Steele paid equally fulsome compliments to Lord Somers, whom he said had ascended to the heights of power purely through ‘a certain Dignity in Yourself, that (to say the least of it) has been always equal to those great Honours which have been conferred upon You’.17 Steele emphasized not Somers' public achievements in this dedication but the charms of the private man known only to those who ‘are admitted into your Conversation’.18 This phrase beams with Steele's selfsatisfaction at his own admission to Somers' inner circle, the Kit-Cat circle, by the time of writing.
Joining the Kit-Cat Club meant a great deal to Steele, not only in terms of social status and expectation of patronage, but also in terms of his sense of himself as a cultured, cosmopolitan gentleman. Steele once described himself as a ‘Stranger upon Earth’, a mere ‘Looker-on’ compared to Lord Halifax.19 Though Steele never entirely lost that outsider's perspective, the promise of the Club was that it treated its members as equals in conversation—as men who each belonged. He contrasted its atmosphere and motives with those of Tory hospitality:
A vainglorious [Tory] fox-hunter shall entertain half the county for the ostentation of his beef and beer, without the least affection for any of the crowd about him. He feeds them, because he thinks it a superiority over them that he does so, and they devour him, because they know he treats them out of insolence.20
Whig lords, Steele implied, lived in the same style but a different spirit. Fed on Kit-Cat pies and wine by his social superiors, Steele flattered himself he was being fed with ‘affection’.
Steele's and Addison's admissions introduced a more guilty attitude towards the Club's nocturnal bacchanalia. Although Addison had left Magdalen recognizing there was life beyond the cloister, he remained a fundamentally pious man, with a more melancholic personality than friends like Congreve, Vanbrugh, Prior or Stepney. The need for faith, he wrote, ‘must be very evident to those who consider how few are the present Enjoyments of the most happy Man’.21 Addison knew that a virtue of the English character was to consider excessive religious feeling unfashionable, but he concluded that religious hypocrisy was less dangerous than ‘open Impiety’,22 and thought that was exactly what the other Kit-Cats verged on. Tonson once remarked that Addison, ‘ever thought him[self] a priest in his heart’.23
There is an anecdote about Addison and Steele unwisely inviting Benjamin Hoadly, the Latitudinarian Bishop of Bangor, to be an honorary guest at a Whig ‘club meeting’ to celebrate the November anniversary of King William's landing in England. Another Club member entered the tavern room on his knees and in that posture toasted William's immortal memory with a tankard of ale. Watching this slapstick, Steele leaned over to the Bishop and whispered: ‘Do laugh. 'Tis humanity to laugh.’ This touching story of Steele protecting his wit-challenged friend has a less edifying conclusion: Steele proceeded to get so drunk he had to be carried home and put to bed by his friends. The next morning, he sent an apology to Hoadly for his disgraceful behaviour.24
In his writing, Steele condemned excessive drinking because it stopped a man being ‘master of himself ‘—a resonant phrase for Steele, who craved independence from his superiors above all else.25 Steele also observed that drink could start by making men into warmer friends, but ended by removing the capacity for empathy:
You may indeed observe in People of Pleasure a certain Complacency and Absence of all Severity, which the Habit of a loose and unconcerned Life gives them; but tell the Man of Pleasure your secret Wants, Cares, or Sorrows, and you will find that he has given up the Delicacy of his Passions to the Craving of his Appetites.26
Steele regarded Dorset, in particular, as a man whose ‘shining Qualities’ made self-destructive living (‘drinking till they cannot taste, smoking till they cannot see, and roaring till they cannot hear’) misleadingly attractive.27 He and Addison may have been as fond of drink as Dorset, Tidcomb or the other earlier Kit-Cats, but they were both men who regretted their drunkenness and apologized to bishops in the morning.
This attitude seems to have spread from the new admissions to the older members of the Club. Congreve, who when younger had only disapproved of drunkenness if you spat or ‘bepiss[ed] yourself’, advised a friend in 1706 that ‘[n]othing but an absolute and continued regularity’ could counteract past years of excess.28 He still loved his wine, and his ‘usquebaugh’ (an Irish whiskey), but he no longer treated heavy drinking as a macho competition or a requirement for poetic wit.
