Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  Stepney had taught Addison how to treat government service as a profession rather than a hobby, yet simultaneously to maintain a self-image as a man of letters. Much affected by his friend's sudden death, Addison therefore reported the news to Manchester: ‘I need not tell you how much he is lamented by everybody.’4

  Stepney's will asked for him to be buried in Westminster Abbey, this ‘being the place of my Education’, and for Halifax and Prior to be tasked with enumerating the achievements of his life and diplomatic career at the funeral, since Stepney knew they would do it ‘with plainness and truth’. Halifax was left a golden drinking cup, and instructed to select from Stepney's private library ‘a hundred Tomes, if there be any which may deserve to have place in his Library’. As for Prior, Stepney only provided that he should be forgiven fifty guineas of debt,5 but behind this provision lay a larger message of forgiveness for the Lord Dorset's Boy who had betrayed his friends. Stepney's will also ordered his private letters be destroyed, which, on the whole, they were.

  Stepney's Kit-Cat friends probably bore the expense of his Abbey funeral a week later, on the night of 22 September, much as they had borne that of Dryden. The pallbearers consisted of two dukes, two earls and two barons—a remarkable tribute to the son of a minor courtier, and further evidence of the Kit-Cat Club's power to level social classes. A Latin epitaph, transcribed by Tonson, was engraved on Stepney's tomb, listing Stepney's intimacy with ‘men of the highest position’ as an achievement in its own right.

  Stepney was hardly cold in the ground when an unseemly scramble started among several Kit-Cats to obtain his post in The Hague and place on the Board of Trade. The candidates included Stanyan, Stanhope, Lord Berkeley and William Walsh. The most tactless application came from Prior, who wrote to Halifax about the post while their friend still lay mortally ill in Chelsea. Such behaviour could only be explained by Prior's now desperate financial situation. Prior apologized to Halifax for remaining the latter's debtor ‘as to Pecuniary Matters’, and protested that, though it was ‘too late to recapitulate the differences that have happened between us, or to dispute the reasons’, his ‘respects to yourself and your family are inviolable’.6 No reply from Halifax survives.

  Superficially the Junto was, as Steele put it, back ‘in great power’ at this time, but underlying tensions were starting to fester between Club friends. The first tension was political. Wharton and Halifax were losing patience with the fact that their mounting influence had not yet returned them to high office. While staunchly supporting the war effort, they recognized the paradox that the worse the war went, the more dependent Godolphin's ministry became upon them. When it came to the crunch, the General and Treasurer were dependent upon Whig Junto votes in the Commons to pass Bills of army supply. When, for example, the loss of some British ships and the failure of Britain's Allies to fulfil their pledges of troops and supplies led the Tories to propose Britain transfer its forces from Flanders to Spain, where they could focus on protecting sea trade routes to Italy and the Levant, Marlborough and Godolphin had to look to Somers and the Whigs to block this unwelcome initiative. The debate, with Somers saving the day for the ministry, was a clear instance of how Tory attacks increased the Junto's power. In December 1707, a non-Junto Whig loyal to Godolphin told a friend: ‘[T]he Kit-cat & Junto, have changed their principles so often upon the score of dominion that I doubt not your Lordship will see…how little a free nation ought to rely upon them.’7

  Other Kit-Cats, however, disapproved of the Junto's tactic of capitalizing on this paradox—particularly several moderates (Somerset, Smith, Walpole, Compton and Harry Boyle) who started to identify themselves as the ‘Treasurer's Whigs’ because they were willing to form alliances with the Tories in support of Godolphin's ministry and the war, thereby loosening the Junto's parliamentary grip. Walpole, in particular, spoke out against Halifax's and Somers' attempts to pry the Queen's husband from the head of the Admiralty. This internal party division, between the Junto Whigs and Treasurer's Whigs, put a freeze on Kit-Cat meetings for much of the winter, Congreve remarking that he only saw Addison ‘once by accident’ in January 1708.8

  The Whigs were united, however, against Robert Harley, who had been carrying on a backstairs intrigue throughout 1707 to convince Anne he could offer a coalition government independent of the Junto Whigs. In February 1708, Marlborough and Godolphin, spurred on by the Junto lords and Marlborough's wife Sarah, told Anne that either they or the intriguing Mr Harley, then Secretary of State for the North, would have to go. At first the Queen resisted, but Addison was soon telling Manchester ‘a Secret here at present: that the Queen has just now demanded the seals of [Harley]’.9 The audacity of having forced Anne to demand a resignation, against her will, made the development one to be relayed in an excited whisper across half a continent. Four days later, Harley resigned, and Wharton moved that Harley's personal secretary be tried as a Jacobite.

