Rosamund's performance at Drury Lane, rather than the Queen's Theatre, has obscured its distinctly Kit-Cat roots, but the reason Addison took it to the rival company was simple: a deal had been struck at the start of the season whereby the Queen's would perform only plays, while Drury Lane (and Dorset Garden) would perform only operas. Congreve, hearing of this deal, thought the ‘houses are misapplied’—meaning that the monopolies should have been granted in reverse, to suit their acoustics.18
Rosamund opened on 4 March 1707. The omens must have looked good to its author, as he stepped past the shoeshine boy and the barber who camped, to serve theatregoers, in the doorway of Drury Lane's neighbouring Rose tavern. By the time Addison came out of the theatre, however, he knew his carefully calculated effort to establish an English style of opera (and to compliment his boss Sunderland's famous in-laws, the Marlboroughs) had failed dismally. Rosamund ran for only three nights—just long enough for Addison to receive his takings.
Thomas Clayton's inharmonious score (‘a confused Chaos of Music’19) was largely to blame, though the music had been previewed to a select audience and passed the ‘Opinion of the Best Judges’, for which read Kit-Cats.20 Yet Addison took Rosamund's failure to heart: it was the first major failure of his creative life, and seems to have piqued into definite antipathy his ambivalence about traditional Italian opera. Addison was soon complaining in a prologue to a friend's play that Italian opera, which was doing well with London audiences only a few years later, left one ‘from the full fatigue of thinking free’. He objected that ‘Our homespun authors must forsake the field / And Shakespeare to the soft Scarlatti [Alessandro Scarlatti, opera composer] yield.’21
Two months later, bottles of French wine posing as port were undoubtedly uncorked when the Kit-Cat gathered to celebrate the Treaty of Union as it came into force on Thursday, 1 May 1707. It was a day of national celebration for the new ‘United Kingdom’, the bells of St Paul's ringing out over London. Although the union had been as much a policy of self-interest as ‘affection’, the Kit-Cats retrospectively celebrated it as a visionary act on their part, just as they had retrospectively recast the Revolution of 1688 as ‘Glorious’ and high-principled. The ambivalent English feelings about union in 1707 have been compared to ambivalence surrounding German reunification in 1989, with even less populist pride since no restoration of a previous national entity was involved.22 The Scots were even more sceptical—the immediate impact on them was a range of new taxes, the longer-term benefits of sharing a slice of England's global trade and colonial profits being not yet obvious. There was pride, however, in achieving the merger of two independent sovereign nations without bloodshed. The Whig leadership rejoiced in the solid fiscal and military national unit they had managed to create in the midst of a pan-European war against a much larger and more centralized enemy. Stepney sent congratulations from The Hague to his Kit-cat friends in London.
This May Day of the new Britain's birth was also Addison's thirty-fifth birthday. It was also the day Steele officially assumed a prestigious new job as editor of the government mouthpiece, The Gazette. Steele owed this new post at least in part to Addison, since it had been in the gift of Addison's boss Sunderland. At the same time as Steele was given the editorial responsibility, Tonson's firm received the printing rights—a lucrative contract.
Steele's Kit-Cat membership had paid its first dividends the previous summer, in August 1706, when, through Halifax's influence, Steele was appointed to be a Gentleman-Waiter to Anne's husband George—a fly-on-the-wall place useful to the Junto's efforts to read the Queen's moods on a daily basis. More importantly for Steele, it was worth £100 a year (nearly £14,000 today) tax free, which he sorely needed, as two creditors had brought legal actions against him that year. When his Barbados heiress wife had died in December 1706, the short-term result was to worsen Steele's problems, as his debts were called in before he had cash in hand.
The post of gazetteer was previously a sinecure worth only some £60 a year and The Gazette was just a sheet reporting basic international news. With Steele's appointment, editing The Gazette became a nearly full-time job, the salary raised to £300 (almost £42,000), and the paper included more editorial analysis. The paper's content came to Steele through the two Secretaries of State, and Steele worked in Sunderland's Cockpit office, under Addison's daily supervision. Addison and his counterpart in the Northern Office, Thomas Hopkins (later to become a Kit-Cat too), received news from commanders and envoys, which they passed to Steele, who digested it for publication three times a week. Though Steele claimed he tried to keep The Gazette ‘very innocent and very insipid’,23 the conduct of the war was becoming an increasingly partisan issue, requiring Steele to sift ‘bloody News from Flanders’24 through a pro-Junto, prowar filter.
