They wished to show that, whether choosing one's leaders or one's entertainment, the same enlightened exercise of reason and good taste was required.

Only four musicians entered the competition because it was unfairly believed that the event, like a parliamentary election, would be fixed. A good audience, however, attended to hear the four alternative performances at the Dorset Garden Theatre, which had been lined with tin to improve its acoustics, and prettily decorated with extra candles. ‘The boxes and the pit were all thrown into one; so that all sat in common,’ wrote Congreve, ‘and the whole was crammed with beauties and beaux, not one scrub being admitted.’⁴⁵ Free hot chocolate and cool drinks, including ‘ratafia’ (liqueur flavoured with almond or fruit kernels) and white wine, were served between the pit and the stage. Bracey, or ‘Our friend Venus’ as Congreve fondly called her, ‘performed to a miracle’. She and the other actresses playing the goddesses judged by Paris were at one point in the masque ordered to disrobe and partially did so, making it an extremely erotic performance for its day.

The Kit-Cat patrons dominated the all-Whig subscription supporting this production and competition, with Halifax being its prime sponsor, and Somerset lobbying for his favourite contestant to win. Ironically, as in the last two parliamentary elections, it was not the Kit-Cat candidates who triumphed, however, but another young man, John Weldon, who later became the King's organist.

There was soon little time for such cultural contests, as another parliamentary crisis erupted around the ‘discovery’ of the two secret Partition Treaties. Harley, who only wanted an excuse to further decapitate the Junto Whigs, promptly led his coalition of Tories and radical Country Whigs (who feared William's secret diplomacy as a return to the autocratic ways of Charles II) to attack the Treaties' makers. Declaring passionately that Somers had to be punished or ‘our posterity will curse us’,⁴⁶ Harley tried to persuade his fellow MPs to impeach Somers.

On 14 April 1701, Somers delivered a half-hour speech in his own defence to the Commons, ‘with great plainness and presence of mind’, explaining he had only been following the King's orders.⁴⁷ He then withdrew before the House voted on his case.

Prior was one of the MPs sitting in the Commons that evening. He had obtained his East Grinstead seat three months earlier through the influence of his childhood patron, Dorset. Though he had written to Dorset in 1698 complimenting William's wisdom in concluding the first Partition Treaty (in which Prior himself had had a significant hand), Prior now took the extraordinary step of voting with Harley and the Tories in favour of impeaching Somers for ‘a high Crime and Misdemeanour’ in the Lords. If the Kit-Cats had not suspected the shift in Prior's loyalties before, it was now made dramatically evident. As Prior voted, he must have avoided the eye of fellow Kit-Cat William Walsh, acting as teller. Though there was often the odd deviancy on a division list, such outright defection away from a political party and its patrons was observed with shock. Prior further voted with the majority, 198 to 188, to bring impeachment charges against two other Junto lords: Orford and—incredibly, in light of their long friendship—Halifax.⁴⁸

Afterwards, the Kit-Cats unanimously denounced Prior as an ungrateful Judas, concerned only with keeping his place. One remarked that Dorset had not raised Prior from tavern-sweeping obscurity for disloyalty such as this. Halifax's brother Jemmy, now the eminent jurist Sir James Montagu, struggled as only a lawyer could to excuse their old school friend, explaining that Prior must have felt voting otherwise would have turned the guilt for the two Treaties upon the King himself. The Kit-Cat Club was unconvinced, and though Prior was not expelled from the Club straight away, he was unwelcome at its meetings from this date onwards.

A little lament, written by Prior in 1701, may suggest he regretted the price paid for his political choices that year:

Reading ends in Melancholy;

Wine breeds Vices and Diseases;

Wealth is but Care, and Love but Folly;

Only Friendship truly pleases.

My Wealth, my Books, my Flask, my Molly,

Farewell all, if FRIENDSHIP Ceases!⁴⁹

At the same time, another Prior verse conveys his overriding pragmatism, which had led him to act as he did:

For conscience, like a fiery horse,

Will stumble, if you check his course;

But ride him with an easy rein,

And rub him down with worldly gain,

He'll carry you through thick and thin,

Safe, although dirty, to your inn.⁵⁰

Stepney, the third Lord Dorset's Boy, could not easily forgive Prior's betrayal. That summer, he told Halifax that the second ‘mouse’ had been ‘nibbling towards drawing me into a correspondence with him, but I waived it in as cold a manner as I could’.⁵¹ What Halifax's own feelings were when he learned that his friend of almost twenty years was among those who voted for his impeachment can only be guessed.

Somers and Halifax coordinated a press campaign against the impeachment charges, using the Kit-Cat Club to liaise with Whig writers in their defence. A Tory complained that those who were ‘solicitous for the nation’ were being libelled as Papists, Jacobites and French spies, as ‘given out in a certain printed ballad, said to be written by a certain club of great men, which was then held not far from the King's Head tavern in Holborn [on Chancery Lane, hence plausibly the Kit-Cat Club at Gray's Inn]…The mob took the hint…and gave it out for gospel in an instant.’⁵²

Jonathan Swift, who had watched with envy as Congreve received favours from the Kit-Cat patrons, contributed an anonymous pamphlet in defence of the impeached lords. Somers and Halifax sought the acquaintance of the pamphlet's author via its printer, and were, boasted Swift, ‘very liberal in promising me the greatest preferments I could hope for, if ever it came in their power’. Swift claimed he ‘grew domestic’ with Halifax during 1701, and was ‘as often with Lord Somers as the formality of his nature (the only unconversable fault he has) made it agreeable to me’.⁵³ Nonetheless, Swift was not invited to join the Kit-Cat Club.

Congreve turned his legally trained eye to the various charges against Somers and concluded, in June 1701, that the impeachment would never go through, ‘for there is neither matter nor proof’.⁵⁴ After a tussle between the lower and upper houses, his fellow peers acquitted Somers and dismissed the other charges against Halifax and Orford. This was a crucial political moment, at which a Whigdominated Lords overrode a Tory-dominated Commons, allowing the Tories to thereafter cast the Whig Junto as an anti-democratic force, for all their talk of English liberties. It was a crisis that polarized the parties and set the terms for heated Whig/Tory debates throughout the decade to follow. As one Tory muttered, these impeachment proceedings had launched ‘a feud that I fear will not die’.⁵⁵

VII THE WHIGS GO TO WAR

[T]o say ‘these are my friends’ implies ‘those are not’.

C. S. LEWIS, The Four Loves (1960)

SOMERS AND HALIFAX had to advise the King ‘behind the curtain’, as the contemporary phrase went, after their narrow escape from impeachment. In the summer of 1701, they also encouraged less prominent Kit-Cat friends who sat on Grand Juries throughout the country to petition the King and so make it appear as though the nation was crying out to resume war with France, and for another general election that might return a more Whiggish House of Commons. The Kit-Cat patrons simultaneously commissioned prowar propaganda, such as Stepney's Essay upon the Present Interest of England (1701), arguing that Louis' record of breaking international treaties made another war a necessary evil.