  Tories and supporters of Harley resigned in solidarity, and were replaced by Whigs.10 Though each of the promoted men was a Kit-cat, they were all from among the Treasurer's Whigs, making this faction even more pivotal. Wharton complained that Jack Smith, whose opinion ‘no man valued’, was being consulted on appointees, rather than the ‘whole body of the Whigs’—meaning Wharton and his friends.11 The Junto, on the other hand, saw it would be wise to work alongside their fellow Kit-Cats who were now in the Cabinet. ‘This Revolution,’ Addison observed, ‘has already had the good Effect to Unite all old friends that were falling off from one another.’12

  Meanwhile a heated debate about the battle of Almanza, a disastrous defeat suffered by the Allies in Spain, was underway in the House of Lords. Appointed Envoy Extraordinary to the Spanish Court of Carlos III (formerly Archduke Charles of Austria) in 1706, Stanhope had directed the Spanish campaign in tandem with his Commander-in-Chief, Lord Peterborough, for the past year. When an offensive strategy, recommended solely by Stanhope, led to the defeat at Almanza in April 1707, Peterborough and the anti-war Tories held Stanhope personally responsible for the terrible loss of life and territory.

  Kit-Cat Major-General Shrimpton was one of those humiliated at Almanza, and relatives of Kit-Cat members were among the thousands killed. It was a defeat as disastrous as Marlborough's victories in Germany had been miraculous, and Stanhope was forced to defend his actions in the Commons that winter. With Marlborough's and the Junto's help, however, Stanhope was cleared of all charges, and even promoted to assume Peterborough's command in the next Iberian campaign of spring 1708. Addison described the Almanza debate, coming before another general election, as one that ‘fixed all men in their proper parties and thoroughly established the present [Whig-dependent] Ministry’.13

  On the subject of the war, there was now little distinction between Whig and Court propaganda. In spring 1708, the Kit-Cat authors seem to have collectively answered a call from their Junto patrons to turn their hands to pre-election campaign literature. Halifax and Somers commissioned Addison to produce a pamphlet, The Present State of the War (1708), arguing for continued engagement until the separation of France and Spain was guaranteed. In it, Addison acknowledged that the War of Spanish Succession was primarily about trade rather than religion, but labelled as unpatriotic anyone seeking peace under current conditions. A war that began with cross-party support was fast becoming a Whig enterprise, just as the ministry, which had begun as moderately Tory, would soon be propped up almost entirely by Junto-managed votes.

  Tonson printed and widely distributed another anonymous pamphlet, Advice to the Electors of Great Britain (1708), which argued that, since certain Tories were suspected of plotting with France to restore The Pretender, all who cared about defending a Protestant Crown should vote Whig. A High Church Tory reported that the pamphlet was written by ‘Lord S[ome]rs or some eminent member of the Kit-Cat’ and ‘for the style, the character and the lies there is in it, seems worthy of the mind of Jacob T[onso]n’.14 It was, in fact, written primarily by Arthur Maynwarin
g.

  Electoral propaganda in the event proved superfluous, as the Whigs received the pre-election gift of an unsuccessful invasion attempt by James II's son and his French allies. Addison and his boss Sunderland were among the first to receive reports of the invasion forces gathering at Dunkirk. Heavy mists in the North Sea provided cover for the enemy ships when they set sail on 6 March 1708. The French were testing whether the Scottish back door remained ajar; Addison characterized the invasion as ‘the last Effort of the party that opposed the uniting of the two Nations’.15 By this he meant the Jacobites, feared and vilified as the terrorist cells of their day.

  Britain was put into a state of emergency. Addison, despite failing eyesight and temporary lameness, worked day and night to mobilize the nation's defences. Internal freedom of movement was suspended, with Englishmen requiring permits to travel north. When Sir George Byng prevented the French landing and captured one Jacobite ship, Addison was the man at Westminster to receive this welcome report. By 23 March, the Jacobite Duke of Hamilton was in custody. A month later, some fifty Jacobite prisoners were sent to the Tower of London to stand trial.

