John Evelyn's diary records Italian opera in London as early as 1674, yet opera still seemed to most Englishmen in 1703 ‘not a plant of our native growth, nor what our plainer appetites are fond of, and is of so delicate a nature that without excessive charge it cannot live long among us’.4 Dryden had attempted, but failed, to found an indigenous operatic tradition with his musical adaptation of Paradise Lost in the 1670s. Though the Kit-Cats preferred the ‘plainness’ of oratorio to the frippery of French or Italian productions, they sought to nurture a home-grown style of English opera. A publication compiled by Congreve's friend John Abell, A Choice Collection of Italian Ayres (1703), to be sung in the north of England and ‘at both Theatres in London’, therefore included a song entitled ‘The Kit-Cat’. This approach to musical reformation paralleled the Kit-Cats' emergent approach to architecture: inspire English taste using imported baroque elements, in the hope that some distinctively Whiggish hybrid might take root.
The only English-born composers to have earned critical regard during the Kit-Cats' lifetimes were the Purcell brothers, Henry and Daniel. Henry Purcell set several Congreve poems to music before he died in 1695, and Vanbrugh's play The Pilgrim (1700) included music by Daniel. Among the Kit-Cats, Vanbrugh and Congreve were particular enthusiasts for the Club's musical mission. Congreve had fallen in love with Bracey partly thanks to her singing voice, and placed great importance upon the songs, set by John Eccles, in Love for Love and The Way of the World. By the 1700s, though still in his thirties, Congreve was suffering from cataracts and could only read or write with the help of a thick magnifying glass. His love of music, like Queen Anne's, therefore grew in proportion to his failing eyesight.
At first, the building of the new Haymarket theatre was solely Vanbrugh's initiative—undertaken not only for the public good but also as a property development project from which he personally hoped to profit by retaining and renting out the land and vaults under the theatre. Vanbrugh's design was approved in model form by the Kit-Cat patrons and was ‘very different from any Other [Play]House in being’.5 No original plan survives, and the theatre burnt down in 1789, but these differences probably related to its acoustics and a deeper stage to allow for elaborate scenery. For its operatic purpose, there was to be the innovation of an orchestra pit—previously musicians in English theatres played behind the scenes, on the stage, in a side-box, or perched above the proscenium arch. In addition, the dramatic action was to be removed from the middle of the audience and set back into a world of suspended disbelief. It was, in other words, the first theatre resembling the classic nineteenthcentury design still familiar today.
By mid-June 1703, Vanbrugh was telling Tonson (in Holland): ‘I finished my purchase for the Playhouse and all the tenants [of the stables] will be out by Midsummer Day [24 June]; so then I lay the cornerstone and, though the season be thus far advanced, have pretty good assurance I shall be ready for business at Christmas.’6 This was an over-optimistic forecast. The theatre—which came to be called the Queen's Theatre—would take three times as long to build as Vanbrugh predicted.
Work had not yet begun on the theatre's construction by November 1703 when, following Tonson's return from Amsterdam, the Kit-Cat Club resumed its regular Thursday meetings. The Kit-cats' anti-government mood came to a head on 4 November 1703, the eve of the anniversary of King William's landing at Torbay, which the Whigs celebrated as if it were a national holiday, in pointed preference to other official celebrations at Anne's Court. A London contemporary refers to the anniversary being celebrated with illuminations and bonfires ‘in the chief streets all over town’ and ‘[A]t the Kit-cat 'twas very great. Lord Hartington [William Cavendish], Duke of Somerset etc were there. The glass sent down was to the immortal memory of King William. They had all new clothes etc.’7 Aside from the usual four-line toasts to female beauties, Vanbrugh that evening presented his witty verses ‘To A Lady More Cruel Than Fair’, but most of the conversation probably focused on matters political, not literary.
