Vanbrugh was sent to Hanover not only as a herald but also to represent the best of English talent and manners, as a playwright, architect and fluent French speaker. Similarly, though Addison was officially sent as Under-Secretary of State, he was selected because he had impressed various Hanoverian courtiers, including the philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz, during his stay there just a few years earlier. If Addison and Vanbrugh had not spent much time together before, they now had weeks on the road from Amsterdam.
The trip to Hanover appears to have been open to other Kit-Cats and their friends. Congreve told Joe Keally, for example: ‘I was out of town when Lord Halifax undertook his expedition. If you had been here, and inclined to such a ramble, I should not have avoided it.’54 The presence of young Lionel, however, is what most clearly identifies the trip as a Kit-Cat junket. This was part of the Kit-Cats' campaign to mentor and flatter Lionel, hoping he would shortly prove a generous patron of the arts like his father. Prior had been the first to commence this campaign, having written to Lionel when he was only a 10-year-old schoolboy. The Kit-Cats would be disappointed, however: Lionel did not share his father's ambition to distinguish himself through patronage of the arts. Or perhaps Lionel listened to Kitling Spencer Compton, who warned him that his father had left many debts, so his son would need to live more frugally.
When they arrived at the Hanoverian frontier, the delegation paused, fearing they might be received without due ceremony if the Electoral family were indeed displeased with Anne's recent actions. Halifax sent Addison ahead to test the mood, smooth things over, and ensure the Hanoverian Court could not feign surprise at the delegation's arrival. Addison was pleased to report that he found Hanover willing to welcome them ‘in great pomp and state’.55
The delegation was greeted with a grand reception in a private house, and accorded the royal honours of trumpets and kettledrums. Addison, who described the Hanoverian Court as ‘the most Agreeable place in the world’,56 was made particularly welcome by Leibniz, who called the English delegation ‘une fort bonne compagnie‘ and arranged for Addison to sit at Sophia's table.57 Upon being introduced to Sophia, Halifax handed over Anne's letter and the Acts of Parliament with various assurances of personal and national friendship, before being honoured by a private conversation with her son the Elector (‘in very ill French’ on Halifax's part). Halifax described the future George I as ‘more easy, and familiar than I expected…but I think Him very dry’.58
The following day the delegation requested an audience with Sophia's grandson, the Electoral Prince. It was a sensitive business, they discovered, as the Prince and his father were in the middle of a family quarrel, so the Elector was pettily insisting that the ceremony to invest his son with the Garter be less elaborate than his own earlier investiture. The Prince's investiture was therefore a relatively simple affair a few days later: Halifax tied the blue ribbon onto the Prince's leg, propped up on a stool, while Vanbrugh read out the required words. This was followed by an early afternoon dinner in Sophia's apartments and, in the evening, a ball. Two days later, there was a further ceremonial presentation, and the delegation attended a thanksgiving service for Marlborough's recent victory at the battle of Ramillies.
Nothing could have reflected so well upon the English visitors as this exhilarating news of Marlborough's latest victory arriving during their sojourn in Hanover. Halifax described being awakened to hear the news in a ‘transport’ of happiness.59 The significance of the victory was that it allowed the Grand Alliance's focus to shift from Holland and the other United Provinces to the eastern fronts of the war, of more direct concern to the Hanoverians. Tories critical of England fighting such a heavy land war argued that the Whigs only financed these eastern campaigns after 1706 to serve Hanover's national interests, and so curry favour with the future royal family at the English taxpayers' expense.
Between the investiture ceremonies, the Kit-Cat tourists enjoyed the sights of Hanover, which was considered the most sophisticated of the German Courts, heavily influenced by Venetian culture. They likely viewed the frescoes in the Herrenhausen Gallery and the Italian old master paintings collected by the Electoral family. Vanbrugh would have been fascinated by the Elector's project to rebuild Herrenhausen and its gardens, and flattered by the high status that the Court favourites, Leibniz and Johann von Kielmansegg, accorded to architecture as an art form.