William needed no persuading. He had every intention of taking the country back to war, and had sent John Churchill, then the Earl of Marlborough, to The Hague as a plenipotentiary, to negotiate a new ‘Grand Alliance’ between the Austrian Habsburgs, the United Provinces and England. This confirmed the political rehabilitation of Marlborough, previously out of favour with the King, and the start of a vital alignment between the international objectives of Marlborough and those of the Kit-Cat Club. Stepney, who had finally been appointed Envoy to the Imperial Court in March, did what he could from Vienna to assist Marlborough with the negotiations.

The second Treaty of Grand Alliance was signed in August 1701. Soon after, when James II died in exile, Louis XIV took the decisive step of recognizing the deposed king's son, James Edward Stuart (known to the Whigs who alleged he was illegitimate as ‘The Pretender’ and then later as ‘The Old Pretender’), as James III of England and James VIII of Scotland. France and Spain also imposed an embargo on English goods. These actions persuaded many previously reluctant Tories to support the coming war and resupply the army they had so recently pressed to disband. Even so, the Tories believed England's only hope of victory was at sea, since the French army comprised between a quarter and half a million men and was considered invulnerable on land, especially if allied with the Spanish forces. The King, who favoured fighting on his home turf in Flanders, therefore dissolved Parliament as a prelude to a new election, just ten months after the last, in the hope that more Whigs, who would back his war strategy, might be returned. At the election, the Kit-cat lords once again emptied their purses and pulled strings on behalf of their candidates, Wharton influencing the return of some twenty-five MPs to the Commons. A Tory poem accused the Kit-cat Club of disseminating libellous election propaganda via street hawkers who were hired by ‘Trusty Secretary Jacob’¹ and licensed by Congreve's Office.

The composition of the Commons after this election was more evenly balanced between the parties, and certainly more in favour of war. A series of promotions followed for the Whigs, especially the Kit-Cats. Though Marlborough, now Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, was willing to work with the Junto for the sake of the forthcoming war effort, his closest ally, Lord Godolphin, had resigned as First Lord of the Treasury before the elections, stating he refused to serve the Junto's will in place of the King's. The Kit-cat Carlisle was given this top Treasury post in December, and Manchester was appointed Secretary of State for the Southern Department (whose responsibilities included France, southern Europe, the plantations and American colonies, Ireland, and a share of domestic policy, including law and order). Addison wrote to Lord Manchester from Italy with congratulations and offering his services.

It was too soon after the impeachment crisis for Halifax or Somers to be officially rehabilitated. Somers remained without official appointment, dividing his time between his townhouse in Leicester Square and his country retreat of Brookmans Manor, in Bell Bar, Hertfordshire. Halifax meanwhile remained Auditor of the Receipt, continuing to grant profitable administrative places to impecunious writers. One of these was a Kit-Cat named Arthur Maynwaring, who would become the Club's leading propagandist in the decade ahead. He had been a friend of Congreve's since Middle Temple days, at which time Maynwaring was just sloughing off his early Jacobite sympathies and converting—with all the fervency of a born-again believer—to post-Revolutionary Whiggism. He had been among Dryden's literary disciples at Will's Coffee House, then another of Lord Dorset's protégés, and now in 1701 he was passed along from Dorset to the care of Halifax's patronage, thereby gaining a place as a Commissioner in the Customs House.

Addison remained another of Halifax's charges. He was travelling north from Florence to Geneva at the end of 1701, just as Halifax and Somers were beginning to regain their influence, and as he crossed the Alps, ‘shivering among the Eternal snows’, Addison claimed he distracted himself from his vertigo by composing, upon horseback, a verse ‘Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax’.²

Richard Steele, meanwhile, spent the summer of 1701 lodging in Wandsworth with a woman who tutored girls—an experience that may well have shaped his later views in favour of promoting female literacy. Steele was working hard on his first play, The Funeral, while spending his leisure time with Congreve, who was passing the summer just across the river in Chelsea. Tonson had already published Steele's first work, a didactic moral tract entitled The Christian Hero, suggesting that no overly hard feelings remained over the seduction of Tonson's niece. Given the impeachment proceedings that were commencing at the time, Steele had dedicated the tract not to any Junto lord, but to his army boss Lord Cutts. The primary aim of The Christian Hero was to make its author some quick cash, and indeed the book proved a bestseller in those Collierite times, running to twenty editions. Steele's literary friends, however, teased him as a hypocrite given his recent sexual indiscretions, including a dalliance with a woman called ‘Black Moll’ and a duel fought in Hyde Park against another Irish army officer, most likely over a woman. The wits ‘measured the least levity in his words and actions, with the character of a Christian Hero’.³ Whether due to these friends' teasing or the reflective exercise of writing the book, Steele does appear to have reformed his sex life after 1701. His spending habits were less easily cured, however. In a letter to an army friend at this date, he confided that ‘nothing can really make my heart ache but a dun’.⁴

Steele wrote The Funeral, like The Christian Hero, with an eye to commercial success, aiming to please censorious theatre audiences, but also to ‘to enliven his character’ in the eyes of his literary friends,⁵ since, as he put it, ‘Nothing can make the Town so fond of a Man as a successful Play.’⁶ For good measure, the play's anti-French jokes capitalized on the town's rising mood of bellicose Protestant patriotism. Even in December 1701, however, when the play opened and went to the printers, Steele remained politically cautious: he dedicated it to the wife of William's Dutch favourite, Keppel, rather than to an Englishman of a particular party or faction. The Funeral was, as hoped, an instant hit, performed more than 170 times over the next five years. Steele's reputation as a popular (if not erudite) writer was made, as was his career in the rearming army: as reward for his literary success, he was given a commission as Captain in the new 34th Regiment of Foot.

Two days before Steele received his commission, on 8 March 1702, King William died following a fall from his horse, and his sister-in-law Anne assumed the throne. Intelligent and diligent, Anne could also be stubborn and oversensitive. Innately Tory, she believed it her royal duty to stand above party and resented any attempt by political factions to force her decisions, begging Lord Godolphin, whom she appointed as Lord Treasurer, to help her keep out ‘of the power of the Merciless men of both parties’.⁷ Anne was, furthermore, devoutly religious, personally repelled by what she regarded as the gross immorality and open impiety of the Junto lords. The Tories played upon Anne's High Church prudishness, increasing their efforts to expose the Kit-Cat politicians' private sleaze, not only to shock Anne and the Collierites, but also to challenge the Whigs' claim to be ‘dispassionate’ men.