  The immediate effect of the abortive invasion was to strengthen the Whig hand. On 9 March, the Queen reshuffled her Cabinet, and there was talk that Wharton and Somers would soon finally receive high office. The second major effect was a swing in favour of the Whigs in May's election, where they won their first Commons majority of Anne's reign—a notable exception to consistent Tory election victories throughout the 1690s and 1700s.

  Sunderland had recommended Addison as a parliamentary candidate for Lostwithiel, in Cornwall, a traditionally Tory seat that Addison won in May 1708 despite his total lack of personal connections there. Addison took his seat when the House reassembled in the autumn, alongside the Duke of Somerset's son—the young man he had unsuccessfully applied to tutor not so many years earlier. There was a fly in the ointment, however: the Tories claimed the Lostwithiel electoral rolls had been rigged—not difficult when the franchise only extended to some twenty-four men. As a result of these allegations, the result was ‘set aside’ in December 1708, and Wharton had to come to the rescue by handing Addison another pocket borough, that of Malmesbury. For several years, Addison served that constituency alongside Thomas Farrington, another possible Kit-Cat returned thanks to Wharton.

  Wharton spent up to £80,000 (over £8.6 million today) on campaigns across the country in 1708, proving responsible for the return of over a dozen MPs. As his annual income was only £16,000, this expenditure was enough to bring bailiffs to the door of Wharton's Dover Street mansion. Abel Boyer eulogized Wharton as a man of unshakeable Whig convictions (‘the most active, most strenuous, and most indefatigable Asserter of Liberty’16), and Steele remarked upon Wharton's fidelity to those he supported: ‘[H]e helped more of his Friends to places than any one of the Ministers themselves; his Lordship being the best Friend and the best Solicitor in the World when he was pleased to Honour a Man with his Protection.’17

  Wharton had a way with the man in the street, described as demagogic or democratic depending on whether one was his enemy or ally. One anecdote recorded by Steele described Wharton during elections in the Buckinghamshire borough of Wycombe: two Tory candidates spied him going into the local shoemaker's shop and asking where Dick was, at which the woman in the shop said her husband was out but ‘his Lordship need not fear him, she would keep him tight [to vote Whig]’. ‘I know that,’ Wharton said, ‘but I want to see Dick and drink a Glass with him.’ Wharton then asked the woman, ‘How does all thy Children? Molly is a brave Girl I warrant by this time…Is not Jemmy breeched [in breeches] yet?’ At which, Steele said, the two eavesdropping Tories jumped on their horses and fled the election, since any peer who knew the names and ages of a local shoemaker's children must be unbeatable. Steele, of course, brought Whig bias to this story, but it is telling that Wharton's common touch was highlighted with such pride.18

  Vanbrugh and Congreve never stooped to pre-election pamphleteering or sought seats in Parliament, leaving such work to the newer Kit-Cat members, like Addison and Steele. Congreve remained consumed by his affair with Henrietta: ‘If I have not ambition, I have other passions more easily gratified,’ he confessed.19 The management of the Queen's Theatre, meanwhile, was again consuming Vanbrugh. Its company had swapped monopolies with Drury Lane in December 1707 and was now producing only operas—an arrangement ‘to the general liking of the whole Town’.20 Vanbrugh, who had temporarily sold the theatre's management, now bought back his shares.

  At first Vanbrugh counted on Kit-Cats and other wealthy Whigs to subscribe for the costs of bringing over Italian opera singers, but the Kit-Cats appear to have let him down. Vanbrugh was therefore forced to apply to the Queen for a subsidy. He hinted to Manchester (currently on his second stint as Envoy in Venice, with Stanyan as his secretary) that this royal grant was as good as promised, so if ‘Nicolini’ and ‘Santini’ would come to England, they could divide as much as £1,000 (over £116,000 today) between them. ‘Nicolini’ was a famous castrato, Nicolo Grimaldi, who later arrived in London and demanded crippling fees every season, which Vanbrugh failed to persuade the Queen to pay. Receipts from performances remained so low that Vanbrugh was forced to sink his own money into the theatre to keep it solvent, ‘and this Distresses me to the last Degree’.21