The Kit-Cats were invited to stay in Hanover a few days longer than planned to attend the wedding of the Elector's daughter to the Prince of Prussia. This show of favour was noted in England as a sure sign that the future monarch would favour the Junto Whigs. Their Tory opponents must have observed the whole thing, through Hanoverian spies and as relayed in the English press, with jealous despair. If a wavering Tory had not previously contemplated restoration of James II's son as his party's best hope after Anne's death, he may well have begun to do so now.
XI
UNEASY UNIONS: 1707
Blest Revolution, which creates
Divided Hearts, united States.
JONATHAN SWIFT,
Verses Said to be Written on the Union (1707)
The 1706–7 negotiations for securing a union between England and Scotland—nations which, despite a union of Crowns in 1603, maintained remarkable political and religious independence—were led, on the English side, by members of the Kit-Cat Club, in particular Lord Somers. The Junto Whigs had seen themselves as nation-builders since the heady days of constitutional change following the Glorious Revolution, as every piece of heroic verse blowing their own Whig trumpets made clear. Now they were involved in founding not a metaphorical new ‘Age’ but a literal new ‘Britain’—an achievement of statecraft that was, for once, every bit as momentous as they boasted.
Since 1688, the Scots and English had done little but antagonize one another—King William thoroughly alienated the Scottish political class for the sake of his Continental wars, and tensions arose between the two peoples as England became one of the wealthiest European nations and its northern neighbour one of the poorest. An unusual alliance of anti-Union opinion formed between English merchants and High Church Tories: the merchants feared losing trading privileges and monopolies, while the Tories opposed further negotiations with the Presbyterian Scottish Establishment.
William's dying wish, however, echoed in Anne's maiden speech in 1702, had been for legislative union to succeed dynastic union between England and Scotland. Godolphin, Marlborough and what might be called the Whig war party (the Junto, Kit-Cats and their other followers) had persuaded Anne that this was necessary in order to strengthen the British Isles against Louis XIV and prevent the Scottish Crown being grabbed by her half-brother, The Pretender. Scotland and Ireland were seen as England's half-open back doors, in need of bolting against Jacobites and Catholics. The war with France also required troops and funds from Scotland, and centralization of government through legislative union would allow these to be secured more reliably and efficiently. The Junto, however, waited until their post-1704 political comeback to really push the unionist agenda. They needed to ensure their domination of the negotiating Commission so that the deals done would go in their own party's favour. They were also alarmed into action by the Scots passing the Act of Security in August 1703, which insisted upon Scotland's right to select its own monarch, separate from England.
By 1706, alternating strategies of carrot and stick had brought the Scots to the negotiating table. On 10 April 1706, while the Westminster Parliament was prorogued, thirty-one Commissioners were named by the Court, of which nine were Kit-Cats and a larger number were friends or kinsmen of the Kit-Cats. Congreve remarked to a friend on the similarity between merger negotiations then underway between the Queen's Theatre and Drury Lane and those his patrons were conducting at the national level: ‘Have heard there is to be a Union of the two [play]houses, as well as Kingdoms.’1
Six days later, on 16 April, the Commissioners held their first meeting in Addison's Whitehall offices, ‘
The Cockpit’, with the English Commissioners in one room and the Scottish Commissioners in another. Halifax, though a Commissioner, had just departed for Hanover, where he could represent the Junto as being the key promoters of an Act guaranteeing the Hanoverians a further Crown.2 Somers told Lord Marchmont, former Lord Chancellor of Scotland, of his conviction that union was needed to secure Protestant domination and thus the liberties of both peoples: ‘[I]f we do not now become better friends than ever, we shall soon be less so.’3
The negotiations proceeded through written papers passed between the two Cockpit rooms, rather than face-to-face debate. Cash and personal promises also passed between the two sets of men. The negotiations of 1706 have been described as ‘not far removed from a conspiracy’,4 with certain Scottish peers and lairds seeking rewards of money, pensions and titles, while offering such bribes in turn for their followers' votes. However, it is too simplistic to attribute the successful negotiations solely to venality and corruption; the £20,000 (over £2.5 million today) secretly paid to various Scots was too small an amount to be decisive. Most of the payments were merely confirmation of alliances between the Junto and the so-called ‘Squadrone’ of Scottish Whig magnates. More significant were various Scots' hopes to have a stake in ‘The Equivalent’—£398,000 (or nearly £52 million in today's money), which England would pay to Scotland upon union, as compensation to creditors of the former Scottish government.