Soon after Congreve's appointment to the Commission for licensing wine, arranged by Halifax,29 Congreve—whom a fellow Kit-Cat described as having ‘no head for business’30—bought himself out of Betterton's company and so quit ‘the affair of the Hay-market’, saying he had ‘got nothing by it’ and leaving Vanbrugh to deal with the failing theatrical enterprise alone.31 It could not have been worse timing. In June 1705, Vanbrugh received the warrant to build Blenheim Palace and had to devote most of his time to that property (which Congreve's lover Henrietta stood in line to inherit since Marlborough had no living sons). Congreve's resignation may also have been the cause of a rift between Congreve and Tonson, which we know about thanks to a poem written on the later occasion of their reconciliation.32
Steele was fortunately on hand to help Vanbrugh pick up the pieces at the Queen's Theatre. In Congreve's place, for example, Steele composed a prologue for The Mistake, a play hurriedly translated from French by Vanbrugh for performance in December 1705. Vanbrugh knew, however, that though Steele shared his own entrepreneurial and soldierly energy, Steele had a sorry record in business. Steele was not asked to replace Congreve as a company investor or manager.
June 1705 also saw the election go decisively in the Junto Whigs' favour, though they failed to gain an outright majority. The Queen's recent indulgence of the Whigs, combined with the public's disgust at the tackers' tactics, had hurt the Tory vote. One young Whig MP who had played a key role in defeating the tackers was Robert Walpole, later to become Britain's first Prime Minister. Descended from a long line of Norfolk gentry and married to the daughter of a prominent London merchant, Walpole typified his party's alliance between county and City. Walpole's first patron, the Earl of Orford (a title Walpole would one day acquire himself), likely introduced Walpole to the other Junto members, whom Walpole quickly charmed. A fellow MP described the young Walpole as having ‘the most friendly nature I have known’33 and another contemporary referred to him as ‘always…laughing and talking’.34
Stanhope, on the instructions of Halifax, had invited Walpole to lead the Junto Whig MPs in October 1703, the Junto having realized that they needed a new manager in the lower house.35 Walpole effectively accepted this responsibility, and also joined the Kit-Cat Club at around the same time as Addison. Unlike Addison, he loved nothing more than hosting lavish meals for his Club friends—Walpole's personal accounts from later years show he spent over £1,000 a year (or nearly £150,000 today) on food.36 He used the position he received on the Admiralty Council, as thanks for his Commons campaign against the tackers, to smuggle wine from Holland on navy vessels, which the Kit-Cat Club must then have enjoyed, and, in expectation of this appointment, Walpole moved his wife to a grand townhouse on Dover Street where he held a housewarming feast and ball to which every Kit-Cat would have been invited. Walpole's giddy younger sister, Dolly, came to London for the ball where her flirtation with the 56-year-old, married Wharton led to a minor scandal.37 Walpole's ostentatious hospitality was competitive—trying to outdo others in the aristocracy—but also his way of blocking out the nagging worry of debt during years when the tenant farmers on his lands were unable to pay their rents.
After Christmas 1704, the tacking debate gave rise to a grouping of MPs, led by Walpole and Stanhope, who were sometimes known as the ‘Kitlings’.38 The others in this grouping were Spencer Compton, Jack Smith (though much older than the others), William Pulteney, and Walpole's former schoolmate, Charles, 2nd Viscount Townshend. Townshend was the only non-Kit-Cat in the group, either by choice or
because he lacked the necessary charms (his diction was described as ‘inelegant…frequently ungrammatical, always vulgar; his cadences false, his voice unharmonious’39).
Most of the Kitlings' extended families—the Walpoles, Stanhopes and Comptons—were divided by party, showing that ideology was increasingly trumping kinship when it came to determining men's loyalties. Some were even leaving their estates to political friends rather than relations: when Stanhope's ‘bosom friend’, the Whig Earl of Huntingdon, died in February 1705, for example, he bequeathed Stanhope £400 per annum (over £56,000 today) to ‘defend the liberty and laws of his country, and the rights of the people’.40 In April 1705, Stanhope was promoted to Brigadier-General and in May returned to Spain to drive forward the Allied campaign to place the Austrian Archduke Charles on the Spanish throne.
Spencer Compton, in his early thirties like Stanhope and Walpole, may already have been a Kit-Cat for several years by the time Walpole joined the Club. Compton's sister was married to Lord Dorset, so he first became acquainted with Tonson and all three of Lord Dorset's Boys in the 1690s.41 Compton was not the sharpest pin in the box, explaining why the Kit-Cats did not ask him to lead the Kitlings in the Commons, but his natural hauteur carried him far enough.