Anne held a grudge against Halifax, Wharton and Somers for their role in supporting her expulsion from William and Mary's Court back in the early 1690s. Several Kit-Cats complained in the House of Lords upon the publication of a history by one Dr Drake, who implied that the Junto had treated Anne disrespectfully and done everything it could to prevent her succession. Another Tory, Charles Davenant, wrote a pamphlet in which a Whig character confesses that preventing Anne's succession ‘was the Discourse of all our Clubs’.⁸

The Junto Whigs' rising hopes and ambitions therefore collapsed upon Anne's accession. Somers, who even in his unemployment had maintained an advisory relationship with William, was now persona non grata at Anne's Court, not even permitted to continue as a magistrate in his native Worcestershire. Halifax and Wharton were immediately dismissed from the Privy Council. The man replacing Wharton as Comptroller of the Royal Household, the Tory Sir Edward Seymour, declared in the Commons what a pleasure it was ‘to have a Queen that was entirely English’.⁹ Jack Smith, the leading Kit-Cat in the lower house, replied indignantly that ‘none but one whose heart was truly French would make a reflection on his late Majesty’.¹⁰ Defence of King William's memory quickly became the new litmus test of Whig allegiance.

Vanbrugh foresaw the sudden demotion of his patron Carlisle, who handed the Treasury back to Godolphin after less than three months in the job. Vanbrugh therefore bought a new army commission to keep himself afloat were Castle Howard's construction put on hold. Carlisle had also organized for Vanbrugh to be appointed Comptroller of the Board of Works—a part-time job, paid accordingly, but with several houses attached, which Vanbrugh could rent out for profit. In this way, a state income relieved the Earl of the personal expense of paying Vanbrugh's salary as an architect. The appointment came through in May 1702, with Vanbrugh supplanting William Talman for a second time. In fact, the Earl continued to build Castle Howard with additional vigour after his dismissal, as if not to lose face. By the end of 1702, there was a roof on the east wing and work starting on the central block.

Manchester also lost his job as Secretary of State for the South following Anne's accession. Lingering in Geneva, Addison had hoped that, through the influence of Manchester or Halifax, he might be appointed as English representative to the army camp of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Imperial Commander and Marlborough's most useful ally in the impending war. However, with news of William's death and of the demotion of so many Kit-Cat patrons, Addison's hopes were dashed.

The Kit-Cat Club would function as a centre of opposition to Anne's first, Tory-dominated administration. Anne's ministerial favourites—Godolphin, Marlborough, and later Harley—tried, futilely, to claim they stood aloof from party like the monarch herself, but, like Anne, all three leaned instinctively towards the Tories. Anne chose to retain just two non-Harleyite Whigs in her first ministry, one of whom was the Duke of Somerset—his reward for having stood by Anne and the Marlboroughs during their 1690s quarrels with William and Mary. Somerset, in turn, was able to retain and even promote his personal Kit-Cat clients. Most significantly, Harry Boyle, a cousin of Somerset's, remained Chancellor of the Exchequer. A fictionalized record of a Kit-Cat meeting in the weeks before King William's death had depicted the Club, like a mock-parliament, passing a motion that ‘Harry Boyle's head of hair be demolished and afterwards burned by the hand of the Common hangman’. Apparently, Boyle's wig had turned rancid with the pomatum (gum or grease) used to thicken it, and was offending their noses. Now that the political ground had shifted, leaving so few Kit-Cats in government, Boyle became a much more important figure, worthy of respect.

The Whigs feared Anne might desert the Grand Alliance and shy away from war with France, perhaps even making a deal with her exiled half-brother, The Pretender, to undo the Act of Settlement. These fears were unfounded. Marlborough and Godolphin shared the Whigs' conviction about the need to contain French imperialism, and when, in February 1702, Louis' troops seized Dutch fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands, Anne reassured Europe she would not break the Alliance. On 4 May 1702, England formally declared war on France.

As the War of Spanish Succession began, Steele, who had spent the spring travelling through Essex and Norfolk hiring his company of soldiers with money borrowed from friends, found his whole regiment quartered at the dilapidated Landguard Fort in Harwich. It was a bleak, windy spot where Steele's men fell sick from chills, a place far removed from Steele's recent success in the London theatres and with little opportunity for either heroism or promotion. Steele at least had time to write. Local tradition has it he wrote his second play, The Lying Lover, on his off-duty evenings at the Queen's Arms in Harwich.

Addison meanwhile continued his European travels within Allied territory during the first campaign of the war. He visited Stepney's embassy in Vienna in the summer of 1702, then Hamburg that winter, complaining of being unable to see the German landscape because everything was so covered in snow that the dirty linen on inn beds was the only thing not white. As Addison was travelling on a tight budget, it was all the more welcome when Stepney opened doors for him with letters of introduction to the Electoral Courts of Dresden and Hanover, and by obtaining dinner and opera invitations from the Prince of Liechtenstein and the nobility in Hamburg. Addison likely sent Stepney an early draft of his Italian travel journal, later to be dedicated to Somers, which Addison said was passed around so many friends in manuscript that it ‘made a greater voyage than that which it describes’.¹¹ More than any of his literary tourism in Italy, these months among the northern European Courts, under Stepney's tutelage, would prove useful to Addison in future.

Somers told Halifax he now saw their role as fighting at home the war that Marlborough was to fight on the Continent. By this he meant that it was their responsibility to run the Whig publicity machine in support of Britannia's crusade in Europe—selling a woolly conflation of liberty and national destiny not dissimilar to American patriotism in later centuries. Somers edited and Tonson published Several Orations of Demosthenes…(English'd from the Greek by several Hands) (1702), for example, which included speeches calling the Athenians to war. Four of seven contributors to this book were Kit-Cats.¹²

When it came to whipping up Whig Protestant patriotism, the Kit-Cats were hindered by the profiles of the monarchs fate handed to England: first William, a Calvinist Dutchman, then Anne, an un-attractive Tory woman, and finally the prospect of a Lutheran German from Hanover. Marlborough was therefore quickly chosen to become ‘the hero of the Whigs, though he was never a Whig hero’.¹³ This was made possible largely thanks to Marlborough's wife Sarah, who was a vehement Whig and spent much of the following decade pressing her husband to side with, or at least work with, the Whig leadership. Like Sarah, the Kit-Cat Club was eager to absorb the Allied Commander into its party, and from 1702 onwards recruited a series of Marlborough relations and supporters as the next best thing to the man himself, who protected his political independence. A Tory satire, written after Marlborough received his dukedom, described a typical Kit-Cat member as being a ‘humble servant’ of Marlborough ‘from the Teeth outwards’, but ‘the Duke will not be led by the Nose by him, which very much alters his [the Kit-Cat's] inward Respect’ for the Duke.¹⁴

The clearest example of this forcible assimilation of the Marlborough ‘brand’ is the admission of Francis, Viscount Rialton and future 2nd Earl of Godolphin, who was both son and heir of the Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin and husband of Marlborough's eldest daughter Henrietta. In a Kit-Cat toast to Henrietta, she is complimented in terms clearly referencing her father: ‘Her conquering race with Various fate surprise / Who 'scape their Arms are Captive to their Eyes.’