In mid-August 1706, the Kit-Cat delegation to Hanover sailed home from The Hague with the East India Company's fleet, and Somers expressed his relief at having Halifax back to help handle the more delicate points of the negotiations. September saw the leader of the Scottish parliamentary opposition to union, the Duke of Hamilton, undercut his own side and so leave the way open for passing the articles of the Act of Union in the Scottish Parliament.
The Scottish people were less easily convinced. When the articles were made public, numerous addresses to the Queen begged for a new general election, and there were riots in Edinburgh, Glasgow and the southwest lowlands. On 3 September 1706, Addison told Stepney in The Hague (where, in reward for his long hard years of diplomacy in Vienna, Stepney was now Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the States General of the United Provinces, effectively administering the captured Spanish Netherlands): ‘The Union at present takes up all public discourse, and 'tis thought will certainly be concluded at last, notwithstanding the late popular commotions.’5 Stepney was asked to investigate whether any European power was funding intrigues or riots to prevent the union, and reported back that he thought only the French would bother with this. To his overseas correspondents, Addison passed on the complacent reassurance of his Junto bosses that ‘not only the Parliament, but throughout the kingdom, the majority is for the Union’.6 In fact, a pro-union Scottish Whig historian only twenty years later admitted that ‘not even one per cent’ of his fellow Scots supported the Act while it was being negotiated.7
To obtain the Scottish clergy's support for the union, the Junto Whigs ensured that an Act guaranteeing the Presbyterian Establishment was appended to the Act of Union—a concession from the English that was decisively influenced by the ‘Dissenters’ Friend', Lord Wharton. Wharton's key role was recognized the following month when the Queen created him Viscount Winchendon and Earl of Wharton. One address thanked him for single-handedly preventing the European war from being played out on Scottish soil.8
In December 1706, Marlborough's son-in-law Sunderland was appointed Secretary of State for the South, with the support of Somers and Halifax, who also ensured Addison did not lose his place as Under-Secretary in the change. Sunderland's appointment was celebrated not so much for its own sake as for being an augur of future Junto promotions. What Addison and his patrons failed to appreciate, however, was the depth of Anne's resentment at being forced to appoint Sunderland, a radical Whig, against her personal wishes.
After Sunderland's appointment, the Junto's interest in pushing forward the union seemed to wane. Some have interpreted this as evidence that they were less interested in union per se than in the leverage the union negotiations gave them over Godolphin's ministry.9 Junto policy, however, did not essentially change: they still pursued union, though nervous that Godolphin might try to use the distribution of seats in the unified Houses of Parliament to undercut the Whigs' voting block. The Scots were understandably confused about how closely the ministry and the Junto were really working together.10
Such internal divisions in England were the only hope of the few Scottish politicians who, reflecting the ordinary people's mood, continued to oppose union: ‘The Scots that can't hinder the passing of the Articles retard it as much as they can in hopes perhaps that Our English Parliament may by any unseasonable Heats or Reflections give them a Handle to break the whole Project,’ wrote Addison to an English diplomat in Hanover.11 Such Scottish opponents resented that the Treaty was being foisted upon them, though the truth—as between friends where one is much wealthier or more powerful than another—was more complicated.