The three Kit-Cat Junto lords would all have attended this Williamite anniversary, though Somers and Wharton had been critically ill earlier that year. Wharton, thinking he was dying, had called his servants and the Whig voters of Aylesbury to his bedside, shaken their hands, then ‘recommended himself heartily to the Kit-Cat’ before falling asleep and awaking ‘out of danger’ the following day.8 The Tories also cursed Dr Garth for having cured Somers' possibly syphilitic symptoms. Halifax, much younger than his colleagues, was in sound health but still trying to recover from his political demise: the Lords had acquitted him of committing ‘breach of trust’ as Auditor in January 1703, but he remained barred from promotion in the Treasury due to Lord Godolphin's position there.9
Three weeks after this dinner, on the night of 26November, London was hit by the full-scale hurricane that became known as the Great Storm of 1703. Congreve reported that he and his friends ‘very narrowly escaped the hurricane on Friday night last’. All the trees in St James's Park were flattened, and the leads of church roofs ‘rolled up as they were before they were laid on’.10 The roofs were also stripped off the King's Bench Walk buildings of Inner Temple, ships and boats were destroyed at sea, and the roads of southern England were left impassable. The wind ripped through Congreve's bolted back door and blew his furniture and papers together into a giant heap.
The second evening of the storm coincided with a performance of Macbeth at Drury Lane, where the witches' scene needed no artificial sound effects. Jeremy Collier immediately published his interpretation of the storm's devastation as ‘the Voice of an Angry Heaven’ pronouncing on the London theatres, just as he had seized on the opportunity of the Whitehall fire five years earlier.11 John Dennis dryly replied that, if such was God's purpose, the punishment was unfairly meted out to nations as far away as the Baltic States.
This post-Storm revival of the Collier controversy soon led Queen Anne to step into her late sister Mary's shoes as leader of England's moral reformation. A fast day was decreed for 19 January 1704 to repent national indecency, a royal decree being issued that ‘no plays be acted contrary to religion and good manners, on pain of being silenced, and that no woman wear a vizard [mask] in either of the theatres’.12 The play Steele had written in Harwich, The Lying Lover, was an experiment in whether comedy could be as ‘moral’ as Collier exhorted, and was performed under this decree's restrictions. No great applause resulted, however, and Steele passed the following year amassing debts and commuting between London and his languishing regiment at Landguard.
Evading the censors, and not awaiting Vanbrugh's theatre, the Kit-Cat Club also organized a series of ten musical recitals for an exclusive subscription audience, at the Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn theatres, between November 1703 and March 1704.13 This ‘Subscription Music’, modelled on the 1670s fad for music ‘consorts’ in private houses, developed a party political colouring: ‘Music has learned the discords of the State, / And concerts jar with Whig and Tory hate.’14 Somerset and other Whigs patriotically championed a singer named Katherine Tofts, rival to a Tory-sponsored French singer named Marguerite de l'Epine. Tofts, however, complained the Whig ‘Lord Subscribers’ forced her to sing ‘Even songs that were not proper for her, which gave room to her Enemies to endeavour to lessen her Credit [reputation]’15—further evidence that the Kit-Cats were often amused by bawdy material at their private soirées. The way that the Kit-Cats moved musical performance in and out of private and public venues also indicates that this was a transitional period in the economics of cultural consumption. Subscription performances were a compromise between parties by private invitation and the more democratic approach of selling tickets to anyone who could pay. They reflected a Whig way of doing business: a semi-mercantile approach to aristocratic patronage of the arts.
On the last night of the Kit-Cat recital series, a three-act comedy ‘by several hands’ was performed ‘as a compliment made to the people of quality at their subscription music’.16 Congreve, Vanbr
ugh and William Walsh had, over the course of two mornings, collaborated to translate the Molière play Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, retitling it Squire Trelooby. Garth added a prologue. The final product, which appears never to have been published, though approximate versions survive, was staged at the old Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre. It is a rare example of an explicitly collaborative work by the Kit-cat authors.