Marlborough's other daughters were also repeatedly nominated as Kit-Cat toasts after 1702. Similarly, the Kit-Cat Club membership of Edmund Dunch can be explained by his marriage in spring 1702 to Elizabeth Godfrey, daughter of Marlborough's sister Arabella. Two other Kit-Cats later married a daughter and a granddaughter of the Marlboroughs. Dr Garth's importance within the Club rose significantly after he became Marlborough's personal physician, and after Garth helped Marlborough's younger brother avoid murder charges, earning Marlborough's lasting gratitude.

Another Kit-Cat member who was admitted thanks to his links to Marlborough was Charles, Lord Mohun. By 1702, Mohun had stood trial for murder no less than three times, escaping conviction in at least one case thanks to the value of his vote in the Lords, which he gave to King William in exchange for clemency. Following his return from a trip to Hanover to meet with Electress Sophia, Mohun was teased for putting on ‘a Politician's Face’ for the Whigs.¹⁵ Kit-Cat membership sometime between the autumn of 1701 and May 1702 therefore fitted neatly with Mohun's resolution to rectify his ‘slips of youth’ and become a political player.¹⁶ It would also have fitted, cynically, with his need for more friends in the Lords in order to win a complicated inheritance dispute that began in 1701. At his first attendance at the Kit-Cat Club, Mohun ‘broke down the gilded emblem on the top of his chair’, giving Tonson the opportunity to allude slyly to Mohun's wayward past by complaining that ‘a man who would do that would cut a man's throat’.¹⁷

A number of military men were also admitted to the Kit-Cat after 1702, all of whom, almost inevitably given the limited size of the army's officer class, had links with Marlborough.¹⁸ Most important of these was James, 1st Earl of Stanhope, eldest son of the respected diplomat Alexander Stanhope. By May 1698, when James Stanhope served briefly alongside Prior at the Paris embassy, a friend told Alexander that his son was the ‘greatest hope in England, and I believe no man of his age hath by his own personal merit made himself so many friends and rendered himself so universally acceptable’.¹⁹

King William had at first been charmed by Stanhope's precocity and outspokenness, but cooled towards him when the young man wrote in favour of disbanding the army after Ryswick and argued with one of the King's Dutch friends. This anti-Court positioning alone excluded Stanhope from the Kit-Cat Club when it was first formed in the late 1690s. Stanhope also lost royal favour at the outbreak of the culture wars in 1698 because of his overt anticlericalism. When Anne came to the throne, however, Stanhope was one of those lucky enough to survive the Whig purge thanks to Somerset's protection. Somerset supported Stanhope in gaining a parliamentary seat for Cockermouth in Cumberland, and probably a simultaneous seat at the Kit-Cat Club, in summer 1702. Stanhope's erudition, particularly as a translator of Greek, and his exquisite family seat of Chevening in Kent, qualified him for the Club from a cultural standpoint, one contemporary calling him ‘the best scholar perhaps of any gentleman of his time’.²⁰

At the outbreak of the War of Spanish Succession, Stanhope had been posted to the Iberian Peninsula, but, after commendation for his part in storming Vigo Bay in October 1702—England's first significant victory—he had been transferred in 1703 to serve directly under Marlborough in Flanders. Stanhope developed a good working partnership with Marlborough, who recognized that Stanhope possessed a mixture of soldierliness, diplomatic charm and intellect not unlike his own.

Another of the Kit-Cat Club's new military members after 1702 was James, future 3rd Earl of Berkeley, a naval officer admitted on the same day as Mohun. Richard Boyle, 2nd Viscount Shannon, also joined the Club soon after leading the grenadiers who stormed the fortifications at Vigo with Stanhope in October 1702.²¹ Two soldier brothers, John and James Dormer, may also have entered the Club, simultaneously or in succession, soon after the war began. A ‘Mr Dormer’ is recorded as dining at Wharton's house on Dover Street, alongside four other Kit-Cat members, on 5 December 1702, and again with three Kit-Cats on 27 December.²²

The only military Kit-Cat whose membership certainly predated 1702 was Colonel John Tidcomb, a Restoration Court pal of Dorset's who had led deserting troops towards William's invasion force in 1688 and was now enjoying the Club in his retirement. Tidcomb and Dorset provided the prototypes for the admission of Kit-Cat soldiers who possessed enough cultural refinement that their conversation did not, as Addison put it, ‘smell of gunpowder’.²³

Thanks to the additional military members who joined during 1702 and 1703, the Kit-Cat Club needed to move to a more spacious venue: likely the Fountain tavern on the Strand. Whig conspirators had clubbed in this tavern before the Revolution and this subversive history now held added appeal for the Kit-Cats as they entered an indefinite phase of political opposition to another Tory-leaning Stuart monarch. Some sources state that Mr Cat sold the Cat and Fiddle to buy the Fountain with a loan from Tonson, just as Cat moved his home and shop from Gray's Inn down to Shire Lane, a street that ran through the middle of where the Royal Courts of Justice stand today.

In addition, for summer gatherings, the Kit-Cat Club planned to erect some sort of clubhouse, referred to as a ‘convenient reception’, in the fresher air of Hampstead. The village of Hampstead was then visited mainly for its proximity to the Bellsise (today Belsize) Gardens—pleasure gardens like those in Kilburn, Vauxhall and St Pancras where Londoners could enjoy music, dancing, gambling and sex amid the shrubbery. The original proposal for the Hampstead venue in May 1702 was signed by fourteen members of the Club who each promised to contribute ten guineas (each guinea was worth 20–30 shillings or £130 to £200 today), with Wharton listed as ‘Controller of the Society’.²⁴ The building was to be finished by the spring of 1703, but it may be that it was never begun. Though a 1708 poem does refer to the Kit-Cats dining on Hampstead's ‘airy Head’ in the summertime,²⁵ no clubhouse has ever been identified there, and there is an oral tradition that they met in the gardens of the Upper Flask tavern, known for its ‘races, raffles and private marriages’, rather than in any purpose-built venue.²⁶

When in power, the Kit-Cats always imagined themselves in terms of heroic, patriot governors, modelled on classical Roman senators—men whose friendship formed the pillars of civilization—but when out of power, Renaissance and humanist models came to the fore, and they imagined themselves a private circle in retreat from a repressive state. During these first years of Anne's reign, when all the Kit-Cats but Somerset had been unceremoniously ejected from the Queen's Cabinet, but when the country was embarking on a war most intensely desired and bankrolled by their party, the Kit-Cats were ambivalent about which image to cultivate: the Fountain politicians or the Flask revellers.

VIII KIT-CAT CONNOISSEURS

If eating or drinking be natural, herding is so too.