In the summer of 1705, Jack Smith was elected Speaker in the Commons—clear confirmation that the election results had favoured the Whigs. Somers had written to Whig peers telling them to ensure their ‘friends’ were all present in the Commons to vote for Smith.42
It was a close contest, Smith finally winning by forty-three votes, and the Kit-Cat Club met to toast the victory that same evening. Smith was perceived as a relatively moderate Whig, not one whom, as Godolphin put it, ‘nothing would satisfy but wresting the administration out of the Queen's hands’.43 After becoming Speaker, Smith was seen as the creature of the Marlborough–Godolphin duumvirate, but where the duumvirate differed from the Junto, he still voted with his Kit-Cat friends. One Tory satirist criticized Smith as ‘a State hermaphrodite—an ambidexter. Jacob Tonson, with his two left legs, makes not such an awkward figure as he does.’44
The final member of Walpole's clique of Kitlings was Pulteney. At 21 in 1705, Pulteney returned from his Grand Tour, won a seat in the Commons, which he held until 1734, and also a seat in the Kit-cat Club. As a boy, Pulteney had inherited an enormous fortune and gained a reputation as a talented classicist. Congreve, perhaps seeking a malleable patron, was said to have consulted Pulteney on a draft of The Way of the World while Pulteney was still in his teens.
Addison was another who flourished thanks to Kit-Cat patronage after the 1705 election. Rather than being rewarded like Congreve with a mere sinecure, Addison was given a government office of substance. In July 1705, he was appointed Under-Secretary to Sir Charles Hedges, Secretary of State for the South. Though Hedges was a Court Tory and not a Kit-Cat, Addison obtained this important position primarily through the influence of Somers and Halifax. An Under-Secretary was paid about £400 a year (over £56,000 today), but the job was also worth at least £550 (over £77,000 today) in commissions on fees charged. For this salary, Addison worked long hours in his Whitehall office, managing news and diplomatic business from all the relevant countries; his letters to friends after the summer of 1705 constantly apologize for his lack of time. Luckily, several Kit-Cat friends were among Addison's diplomatic correspondents. He briefed Stepney in Vienna on war news from Spain and Portugal, and on the rise of Walpole's Kitling clique. Stanyan, meanwhile, was appointed Envoy Extraordinary to the Cantons of Switzerland in May 1705, charged with increasing the Swiss contribution to the Grand Alliance.
In November 1705, the faltering Tories misstepped badly. The Tory Lord Haversham suggested England invite Electress Sophia of Hanover to reside in England, so ensuring a smooth succession. Anne took offence at this proposal, believing it implied she was about to die or go mad; it reminded her of her son's early death, which had left the country without a nearer heir to the throne. Wharton set up the Whig attack on Haversham's motion in a speech dripping with irony about the Tories' sudden concern for a Protestant succession. Somers came up with an alternative proposal, more to the Queen's liking, for a regency council to govern temporarily in the event of Anne's incapacity or death, until the Hanoverians arrived on English soil. Wharton promoted and Somers drew up this vital piece of constitutional legislation (the Regency Bill), which passed through Parliament in February 1706, ending the ‘invitation crisis’.45 Wharton wrote to the future George I, explaining the new arrangements.
In December 1705, the Tories took yet another self-defeating step when they claimed the Church of England was ‘in danger’ because of Junto influence on Godolphin's ministry.46 The pious Queen again took personally the suggestion that her reign might be endangering the Established Church, and enjoyed watching the Junto gleefully argue down the motion. Halifax declared that the only time the Church was in danger was before 1688, when ‘those Patriots that stood up in [the Church's] Defence and endeavoured to prevent the Evils which might ensue from a Popish successor, were discountenanced and punished’.47 Somers summarized the Whig case by saying that the ‘danger’ was a bogey, recklessly raised by the Tories to destabilize the country in time of war. The Whigs easily won the vote, and profited enormously from the chance to present themselves as defenders of Church and Queen.
The parliamentary session of 1705–6 saw other significant common law and equity reforms, spearheaded by Somers. The Junto was back pulling the strings of power, which were knotted together at the Kit-Cat Club. Walpole's arrival brought a new energy to the Whigs in the Commons, but also a more narrowly political focus to a Club that had previously been as much, if not more, about literary and musical patronage. The Kit-Cat now became a Whig party inner sanctum—the place for policy to be debated on a Thursday evening before Anne's Council met after dinner on a Sunday.