The union negotiations preoccupied the Junto so thoroughly during the spring of 1707 that the Kit-Cat Club's meetings were temporarily neglected. Addison explained to one petitioner that Halifax was ‘so much taken up about the Scotch Union and other public Business that it has been difficult to find an Opportunity of speaking with him’ on matters of private patronage.12 Addison was kept busy implementing his patrons' policies: by the end of 1706, a number of Scottish ‘Incendiaries’ protesting against the union had been arrested on Addison's orders, and he said he believed ‘the Union will quickly be finished on the Scotch side’.13 This optimism was justified. The Scottish Parliament passed all the union articles by January 1707, thanks to a combination of persuasion, bribery (cash and peerages) and compromise. In Westminster, the Commons Committee of the Whole House then met under Kitling Spencer Compton's chairmanship and followed suit within six weeks, passing the Bill almost without debate. On hearing the news, Addison exhaled: ‘God be thanked.’14
A few weeks later, in March 1707, Addison was feeling tense for another reason: he had written the libretto of an opera, Rosamund, about Henry II's lover Rosamund Clifford, and it was to have its opening night at the Drury Lane theatre. Addison had altered the ending of Rosamund's true story to a falsely happy one: the reunion of Henry II and his murderous wife Eleanor. This was intended to make the opera an allegory for the Treaty of Union, with Eleanor representing the Jacobites of Scotland coming to be tamed. The Kit-cat Club's long-held agenda of reforming English culture—particularly literature and music—was now, in theory at least, for the benefit of an expanded club of all Britons.
Addison's opinions about opera had been refined by the Kit-Cat Club's influence. He was now convinced that a new style of opera was needed in the new Britain, stripped of Continental absurdities and reflecting what he saw as the English national character. His authorship of a ‘native’ opera on a very English historical theme and written in the English language was a direct response to the Kit-Cat Club's nationalistic agenda for the arts—an agenda shared, admittedly, by a handful of prominent non-Kit-Cat Whig critics, and by other authors who had tried to write ‘dialogue-operas’ for ‘the Right Noble, Honourable and Ingenious Patrons of Poetry, Music, &c The Celebrated Society of the Kit-Cat Club’.15 Steele reported that there were ‘People of Quality’ now funding operas by subscribing ‘some thousands of Pounds’, and, in response, ‘our English poets have not been behindhand with our English Heroes in reducing the French Wit to as low a state as their Arms’.16 No statement could better express the Kit-Cat Club's image of itself as conducting a cultural campaign to parallel Marlborough's military campaigns. It was a type of battle Addison was willing to fight at his patrons' command: hence Rosamund.
The opera's subject allowed Addison to flatter the all-powerful Marlboroughs, since Rosamund Clifford's legendary bower was located on the grounds of Woodstock Park in Oxfordshire, where Vanbrugh was building Blenheim. Ten days before
leaving for Hanover, therefore, Addison presented a draft of the libretto to the Duchess of Marlborough—the Duke having returned to the Continental battlefields after a winter spent socializing, thanks to his Whig wife, with the likes of Halifax, Wharton, Garth and Maynwaring.17
On the trip to Hanover, Addison, Vanbrugh, Halifax and Lionel, all of whom shared a keen interest in opera, must have debated the art form's merits, problems and future in England. If Vanbrugh did not originally suggest to Addison Rosamund's patriotic story before they went to Hanover together, he certainly seems to have influenced the opera's eventual staging: a picture of Blenheim Palace, as it would look when completed, was painted on the pasteboard stage-set. It would have been the first time the audience had seen Vanbrugh's vision for the house, and there was a nice circularity to the gesture, since stage-set design had so influenced Vanbrugh's approach to architectural and landscape design. The allegorical link between the historical past and the yet-to-be-built future, the new nation born in 1707, was reflected in Addison's lyrics which described contemporary greatness bursting forth from the ruins of former greatness: ‘Behold the glorious pile ascending! / Columns swelling, arches bending.’ Vanbrugh also had an ulterior, more provocative motive in suggesting this set that he probably did not disclose to Addison: by reminding the public of the historical significance of Woodstock's ruins, Vanbrugh hoped to stop the Duchess of Marlborough from demolishing them as he already knew she planned to do.
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