Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  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