3RD EARL OF SHAFTESBURY, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)¹

IN EARLY 1703, Tonson acquired another summer home for the nomadic Kit-Cats. He leased a country house at Barn Elms, about seven miles west of London on the south side of the Thames, just west of Putney. The surrounding area was a picnic resort for Londoners, mentioned by Pepys as a place for strolls among the majestic elms and by Congreve as one of dubious morals. It was best reached by barge from Whitehall, rather than by the road (the original King's Road) that ran through the open country of ‘five fields’ and was notoriously plagued by highwaymen.

Elizabeth I had once stayed at Barn Elms' manor house. Tonson's property was a much more modest residence to the north of the manor, possibly its dairy. Taking the lease was nonetheless an expression of Tonson's social aspirations. The westerly migration from the stink of London into fresher air represented both his own and the Club's rising status since the 1690s. The proliferating villas of Twickenham and Clapham would soon become a clichéd image of new money's encroachment, as Whig ‘Cits’ (City citizens) imitated the rural idyll of the landed gentry but within commuting distance of the town. Like them, Tonson wanted to live within easy reach of London, but this Barn Elms property was unusual in being a status symbol not only for a private individual but also for a collective group.

Tonson may have been allowed to use the unspent Kit-Cat subscription monies, collected to build a Hampstead venue, to renovate the Barn Elms house instead. He hired Vanbrugh to fit up the house's interior. Like Vanbrugh's ‘Goose Pie’ house in Whitehall, Tonson's small property was good practice for the self-taught architect before working at Castle Howard, though in the latter case Vanbrugh would largely leave Hawksmoor to design the interior. Both houses, small and large, reflected their owners' desires to be judged more on how they spent their money than on how much money they had—in Tonson's case because he had more than was considered decent for an untitled merchant, and in Carlisle's case because he had less than his title suggested. As with membership of the Kit-Cat Club, the fad for architecture and interior design, and thereby the demonstration of one's taste, was a way to set oneself apart from an ever-increasing number of prosperous but perhaps less educated neighbours. A diverse range of luxury furnishings available at this date—thanks to the East India Company's imports of cotton, chintz and porcelain, for example—made it as easy for Tonson as for Carlisle to participate. As Defoe wrote when he saw a tradesman's house filled with velvet hangings, embroidered chairs and damask curtains, it was now common for such a man to own ‘Furniture equal to what, formerly, sufficed the greatest of our Nobility’.²

The first time Tonson took Vanbrugh down to Barnes to survey the property, the men shared a simple supper in the kitchen, which Vanbrugh would remember fondly some twenty years later as ‘the best meal I ever ate’.³ Tonson thus became Vanbrugh's second architectural patron, after Carlisle. By this date Tonson and Vanbrugh were also close personal friends. Tonson allocated a bedroom for Vanbrugh's permanent private use at Barn Elms, and a poem by a mutual friend contained a fictionalized dialogue in which the character of Tonson says of Vanbrugh: ‘…so much I dote on him, that I / If I were sure to go to Heaven, would die’.⁴

Tonson convened the Club in London in March 1703, telling the members it would be the last meeting for some time, as he would be travelling to Holland on book business. Stepney, who was in Vienna cajoling Emperor Leopold into devoting greater military resources to the Grand Alliance, sent his ‘hearty affections to the Kit-Cat; I often wish it were my fortune to make one with you at 3 in the morning’.⁵ This March 1703 meeting seems to have been a particularly late and lively one. A dangerously indecent poem by an unidentified Kit-Cat was recited, mocking Queen Anne for her phantom pregnancies. In the poem, Anne knights her doctor with her bare, gouty leg, in a fit of pleasure when he declares her pregnant. It is a nasty piece, reflecting the Junto Whigs' disgruntlement, out of office thanks to what they considered a woman's ignorant and irrational prejudices.

The Kit-Cats' published propaganda was more restrained. Tonson's press, for example, published The Golden Age Restor'd (1703), which was a sarcastic call to arms, suggesting the Jacobites should oust the few remaining Whigs at Court as the prelude to a Franco-Jacobite invasion.⁶ Written by William Walsh, the poem was printed anonymously and its authorship mistakenly attributed to Arthur Maynwaring, who almost lost his commission at the Customs House as a result. Yet Maynwaring did not break ranks and betray the poem's true author. The Kit-Cats stood collectively behind the publication's anonymity, just as the Tories concealed the author of their reply, The Golden Age Revers'd (1703), which reviled the Kit-Cat Club as a gang of hubristic conspirators.⁷

Tonson departed for Holland soon after the March meeting. Now 47 and balding (‘spacious brow[ed]’, as one poet delicately put it⁸), he travelled this time with the youngest Kit-Cat: the indolent 19-yearold Charles Fitzroy, 2nd Duke of Grafton (grandson of Charles II and his mistress Barbara Villiers), who had joined the Club upon reaching his maturity. Vanbrugh thought Tonson would find it amusing to hear that the Tories suspected the bookseller of travelling as a Junto messenger destined for Hanover, and that his subscription list to a new edition of Ceasar's Commentaries was rumoured to be a sinister list of rebels plotting to overthrow Queen Anne. While Tonson's subscription lists were not without political subtext, there was no such undercover mission. It was simply a trip to acquire new texts, typeface and paper from the Continent.

Tonson left his nephew, Jacob Tonson Junior (brother to Elizabeth and uncle to Steele's illegitimate child; referred to hereafter as ‘Jacob Junior’ to avoid confusion) in charge of the publishing firm. This partnership would continue after Tonson's return, and from this date forward it is often unclear which of the two Tonsons was responsible for particular publications or business decisions. Despite the trust placed in Jacob Junior, however, there is evidence that he did not feel unalloyed affection for his domineering uncle.

Vanbrugh, trusted as closely as Tonson's nephew, was left in charge of the renovation work at Barn Elms. He travelled there to inspect the site amid unseasonably heavy rains in June 1703, and reported to Tonson that the carpenters had been neglecting the job for the past fortnight: ‘[E]very room is chips—up to your chin!’ The neighbours had also failed to steal the peas and beans from Tonson's kitchen garden, so that they hung rotting on the vine. Vanbrugh assured Tonson, with a gentle jibe at Tonson's aspirations for the modest property, that the house would soon be ready ‘for the reception of a king’.⁹

Other Kit-Cat Club members took an active interest in the Barn Elms works, supporting the theory that it was intended to become a Club venue. Congreve told Tonson in Amsterdam: ‘I believe Barn Elms wants you and I long to see it but don't care to satisfy my curiosity before you come.’¹⁰ Vanbrugh wrote, meanwhile, that ‘the Kit-Cat wants you much more than you ever can do them…Those who remain in town are in great desire of waiting on you at BarnElms.’¹¹