Addison and Steele not only worked as colleagues in the same government department, but also shared Addison's St James's lodgings that summer of 1707. In later essays, each man described the pleasure of waking early in central London, to the first rumble of hackney coach wheels and the sing-song cries of street vendors selling powdered brick, ‘small-coal’ or milk carried warm from the dairies just beyond St James's.25 There were also criers selling Steele's Gazette, but Addison wryly suggested they could afford to sell it a little less energetically: ‘Our News should indeed be Published in a very quick time, because it is a Commodity that will not keep cold. It should not however be cried with the same Precipitation as Fire.’26
August found each man in the middle of a courtship: Addison was visiting the Countess of Warwick and her son at Holland House, while Steele was falling head over heels in love with 29-year-old Mary Scurlock, a Welsh woman who had inherited money from her late father and was now living alone with her mother on Swallow Street, just off Piccadilly. It has been suggested Steele met Mary at his first wife's funeral in December 1706, though Steele's first surviving letter of courtship dates from 9 August 1707.
Dressing to impress Mary on 15 August, Steele would have ‘shifted himself’ into one of his finer outfits. This included his neckcloth or ‘band’, worn starched like a cleric's at this date, a hat from his haberdasher John Sly, and a topcoat that might have cost as much as £80. Steele always spent lavishly on his appearance, even when, as in 1707, he was indebted to several friends. He said it was ‘a comfort to [be] well dressed in agreeable company.’27 Steele therefore never ‘rode out’ without a black, full-bottomed, high-crowned, dress periwig of the most expensive kind, which he hoped made his face appear less stubby.28 Such a periwig, made of hair shaved and sold by the poor, had to be kept fresh with frequent perfuming. Addison referred to the ‘Caul of a Wig, which is soiled with frequent Perspirations’29—especially, one imagines, when a squat, olive-skinned Irishman, with ‘a shape like the picture of somebody over a farmer's chimney’ and no private fortune, was presenting himself as a suitor.30 On the way to Swallow Street, Steele likely stopped to be shaved at his barber, where he ran up annual bills as high as £50.
By contrast, Steele would have preferred if the object of his affections spent little on fashion and cosmetics, finding true beauty, he claimed, in the animation of a face and the embellishments of mind, manners and virtue. By Steele's account, Mary was naturally handsome, her inheritance being the only further adornment she needed. Despite her advanced age of 29, therefore, Steele was not Mary's only suitor that summer.
Flattering Mary's dislike of flattery, Steele wrote: ‘I shall affect plainness and sincerity in my discourse to you, as much as other lovers do perplexity and rapture. Instead of saying I shall die for you, I profess I should be glad to lead my life with you.’31
Yet when Steele first called on Mary, and she was too busy to see him, he scribbled a fairly ‘rapturous’ love note while standing under the amused eyes of her servants in her hallway, saying he would return the following morning. The next day, he was admitted to sit with her, and the meeting must have gone well, as the following day Mary quickly wrote to her absent mother, aski
ng permission to marry him. Mary argued the writer's intellect made up for his lack of estate and title, and said she intended not to have any ‘public doings’ but to marry privately, as was then common.32
Mary may not have told Steele her mind was so quickly made up, since she received numerous billets-doux from him throughout August 1707. In some cases, Steele wrote them in the office, while working on The Gazette, complaining his daydreams distracted him from his business. There is a sincerity to these little letters that suggests Steele was erotically and romantically excited at the prospect of this second marriage: ‘The Day hangs heavily upon me and the whole business of it is an impertinent Guilty Dream in comparison [to] the happiness of a few moments of real Life at your House’,33 or, ‘I Lay down last night with your Image in my thoughts and have awaked this morning in the same contemplation.’34 Most tellingly, for an ambitious young writer and Kit-Cat: ‘All books are blank paper, and my Friends intruders.’35