Vanbrugh was also turning the Haymarket theatre project into far more of a communal, Kit-Cat one. First, there was a plan to raise a subscription for the theatre's completion, collected and administered by Tonson's firm during the spring of 1704. Each subscriber paid 100 guineas (each guinea worth £130–£200 today) in four instalments, and was promised free lifetime admission to ‘whatever Entertainments should be publicly performed’17 and ‘certain other privileges’.18 Of twenty-nine subscribers, thirteen were Kit-Cats. The second indication of the Kit-Cat Club's cultural as well as financial investment in the theatre was an invitation for Congreve to become Vanbrugh's partner in managing it. Vanbrugh would have argued that joining the management was the only way to extract fair profit from their literary properties, given that playwrights then held no copyright and received no payments after the original production, and Vanbrugh would also have played on Congreve's long-standing loyalty to Bracey and Betterton's Company. Congreve, who had just failed to secure another hoped-for sinecure because of the decline in his patrons' influence under Queen Anne, agreed. Spring 1704 therefore found Congreve and Vanbrugh becoming close collaborators, both on the page and in business, for the first time since the Kit-Cat Club began. It was a professional rather than ‘bosom’ friendship, however, with Congreve complaining sadly at around this time: ‘I know not how to have the few people that I love as near me as I want.’19
In April 1704, though construction was already well underway, the theatre's foundation stone was ceremonially laid by Somerset and/or by a Kit-Cat Club toast: Anne, Countess of Sunderland, Marlborough's favourite daughter who was married to a radical Whig politician named Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland. On one side of the stone was engraved ‘Little Whigg’—the Countess' nickname, in honour of her political fidelity.20 On the other side, in case there was any doubt about who was responsible for the theatre, they engraved simply ‘Kitt-Catt’.21
Addison looked down on the new theatre's building site from his bird's-eye casements with ambivalent feelings, having once told Stanyan he ‘would as soon be in a neighbouring wood as at the Opera’.22 Many Englishmen at this date took a perverse pride in their reputation as Europe's most unaffected people, and Addison disdained operatic artifice in just this way. He considered opera a decadent art form because it appealed to the senses, not to reason, yet it failed to recall the existence of God, like a scenic view or birdsong.23
A Tory satirist saw in the new theatre's humble location, on top of a stinking stable, an allegory of the self-made Whigs' impertinent social ascent, and Harley's follower Defoe attacked the venture in similar terms: ‘Apollo spoke the word / And straight arose a Playhouse from a turd.’24 Dr Garth, however, took pride in the miraculous social transformation that the building rising beside his house represented:
Your own magnificence you here survey,
Majestic columns stand where dunghills lay,
And cars triumphal rise from carts of hay.25
In one building's transformation, Garth implied, lay hope for transforming the whole English nation. The Kit-Cat Club was to be a vehicle of this transformation: raising taste from the lowest dross to loftier heights. The subscription to the Queen's Theatre was intended to be the artistic equivalent of the Royal Society's patronage of Greenwich Observatory in the 1670s—support for what was considered a weakness in the national culture: ‘the cradle and forcing-ground for the Italian opera in England’.26
The Kit-Cats did not draw attention to the fact that they were compensating for Anne's lack of patronage, at least in comparison to Louis XIV's generous patronage of French opera; they instead sought her backing for their project. In November 1704, there was a preview performance for the Queen in Vanbrugh's ‘almost finished’27 theatre on the Haymarket—effectively an application for her to approve its licence. Received by the theatre's attendants liveried in scarlet in her honour, she was conducted into the main auditorium where the ceiling had been painted with ‘Queen Anne's Patronage of the Arts’, depicting Anne surrounded by the Muses, against a skyblue, cosmic background. Chandeliers and flickering sconces lit the auditorium, reflecting in the plentiful gilt decorations on the baroque arch. Seating surrounded the orchestra pit, and eight large columns supported concentric circles of galleries. With seating for over 900, this was far larger than Mr Rich's theatres in Drury Lane or Dorset Gardens. Tonight they did not have to worry about filling it, playing for a royal audience of one.
The performance consisted of a music recital—a safe choice. The Collierites, however, were outraged at this royal visit to the Kit-Cat theatre, and even more outraged when, in December 1704, Anne issued a licence for the new theatre company, ‘reposing especial trust and confidence in Our Trusty and Well-beloved’ Vanbrugh and Congreve that they should reform ‘the Abuses and Immorality of the Stage’.28 These two playwrights, who had been in the frontline of godless dramatists attacked by Collier, were now—in the name of theatrical reformation—artistic directors of the Queen's Theatre. The licence was surprising, and scathingly satirized by those obsessed with England's moral decay. The Society for the Reformation of Manners published an open letter of protest to Archbishop Tenison, calling Congreve and Vanbrugh the worst offenders ‘in equal Abhorrence to the Church and State’.29 A mock-advertisement appeared for the ‘New Hospital in the Hay-market for the Cure of Folly’,30 and the female Tory writer Mary Astell referred to the Kit-cats as men ‘who desire to be more taken notice of’ by means of their subscriptions, criticizing the fact that they donated more to the new playhouse than to ‘the building or repair of a Church’.31The replacement of church-going by cultural consumption worried people like Astell, and for good reason.