This last statement emphasizes how central Tonson remained as Club secretary and chairman, even now that the Club's membership had expanded to include more than a dozen peers of the realm. A month later, Vanbrugh complained again: ‘The Kit-Cat…will never meet without you, so you can see here's a general stagnation for want of you.’¹² The Duke of Somerset sent the same message, though in a more imperious tone: ‘Our Club is dissolved, till you revive it again; which we are impatient of.’¹³ Congreve, Vanbrugh and Halifax drank a toast to Tonson's quick return one day that summer at Hampton Court, ‘as we were sopping our Arses in the Fountain, for you must know we have got some warm weather at last’.¹⁴

Yet Tonson's position remained, at the same time, precarious. Though still the Club's convener and nominal host, he seems to have also been the butt of the Club's raillery during repeated rifts between the publisher and his Kit-Cat authors. A satirical advertisement was printed in January 1704, ostensibly composed by Tonson to deny that he was ‘infamously expelled a certain Society called the K-t C-t Club’ as a result of his ‘ill-timed freedom with some of the Principal Members at the Reading of a Late Satire upon his Parts and Person’ and also to deny he was ‘since Clapped up in a Madhouse’. To the contrary, the advertisement explained, Tonson had withdrawn himself voluntarily ‘in scorn of being their Jest any longer’ and ‘walks the public Streets without a Keeper’.¹⁵ The notice has the tone of an inside joke, meriting speculation about the incident behind it. What was the ‘Late Satire’? Was it Faction Display'd (1704), William Shippen's poem which incorporated three lines mocking Tonson's freckles and lameness? And what was Tonson's ‘ill-timed freedom’? Could it be, as the phrase suggests, that the tradesman had finally taken a liberty too far?

Another poem, The Kit-Cats, written sometime before June 1704, seems to refer to the same rift. Structured around an allegory in which the Club's literary members rebel against Tonson's authority (‘They cry he Sep'rate Interest Carries on, / Pretends their Profit, but designs his own’), the poem is the literary bruise remaining after a fight which history has forgotten.¹⁶ Again, two sources dating to 1705 refer to Tonson being so severely teased by the Club's members that he talked of leaving them: a poem referred to Tonson being ‘Sullen through his late ill-Usage’ at the Club,¹⁷ while a play called The Quacks showed ‘Stationer Freckle’ feeling aggrieved when his authors teased him in their verses. A private letter from Halifax to another Kit-Cat confirms Tonson bore the brunt of the Club's raillery, and was growing sick of it: ‘Our friend Jacob seems to have abdeclared [i.e. abdicated] his government of the Chit-Kat…[T]hey had teased him so unmercifully of late that I fancy he intends to leave them.’¹⁸

Another, later poem described Tonson as having ‘more Humours than a dancing Bear’ but ultimately being persuaded to reconcile with his Kit-Cat authors.¹⁹

As Vanbrugh helped Tonson realize his social aspirations at Barn Elms, so he continued to help Carlisle confirm his family's status—as well as Carlisle's personal educational and cultural status—at Castle Howard. With time on his hands since the Queen had relieved him of his Treasury office, Carlisle was able to personally oversee the construction site there. That summer of 1703, some 200 men were working on the Yorkshire house and gardens. When work had hardly begun, Carlisle took a party of friends, including Kit-Cats Kingston, Grafton, Wharton and William Cavendish, for an impromptu site inspection, demonstrating that the project was, from the start, distinctly Whiggish.

Carlisle's aesthetic, like Vanbrugh's, seems to have gained definition through exchanges at the Kit-Cat Club. Though the Kit-Cats published no manifesto, we can retrospectively discern an unwritten manifesto directing all their cultural projects, whether literary or architectural. This manifesto involved competing with French culture but not, as might be expected, rejecting it wholesale. The Kit-Cats drew from French comedies, architecture and gardening manuals, just as they imported other Continental models from Venice or Vienna, but they aimed to modify all these European imports and so establish a more ‘modern’ and distinctively English brand of neoclassicism. Vanbrugh tried to temper the baroque style, associated as it was with Europe's absolute monarchies, with historical English elements—for example, long Jacobean galleries—and with numerous visual allusions to the Roman republic that the Whigs considered the classical parallel to their constitutional monarchy.

The question of why the Kit-Cat Club felt such an urgent need to define England's national style is a complex one. There was a sense that pre-Revolutionary elites had been lapdogs to the French, a sense that the large number of immigrants in London and at Court during William's reign had further diluted English identity, a sense that European baroque architecture had left England lagging behind, and a wish, in light of England's rising commercial power, to hold their heads high and build properties exuding new-found national self-confidence. There was no English school of architecture to constrain Vanbrugh, and he was lucky that his Kit-Cat commissioners gave him great imaginative freedom during a time of stylistic transition. The Kit-Cat Club directed him only by endorsing his search for a new, distinctively English style. Perhaps his own sense of coming from a family of recent migrants sharpened his personal passion for this quest.

One of the most radical, innovative aspects of Castle Howard was its location—that someone should build such a palatial home on a windswept hillside in Yorkshire. Carlisle saw himself as extending the reach of civilization by importing Continental styles he had seen on his travels into the depths of the English countryside, for his neighbours' edification. The project brought direct economic benefits to the local craftsmen it employed, and the emulation of such great Whig houses by more minor nobility and gentry—such as the building of Beningborough by John Bourchier in Yorkshire in 1716—was to have trickle-down economic benefits.

Castle Howard was also a Whiggish project in the sense that its contents boasted of English trade and manufacture. Its interior was started after 1706, though interior designs had been a part of the house's overall plan from the beginning, with Vanbrugh commissioning Hawksmoor to design the ‘Eating Room’ interior, for example. This was a new way of working, reflecting the fact that a private citizen's private rooms could now make public statements, as only royal palaces' interiors had previously done. Carlisle engaged several London merchants to do the upholstering and make the furniture for his rooms, and collected delftware and other exotic decorative items from the London importers. The house's bedchambers were hung with oriental silk damasks, its dressing rooms with India wallpapers, and the Earl's Grand Cabinet with angora mohair imported by the Turkey Company. The whole house, in other words, became a receptacle for the luxuries of British trade, but with its owner constantly aiming to emphasize that he was a collector and connoisseur, not just a greedy shopper.

The magnificent building, as it rose, provoked the ire of some smaller Yorkshire landowners, resentful of raised wartime tax ation and of peers like Carlisle who were aligned to the City of London's interests. Had they known the extent to which Carlisle's income had dwindled, and how watchful he had to be of expenditure on building a house financed largely through credit and card winnings, they might have felt less aggrieved.