Mary's side of the correspondence is almost entirely lost, and at the start there may not have been much of it, with Steele making the running. He called upon Mary regularly, at a set hour. On 30 August, Steele explained: ‘I am forced to write from a Coffee house where I am attending about business. There is a dirty Crowd of Busy faces all around me talking of politics and managing stocks, while all my Ambition, all my wealth is Love!’36 The next afternoon, after church, was again spent hanging around the St James's Coffee House, where Steele laughed at how he was distracted by desire: ‘A Gentleman asked Me this Morning what news from Lisbon, and I answered, She's Exquisitely handsome.’37 If such flattery was even partly true, it was a serious disability for the editor of The Gazette. ‘[A]ll that speak to me find me out, and I must lock myself up, or other People will do it for me.’38
On 3 September 1707, Steele laid out his financial situation in a letter to Mary's mother, stating he was comfortably off thanks to his first wife's legacy, with an annual income after deductions of £1,025 (over £133,000 today). More importantly, Steele said his ‘Friends are in great power’, meaning he and a future wife would have to keep up certain appearances ‘that I may prosecute my Expectations in a busy Way while the Wind is for Me, with a Just consideration that, about a Court, it will not always blow one Way’.39
Steele seems to have persuaded Mary to marry him without awaiting her mother's approval, as the wedding is registered at the church of St Mary Somerset on Old Fish Street Hill, on 9 September 1707. The weekend before, Steele sat imagining, in a daydream full of erotic charge, how Mary's lips would move to shape the words of her wedding vows.
Steele's friends seem to have known nothing of the marriage at first. Even Vanbrugh, with whom Steele worked at the Queen's Theatre, wrote that same day to Lord Manchester without mentioning Steele's nuptials—a type of gossip Vanbrugh was normally quick to pass on. Because of this secrecy, Steele's wedding day did not go well. The new Mrs Steele insisted on returning to her mother's house that evening to maintain appearances, even though her sickly mother was still out of town and Steele had Addison's lodgings to himself that night. The frustrated groom exploded in anger, before returning alone to his rooms. Almost immediately afterwards, Steele sent a repentant letter, trying to erase the frightening impression his sudden ‘ill-nature’ must have made. A few stanzas of poetry in Mary's hand suggest she was filled with sudden doubts, now they were married, about the sincerity of her husband's previous abject declarations.
Mr and Mrs Steele had not yet started living together in early October 1707, as they awaited the return to London of Mary's mother, so that they could receive her formal blessing. Steele wrote to his mother-in-law, therefore, with heartfelt impatience for her swift recovery and return. In the meantime, he continued to lodge with Addison, while Mary remained up the hill on Swallow Street. The situation wore on Steele's nerves, and he seems to have dealt with it by staying late at the office as often as possible. For weeks, Steele sent notes to Mary apologizing for being unable to join her for their main meal in the middle of the day, around 3 p.m., because of a heavy workload.40 One night at 8 p.m., he wrote from the Fountain tavern, possibly from a Kit-Cat meeting: ‘I beg of You not to be uneasy, for I have done a great deal of business today very Successfully, and wait an hour or two about my Gazette.’41
Steele's Gazette was reporting in October 1707 that the first Parliament of ‘one united kingdom by the name of Great Britain’,42 including its ‘new Brethren’ from Scotland,43 unanimously re-elected Kitling Jack Smith as its Speaker. By the end of the month, Steele had rented a house on Bury Street, around the corner from St James's Square, then a large open square empty of trees or fences. He planned to live there with his wife and mother-in-law, and promised Mary he would work with extra determination to ensure his new family was well provided for. Finally, in November, he moved his belongings out of Addison's lodgings and into Bury Street. Steele's motherin-law had obviously returned and accepted her daughter's fait accompli.