As if symbolically marking the Club's shift of emphasis and atmosphere, Lord Dorset, who had kept the Restoration's spirit so long alive in the Club, died on 29 January 1706. Dorset had been infirm for some time—in 1700, he was rumoured to have finished himself off with a case-knife and had to ‘make his appearance in all the coffee houses to convince the world of the contrary’.48 Dorset had participated in Anne's coronation but after 1702 played little role in public affairs. Before his death, he lived at the spa in Bath, growing fat and, according to Swift, dull-witted in his dotage. Congreve disagreed. Visiting Dorset while he was dying, Congreve reported: ‘Faith, he slabbers more wit dying than other people do in their best health.’49 In October 1704, Dorset had outraged his family by marrying his housekeeper, Anne Roche, who was automatically assumed to be a gold-digger. An anti-Whig satire included Dorset falling asleep at a Kit-Cat Club meeting and rousing himself only to raise a toast to Roche. Another acquaintance saw the marriage as proof Dorset, in his early sixties, had ‘entirely lost his senses’50 (men were traditionally believed to lose their reason at the age of 63, their ‘great climacteric’). Dorset's family complained that Roche had ‘held him in a Sort of Captivity down at Bath’ until he married her and changed his will.51 Prior, who understood about loving women who were not ‘ladies’, took a more sympathetic view,52 and Addison later wrote essays about a superannuated Restoration rake who bore more than a passing resemblance to Dorset and who chose as his wife ‘an obscure young Woman, who doth not indeed pretend to an ancient Family, but has certainly as many Forefathers as any Lady in the Land, if she could but reckon up their names’.53
News of Dorset's death reached London on 30 January 1706, the anniversary of Charles I's execution and therefore a day on which Tory preachers went into zealous overdrive denouncing the Whigs from their pulpits as closet republicans. When the Kit-Cat Club met the following night, and feasted heartily to compensate for the national fast the day before, they surely would have drunk to Dorset's memory. Richard Boyle, 2nd Viscount Shannon, who had become Dorset's son-in-law in June 1704 by marrying Dorset's illegitimate daughter Mar
y, was likely among the Kit-Cat toasters. With Stepney abroad and Prior expelled, Halifax was the only former Lord Dorset's Boy there to raise a glass to the Maecenas of the 1690s and founding father of the Kit-Cat Club. Halifax was appointed one of the guardians of Dorset's 18-year-old son Lionel, now the 7th Earl of Dorset (referred to hereafter as ‘Lionel’ to avoid confusion), and Lionel was soon admitted to the Club in honour of his father.
Halifax was to take Lionel on an important Kit-Cat journey to the northwest German state of Hanover later that spring. Together with Addison, the two men were in Amsterdam in May 1706, awaiting the arrival of the fourth Kit-Cat in their party: Vanbrugh. They passed the time by attending a synagogue service of the Portuguese Jewish community, to hear prayers for the success of the forthcoming campaign against France—a gesture to compliment a community helping bankroll the war that no Tory delegation would have made. Halifax also familiarized himself with the Dutch leaders and generals Marlborough was constantly placating to keep the Grand Alliance united.
Officially, their mission was to invest the 23-year-old Electoral Prince of Hanover (the future George II of England, grandson to the then heir to the throne, Sophia) with the Order of the Garter, and to deliver the Regency Act and deeds of English naturalization to the Electoral family. Unofficially, the delegation's goal was to strengthen relations between the Whigs and the Hanoverians. Experience under William had taught the Junto that the Germans would bring various favourites and advisers into English politics; its members wanted to know what lay in store. Queen Anne had ordered the mission to demonstrate her commitment to the Protestant succession and to heal any offence caused by her refusal, during Haversham's ‘invitation crisis’, to let the Electress move to England.
As the herald appointed to perform the investiture, Vanbrugh was the most essential member of the delegation, but he had delayed his departure by a month, as it was an extremely inconvenient time for him to leave England. Blenheim's walls were just rising, and the central block of Castle Howard was nearing completion. Between these two sites, and managing the struggling Queen's Theatre, Vanbrugh's hands were full, but he could not refuse the Queen's command. He arrived in Amsterdam in mid-May 1706, together with a more junior herald and a vast load of heraldic ceremonial gear.
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