Carlisle had the power to bestow heraldic rewards through the College of Arms, and therefore was able to pay Vanbrugh for building Castle Howard by making him a ‘Carlisle Herald’ in June 1703, an appointment from which Vanbrugh was then promoted to the lucrative place of ‘Clarenceux King of Arms’. This required only that Vanbrugh occasionally appear at the College of Arms in ornate costume. A contemporary's reaction to news of the appointment was pragmatic: ‘Now Van can build houses.’²⁰ Suspicions that Carlisle and Vanbrugh were treating the heralds' internal hierarchy with cynical disrespect, however, were confirmed when Vanbrugh later referred to this appointment as ‘a Place I got in jest’.²¹ To Tonson in Amsterdam, Vanbrugh confided that several Kit-Cats had ridiculed his heraldic investiture with their own drunken ceremony. Carlisle's brother-inlaw, neighbour and fellow Kit-Cat, Algernon Capel, 2nd Earl of Essex, had done the honours, said Vanbrugh, ‘with a whole Bowl of wine about my ears instead of half a Spoonful’.²²

In Amsterdam, Tonson was missing Vanbrugh's company, being stuck instead with that of Addison, recently returned to Holland after his tour of the German Courts. Since Addison would never support himself outside academia solely on the proceeds of Latin translations, Tonson tried to think of a day-job for his author. Reviewing his portfolio of Kit-Cat patrons, Tonson knew that only Somerset was flourishing politically under Anne's Tory-led ministry, and so enquired whether Addison might become an escort and tutor for Somerset's son. When Somerset replied positively, offering a salary of 100 guineas (some £14,000 today), Addison wrote back: ‘As for the Recompense that is proposed to me, I must take the Liberty to assure your Grace that I should not see my account in it but in the hopes that I have to recommend myself to your Grace's favour and approbation.’²³

Somerset took offence at this hint that he would owe Addison future patronage and that the salary was ungenerous; he withdrew the offer. Addison, never one to offend the rich and powerful intentionally, hurriedly apologized, but it was too late. Tonson, having stuck his neck out for Addison in seeking the favour from Somerset, was unimpressed by how it had been handled. While he appreciated Addison's intellect, Tonson never warmed to Addison as to Congreve and Vanbrugh, and incidents like this help explain why.²⁴

Addison was tiring of expat society in Holland, focused as it was on purely material, mercantile and military concerns. He complained of being forced to become conversant with the market price for nutmeg and pepper because, ‘since the coming in of the East India fleet, our conversation here runs altogether on Spice’.²⁵ By September 1703, he was back in London after five years of travel. Tonson probably returned on the same ship, bringing a supply of Dutch type that was to improve the appearance of English printed books dramatically, as well as various purchases on behalf of his favourite Kit-Cats: a copy of Palladio's architectural plans for Vanbrugh, ivory mathematical instruments for Halifax, and a set of new linen for Congreve.

Following Addison's return to London, he rented a garret on the street today known as the Haymarket (thanks to then being the location of one of London's largest stables and hay markets). It neighboured Dr Garth's handsome, fully staffed townhouse on the street's eastern side. Addison's despondency and anxiety about his career and income at this date were understandable. He had given up a safe path in the Church for the ambition of becoming a government servant and writer, but neither of his recent prose publications on Italian tourism or Roman medals was attracting much interest beyond his friends. Somers, Halifax and Manchester remained Addison's nominal patrons, having invested in his European education, but there was no fresh idea of how to employ him since he had blown his chance with Somerset. Addison lived off his small inheritance, conscious of being the eldest yet least settled of his siblings, at 32 the walking embodiment of unfulfilled intellectual potential.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (who had high standards) declared Addison the best company in the world, and Steele, always Addison's biggest fan, asked Congreve to agree that an evening alone with Addison was like ‘the Pleasure of conversing with an intimate Acquaintance of Terence and Catullus, who had all their Wit and Nature heightened with Humour, more exquisite and delightful than any other Man ever possessed’.²⁶ Yet Addison had a natural aversion to large gatherings, saying there was ‘no such thing as real conversation between more than two persons’.²⁷ It was less a matter of principle than personality. He described himself, using a metaphor from Congreve's Double Dealer, as a man who could draw a bill for a thousand pounds but had not one guinea in his pocket, meaning that he could express himself with perfect fluency on paper but then grew tight-lipped and tongue-tied in public. He felt this was a disability partly because he shared the widespread belief that a writer would produce better work if part of a stimulating literary circle—that dinner parties and drinking friendships were essential ingredients in highbrow creativity, as for the Roman Augustans.²⁸ Addison saw the Kit-Cat Club as a place where writers' ‘Conversation fed their mutual Flame’²⁹ and so, against the grain of his own personality, he forced himself to join the Club, to which so many of his friends and patrons had long belonged, in 1704.

Ironically, the practical result of Addison's reticence when at a Kit-cat Club dinner was that he had to get quickly drunk to relax. Addison was especially fond of Canary wine and ‘Barbadoes water’ (an alcoholic cordial flavoured with citrus),³⁰ and Steele was almost certainly thinking of Addison when he described a friend whom you could seldom get into a tavern, but ‘once he is arrived to his pint and begins to look about and like his company, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay buried’.³¹

The amount usually drunk at the Kit-Cat Club is disputed. One contemporary said they ‘refresh themselves with a glass of wine, but with great moderation’.³² Individual members' household alcohol bills, however, suggest that they were often well soaked,³³ and a Tory poet described the Club as inspired by intoxication: ‘Oft do they in high Flights and Raptures swell, / Drunk with the Waters of our Jacob's Well.’³⁴

Vanbrugh's personal punch recipe also suggests that there were some lethally strong cocktails besides the wine on offer at the Club: ‘water or small beer; mead, port—two glasses each; rum, saffron—a very little of each; nutmeg, poker [i.e. warmed by inserting a hot poker], orange or lemon peel in winter; balm etc in summer’.³⁵

Addison's travel book on Italy had reviewed the wine in every place he visited, and this wine connoisseurship was something he shared with other Kit-Cat members. In 1704, when Congreve noted ‘Good wine scarcer than ever’,³⁶ Addison joined the Kit-Cat Club partly because it was one of the few places where one would have been served the finest, lighter French wines. Imports of French wine were heavily taxed during the war, and though the Kit-Cat lords and MPs supported this protectionism in Parliament, they privately made full use of the privilege allowed to the Privy Counsellors among them to import large quantities of duty-free wine. In 1706, Congreve complained London ‘affords not one drop of wine out of a private house’.³⁷ His distinction between what they were drinking in public and private is telling.

Since the Methuen Treaty of 1703, Portuguese wine could be imported at a third less duty than French. Port was ‘patriotic and Whig and woollen; claret was Francophile and Jacobite’.³⁸ Kit-Cat Anthony Henley quipped that the Tories were unpatriotic because ‘they are for bringing in French claret and will not sup-Port’.³⁹ Among the Whigs, champagne and claret became truly guilty pleasures, and much black-market French wine was labelled as port to get it through customs. Between 1705 and 1714, Congreve was one of five Commissioners for licensing wine, which, combined with his job at the Customs House, placed him perfectly—alongside Maynwaring—to assist his patrons with defrauding the system.