According to family legend, a fourth person was brought into the Steele household soon after: his illegitimate daughter by Tonson's niece, now aged 9 or 10. It was said that Steele asked his new wife to accompany him on a visit he was making one afternoon without telling her where they were going, and drove her to a ‘boardingschool in the environs of London’.44 There he presented a young lady ‘to whom Steele showed the greatest fondness, insomuch that his wife asked him if the child was his. On his acknowledging that she was: “Then,” said the Lady, “I beg she may be mine too.”’45
The girl's real mother, Elizabeth Tonson, after whom she was named, did not die until 1726. How Elizabeth felt about her daughter's adoption by Steele's new wife is not mentioned. There is a distinct lack of reference to Elizabeth in the Steeles' personal correspondence during the following years, leading some scholars to conclude that, if she was taken out of the boarding school or orphanage where she was reared, she was more likely taken to live with her mother's family, the Tonsons. Certainly Tonson and the girl's uncle, Jacob Junior, not Steele, arranged Elizabeth's marriage to a glove manufacturer from Herefordshire in 1720. Steele eventually left Elizabeth a legacy, however, so the oral tradition about Mary accepting the girl into her home is not wholly implausible.
During this honeymoon period, Mary must have been eager to please her new husband, and believed his reassurances about his bright career prospects as he set her up in such style amid the nobility of St James's. On 4 November 1707, a few days after moving into their barely furnished house and a week after the Kit-Cats ‘distinguished themselves Extraordinarily’ at a Club meeting to celebrate King William's birthday,46 Mary celebrated her own birthday. Steele, though only 35, was suffering from gout but struggled downstairs on crutches to join her, together with a few close friends, in the parlour. There he sat, probably wearing the tasselled silk turban he often wore instead of his periwig when at home, watching his Welsh bride dance for him, swirling gaily around the room. Beneath the music, a few notes of discord—about money, sex and her family—must already have been sounding, but for now the birthday music drowned them out. The following day, King William's landing in 1688 was celebrated as usual with a Kit-Cat Club feast and by Whigs in taverns and pulpits across the country, all eager to see the current influence of the few Whigs favoured by Marlborough extend to the benefit—and profit—of an even wider circle.
XII
BESET
For the man who keeps his eye on a true friend, keeps it, so to speak, on a model of himself.
CICERO, Laelius, de Amicitia, 80
THE KIT-CATS‘ self-congratulation, following the Treaty of Union and the appointment to high office of their Whig ally Lord Sunderland, was short-lived. The unexpected loss of another much-loved founder member in the early autumn of 1707 was the first news suddenly to sober their collective mood.
At the beginning of 1707, George Stepney had travelled to Hesse-Cassel to negotiate a treaty on behalf of the Grand Alliance with Prince Charles of Hesse, an old diplomatic contact.
The treaty sought to keep Hessian troops fighting against the French in Italy, despite lacking Allied funds to pay for them. It was a tricky negotiation, and Stepney failed to secure the terms his government wanted. During this time of strain, the Envoy's health deteriorated. Stepney had always thought of himself as having a solid constitution, but now, aged 44, he was diagnosed with an ulcer that may, in fact, have been cancer.
Stepney wrote to Lord Lexinton, Envoy Extraordinary to the Imperial Court in Vienna, hoping that he could retire soon: ‘One successful Campaign more will, I believe, be attended by a happy, hon[ora]ble & lasting Peace—when I hope to set up my Rest upon some pleasing seat upon the Thames.’1 This intention to serve until the end of the war was not fulfilled. Stepney collapsed and was forced to return to London at the end of August 1707. Thanks to Marlborough's personal intervention, a yacht was procured to sail the patient home as quickly as possible. In a letter of thanks, Stepney further asked Marlborough whether he would take Stepney's secretary under his ‘Favour and Protection’.2
After returning to England, Stepney, who had never been able to buy property of his own, spent a fortnight at a friend's house on Paradise Row in Chelsea. The house was likely that of the elderly Kit-Cat Lord Carbery, with its gardens rolling down to the banks of the Thames. In some such tranquil setting, the ‘pleasing seat’ he had hoped for, Stepney died on 15 September 1707.
Addison was by Stepney's side at the end. The two men had corresponded frequently (and, rarely for Addison, as equals) during the ten months Stepney served as Envoy in The Hague. When Stepney received the appointment in September 1706, Addison had written with obvious personal warmth:
I beg leave to congratulate you upon your removal to a province that requires all those great abilities for which you are so deservedly celebrated…I have often had an opportunity of mentioning my obligations to you, and the great respect I shall always have for so extraordinary a character.3
Kit-Cat Club, The Page 20