  Part of the problem was that Vanbrugh was competing against private musical performances at the houses of certain Kit-Cat lords, free from overheads. Addison referred, for example, to an opera ‘played several times’ at Halifax's house, its score sent from Venice by Lord Manchester.22 The other problem, according to Vanbrugh, was that gallery audiences of the ‘middling sort’ were not buying tickets in sufficient numbers, even after he reduced ticket prices in February 1708. The Collierite campaigners were continuing to hurt the theatre's audience figures, and a manuscript account book from April 1708 shows Vanbrugh taking a loss of £1,146 (or some £133,000 today) on every performance. Before the season ended, in May 1708, he was forced to resell his shares in the theatre company,23 thereafter collecting only rent on the building. ‘I lost so Much Money by the Opera this Last Winter that I was glad to get quit of it,’ Vanbrugh admitted. ‘[Y]et I don't doubt but Operas will Settle and thrive in London.’24 He would never again entirely recover his financial stability.

  The Kit-Cat Club had not ceased its patronage of the Queen's Theatre when that theatre had abandoned operas. A Kit-Cat document had been produced early in the previous year's season ‘all in Lord Halifax's handwriting’ for ‘a subscription of four hundred guineas for the encouragement of good comedies’.25 This seems to have evolved into a Club scheme, ‘for Reviving Three Plays of the best Authors, with the full Strength of the Company; every Subscriber to have Three Tickets for the first Day of each Play, for his single Payment of Three Guineas’.26

  These three plays—Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Beaumont and Fletcher's The King and No King, and a composite play made of Dryden's Marriage à la Mode and Maiden Queen—were performed in January and February 1707, and proved highly popular with audiences. Garth and Steele did their bit by launching The Muses Mercury, an innovative monthly arts newspaper, reporting on theatre and opera, in January 1707. Its editorial assumption was that if there was a shortage of new writing in England, this was simply due to a scarcity of patronage, ‘[f]or we have no Reason to doubt but there are Geniuses now living’.27 Once again the Kit-Cat manifesto about native art was at work: with the revival of the three comedies, the Club hoped to kick-start England's literary future by celebrating its past.

  Bracey, now in her mid-thirties, performed as Portia in this 1707 production of Julius Caesar. Audiences that season, however, made plain their preference for a younger actress: a girl named Ann (‘Nancy’) Oldfield. Nancy had been Maynwaring's mistress for several years, and was living with him openly by 1707. One critic described her as acting ‘very well in comedy but best of all, I suppose, in bed. She twines her body and leers wi
th eyes most bewitchingly.’28 Bracey, eclipsed by Nancy's sex appeal, decided to make it her last season. The Kit-Cats heard of Bracey's retirement and were about to raise a toast to her when Halifax proposed that they pledge something more substantial: a gift of 200 guineas. The others added to this until there were 800 guineas (some £156,000 today) on the table. It was a larger lump sum than the Kit-cat Club had ever given to any of its male authors, Congreve included.

  Just as Vanbrugh asked Manchester to import Italian opera singers in 1708, so Manchester brought over the Italian painter Pellegrini to work on Castle Howard's interior in August 1708. There is no clearer example of how the Kit-Cats applied the same principles of importing and adapting European talent across the different arts. Vanbrugh's search for an English architecture, mixing old castellar forms with neoclassical geometry, was most apparent at this time in the rebuilding of Manchester's country seat of Kimbolton Castle, near Cambridge. Vanbrugh told Manchester he planned to give the house ‘Something of the Castle Air, though at the Same time to make it regular’.29 Just as English opera was imagined as something that would take an emasculated Continental model and defeminize it, so Vanbrugh said he aimed to create a ‘very Noble and masculine Show’ at Kimbolton.30

  Racing by calash between London, Kimbolton and Woodstock, Vanbrugh would nonetheless have made an effort to attend the Kit-cat Club when Tonson reconvened it in the summer of 1708. The venue was probably Barn Elms, where it was ‘a most miserable Year for fruit’.31 In June 1708, a Tory observer relayed the following gossip to the Club's now avowed enemy, Robert Harley:

  The last Kit-Cat has afforded much diversion. Jacob Tonson, in his cups, sitting between Dormer and Walpole, told them he sat between the honestest man in the world and the greatest villain; and explained himself that by the honest man he meant Dormer, the other was a villain forsaking his patrons and benefactors the Junto, for which poor Jacob was severely bastinadoed.32