In the early 1700s, when heavy drinking had not yet exploded into the epidemic depicted in Hogarth's ‘Gin Lane’ but rather remained the preserve of the upper classes (as in the phrase ‘drunk as a lord’), alcoholism was not regarded as a serious issue. Even the Collierites and Societies for the Reformation of Manners never focused on temperance. However, Addison, self-critical of what he must have known was a personal weakness, lectured young men never to boast of drunkenness, since it distorts the intelligence and ‘displays every little Spot of the Soul in its utmost Deformity’.⁴⁰ He published an essay advising his readers to drink as follows: ‘the first Glass for myself, the second for my Friends, the third for good Humour and the fourth for mine Enemies’.⁴¹ One reader, possibly a teasing friend, commented that ‘there was certainly an Error in the Print, and that the Word Glass should be Bottle‘.⁴²

Addison was far more abstemious about food than alcohol, having too delicate a digestion for the richer dishes at the Kit-Cat feasts. The Kit-Cat Club remained a dining club, even as it assumed its range of other identities as cultural institution, literary clique and political think-tank. It was imitated as a dining and toasting club by the ‘Beefsteak Club’, another Whig club that started sometime before 1705.⁴³ But, though many Kit-Cats were dedicated food lovers, only one member's admission rested primarily on his reputation as a gourmand. Charles Dartiquenave (or ‘Dartineuf’), known to his friends as ‘Darty’, was a member when Addison joined. Darty was rumoured to be a bastard son of Charles II, but in fact his father was a Huguenot refugee. Darty had written a volume of poems in Greek and Latin while a boy, and as an adult became known as a great punster. He was appointed an Agent of Taxes in 1706 and later Paymaster of the Royal Works, being described by one contemporary as ‘the man that knows everything and that everybody knows’.⁴⁴ Anecdotes about Darty, however, focused on only one thing: his obsessive love of food.⁴⁵ Pope wrote an epigram: ‘Each mortal has his pleasure: none deny / Scarsdale his bottle, Darty his Ham Pie.’⁴⁶

It is unsurprising that a man who became known as ‘a most celebrated sensualist and glutton’⁴⁷ should have sought admission to a club founded upon pie-eating.

Addison's indifference to good food was shown by Edward Wortley Montagu's explicit refusal to share lodgings with Addison unless he hired a better cook. In a famous essay on the ‘Gluttony of a modern Meal’, Addison imagined each rich dish on the table as a dish of gout, dropsy or fever. Addison said his prescriptive diet would be one dish per meal, with simple sauces—closer to our modern norm. He recommended that if one must eat a large dinner, one should balance it with some days of abstinence.

Addison's arrival coincided with the Kit-Cat Club's move after 1704 to Barn Elms, where there was fresher produce to enjoy besides the stodgy pies. Following a summer visit to the property, Vanbrugh told Tonson there were a ‘hundred thousand apricocks [sic]’ in the orchards, along with strawberries, redcurrants ‘red as blood’, gooseberries, peaches, pears, apples and plums sufficient ‘to gripe the guts of a nation’.⁴⁸ Addison would later take great pride in his own kitchen garden, full of cabbages, ‘coleworts’ (half-grown cabbages) and herbs,⁴⁹ so he would have taken a keen interest in Tonson's kitchen garden and orchards at Barn Elms, but more as a gardener than gourmand.

A Swiss visitor in 1719 observed many people in England ‘never eat any bread, and universally they eat very little: they nibble a few crumbs, while they chew the meat by whole mouthfuls’.⁵⁰ Meat was a status food and a taste for it (in pies or as roasts) was considered manly, but people also ate more fruit and vegetables than is sometimes supposed. The Kit-Cats would have disdained Italian cookery for its relative scarcity of meat, though Carlisle—with a taste for Continental imports in food as in architecture—once ordered, from an Italian warehouse on London's Suffolk Street, ‘some choice figs’, parmesan cheese and four or five pounds of ‘French raisins’.⁵¹ The Kit-Cat diet was, in other words, not as unvaried as one might think. Addison described a dinner conversation about gastronomic antipathies like eels and parsnips, which proceeded ‘till we had worked up ourselves to such a Pitch of Complaisance that when the Dinner was to come in, we enquired the Name of every Dish and hoped it would be no Offence to any in Company’.⁵²

The balancing of the Club's meat with more fruit and vegetables in the summer paralleled, symbolically, a balancing of the Club's masculinity with more ‘polite’, feminine tastes. After the Barn Elms renovations were completed, Vanbrugh, Carlisle and Garth hosted a ‘Barns Expedition’ by barge to show the house off to a party consisting of Marlborough's wife Sarah and other noble Whig ladies. And it was after the Club settled at Barn Elms (and the Fountain tavern) that the Kit-Cats added a larger dash of delicacy to their meetings with bespoke drinking glasses and decorative silverware.⁵³ Vanbrugh always referred to the Barn Elms house by the feminine pronoun and, in one letter to Tonson, personified it as Tonson's mistress. This was an allusion to a quip in Wycherley's play The Country Wife,⁵⁴ but also a way of countering accusations that an interest in interior design was in any way effeminate.

The metaphor of ‘appetite’ versus ‘taste’ was used in relation to all forms of connoisseurship, with the idea that ‘consumption’ should be refined and one's palate exercised: ‘Conversation with Men of a Polite Genius is another Method for improving our Natural Taste,’ Addison wrote.⁵⁵ At the dinner table, the expectation of conversational pleasures to be served by one's fellow diners was equal to the expectation of good food. Every dinner party in London was said to need at least one Kit-Cat guest, or ‘Flat was the Wine and tasteless was the Cheer.’⁵⁶

Addison had joined the Club, however, not for its wine or conversation, but to remedy his unemployment. Resisting lethargy, he helped select the poems for another edition of Tonson's Miscellany, but this took only a little of his time and attention. Nothing could have come as more of a relief, in these circumstances, than an unexpected visitor bearing good news in the late summer. Harry Boyle, the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the stinking wigs, personally climbed the three flights of stairs to Addison's garret to deliver an important message directly from Lord Treasurer Godolphin. Boyle was possibly selected, or volunteered, as messenger because he was a Kit-Cat and this was a Kit-Cat-inspired business.

Halifax had suggested to Godolphin that Addison be commissioned to write a poem for the government, in exchange for a post as Commissioner for Appeals and Regulating the Excise (a virtual sinecure, worth £200 a year or some £26,500 today). Godolphin himself was ‘not a reading man’,⁵⁷ but the three Kit-Cat Junto leaders had persuaded him that the war effort needed a patriotic poem to celebrate Marlborough's great victory against Louis XIV and the Bavarians in August 1704 at the battle of Blenheim.

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