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
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