The precise political context for these attacks, and also for a Tory poem depicting the Club's leaders as republican-atheist conspirators,32 was a religious debate then raging in Parliament. In mid-November 1704, High Church Tory MPs, the most vocal defenders of the Church of England's institutional privileges, introduced the Occasional Conformity Bill, aimed at eradicating the superficial observance of Anglicanism by which Protestant Dissenters, a crucial wing of the Whig party and a tight-knit community of rising economic power, could hold public office and enter Parliament. It was the third time the Tories had tried to introduce such a Bill, but this time they ‘tacked’ it onto another Bill for supplying the army, hoping such blackmail of the pro-war Whigs would force it through the Lords. This ‘tacking’ was defeated in the Commons, but Godolphin and Marlborough had to rely on the Junto Whigs, combined with Robert Harley's management of his supporters, to achieve this result. Once the anti-Dissenter Bill was ‘untacked’, the Junto was unable to prevent its passing through the Tory-dominated Commons in December 1704. The Kit-Cat played its part in organizing opposition to the Bill that winter, just as Oldmixon recorded that the High Church Tories were meeting at the Vine tavern on Long Acre to rally the Bill's supporters. Wharton, thanks to his upbringing as a Dissenter, spoke with particular passion against it in the Lords, while Stanhope returned from Portugal (after his regiment's capture and his own near-death from illness) in time to add his equally vehement voice. The Tory Bill failed to pass through the Lords, slain by Kit-Cat oratory and the Whigs' remaining majority in the upper house.
The Queen, High Church woman that she was, had supported the Occasional Conformity Bill at its first attempt in 1702, even though she was married to a Dissenter who himself practised occasional conformity, the Lutheran Prince George of Denmark. She had then refused to listen to the alarmism of the Whigs when it appeared for a second time (maintaining that she saw ‘nothing like persecution in this Bill’)
, but this third divisive and reckless attempt of the ‘tackers’ proved as unpopular with the Queen as it did with the public, elated with national pride by Marlborough's brilliant victories.
Anne's licensing of the Queen's Theatre therefore indicated a softening in her feelings towards the Whigs, and hence the Kit-Cat Club's projects, at the end of 1704. She was disillusioned with the behaviour of certain Tory leaders, like Sir Edward Seymour and the Earl of Jersey, who were making life difficult for her commander, Marlborough. The Junto and their Kit-Cat clients therefore dared to feel some optimism as they met that winter and planned how to bargain their way back into power sharing.
Following Marlborough's hero's welcome to English shores in December 1704, Godolphin and the Queen discussed a fitting monument for the Blenheim victory that would also serve as a personal reward. It was decided that the Treasury should fund the building of a private house near Woodstock in Oxfordshire—the building that eventually became known as Blenheim Palace. Over Christmas, Marlborough approached Vanbrugh regarding its design. His choice of an architect who was a Kit-Cat was deliberate; as the Queen and the nation showed their gratitude to Marlborough, so, by choosing Vanbrugh, Marlborough signalled his gratitude to the Junto for having defeated the tackers and pushed the army supply Bill through Parliament. The beginnings of the house acknowledged the beginning of a new alliance between the Godolphin–Marlborough duumvirate and the Junto Whigs.
Like Addison's poem celebrating the battle of Blenheim, Vanbrugh's designs for Blenheim Palace depicted Marlborough and the War of Spanish Succession in epic mode, on a par with the men and deeds of classical antiquity. As with Castle Howard, this was ideological architecture in the sense that it was a palace for a private citizen, symbolizing a shift in authority from the Crown to the relatively self-made aristocracy. It was also a monument of new nationhood, reflecting the beginnings of Britons' grander ambitions, fanned by military victory and the Junto Whigs' Protestant patriotism, to lead Europe and acquire an empire.
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