To be ‘bastinadoed’ means to be beaten with a stick on the soles of one's feet, and Tonson's verbal beating was because he had drawn unnecessary attention to the rift between the Junto Whigs and Treasurer's Whigs at a time when, after the election victory, the Club was trying to forgive and forget. Dormer had remained a loyal Junto follower, while Walpole was a Treasurer's Whig, challenging the party whip of Halifax, Somers and Wharton. In the reshuffle after Harley's fall, Walpole's appointment as Secretary-at-War was reward for what some (including Tonson) saw as his leadership of the ‘traitors’. To outsiders, these divisions were overshadowed by Whig monopolization of every branch of government and culture.
Stepney's death was followed by two other unexpected Kit-Cat deaths in 1707–8 (of William Walsh and Major-General Shrimpton) leaving seats at the Kit-Cat table vacant. Thomas Hopkins was therefore elected into the Club sometime in early June 1708. One spy on the Club reported:
Jacob, who always hated him [Hopkins], bantered him by telling him his election was a banter, for the company then there was but a committee and that all elections were to be in a full meeting. Upon this, the new elect made a speech and told them he hoped his election would be confirmed by the whole society, for which calling [in]to question the power of that company then present, he was turned out of doors.33
Tom Hopkins' qualifications for admission were numerous. He now worked as the other Under-Secretary to Sunderland alongside Addison at Whitehall, and together the two helped keep the peace between their Junto-aligned boss and the Godolphin–Marlborough duumvirate. Hopkins was a perfect, neutral candidate for the Kit-cat after the recent rifts among its members. He also had literary credentials and valuable family links to City financiers.
In July 1708, Addison, who was then living at Sandy End, a hamlet between Chelsea and Fulham not far from Barn Elms, wrote to a friend enclosing ‘a Ballad fresh from the Kit’.34 This may have been ‘Jack Frenchman's Defeat’ by Congreve, or the ‘Toast to Mademoiselle Oudenarde’, both celebrating Marlborough's recent victory at the battle of Oudenarde on 11 July. The latter has been attributed to Maynwaring, but was more likely a joint composition, with different Kit-Cats tagging on verses to ‘smoke’ one another. Subtitled a ‘Dialogue in verse between Tonson, [Tom] Hopkins, [Richard] Topham and Lord Halifax’, this ballad is an important Kit-Cat artefact, identifying Richard Topham as a Club member—possibly another new member, besides Hopkins, admitted that summer to fill Shrimpton's, Stepney's and Walsh's spaces.35 The ballad refers to the Kit-Cat as a club ‘at Service so hard’ for the Whig cause, but quickly descends into a bantering competition, in which the members rib each other for their literary ignorance, lowly births and need for alcohol to fuel wit.
Aside from the fictional ‘Mademoiselle Oudenarde’, at least fourteen real ladies were toasted at a meeting that summer, most with some Marlborough connection. Each was awarded a flattering title. Francis Godolphin's wife and Congreve's mistress, Henrietta, was hailed ‘The Desirable’, Henrietta's sister and Sunderland's wife Anne ‘The Miracle’, while the Duke of Richmond's daughter Lady Louisa Lenox was ‘The Bloom’. Dunch's wife, Marlborough's niece, who had an infamous gambling habit, came off less well as ‘The Careless’.36 The list tells us more about the political constellations of 1708 than about which women the various members admired. The Duke of Grafton's pursuit of Mrs Knight, a woman worth £70,000 (over £7.5 million today), for example, was a business matter, not material for a toast. Similarly, Addison would not have wanted to put on record his ambitious interest in the Countess of Warwick. Some ingratiating letters sent by Addison in late May to her 11-year-old son survive: offering to hunt for birds'-nests or inviting the Earl to hear the morning birdsong in a neighbouring wood, mixing these suggestions with quotes from Virgil or Cicero. For all their kindness, there is something unattractive in Addison's courting the mother via the child.
One existing member would have attended these summer meetings in a new guise. Lord Hartington, a Kit-Cat since at least 1702, inherited the title of Duke of Devonshire following the August 1707 death of his father, one of the Glorious Revolution's ‘immortal seven’ who invited William to invade. The dying 1st Duke also left his balding, 34-year-old son the properties of Chatsworth and Devonshire House in Piccadilly. The 2nd Duke, whom the Queen continued to favour for his father's sake, now became her Lord Steward and was sworn into her Privy Council in September 1707. The young man's title was a significant new ornament for the Kit-cat Club, as discussed in a gossipy letter from Vanbrugh to Manchester. While Devonshire's father had been a generous patron of the arts at Chatsworth, the son's contribution was as collector of medals, prints and an impressive library.
Steele would have attended the Kit-Cat meetings that summer, pursuing patronage from the Junto, particularly Halifax, before his Barbados inheritance came through. Years later, Steele listed as a fault: ‘Neglect of Promises made on small and indifferent Occasions, such as Parties of Pleasure.’37 Though Steele admitted being guilty of this vice, he was probably remembering occasions when great men had promised, in their cups, to do him favours that never materialized. By the summer of 1708, still waiting to rise above the post of gazetteer, conscious of promises to his wife and mother-in-law and of debts incurred for their sakes, Steele badly needed a helping hand from his fellow Kit-Cats. Later he would reflect on his lifelong capin-hand relationship with these patrons: ‘There is indeed something so shameless in taking all Opportunities to speak of your own Affairs, that he who is guilty of it…fares like the Beggar who exposes his Sores, which instead of moving Compassion, makes the Man he begs of turn away from the Object.’38
Since at least February 1708, Steele had been forcing his wife Mary, whom he called by the pet name ‘Prue’ (referring to her prudent but also prudish character), to deal with his creditors.39 The couple spent a great amount on keeping up appearances over the spring of 1708: Steele often wrote home asking his wife to drop by the office in the afternoon, warning her to be well dressed and charming when introduced to anyone who could help his career. Part of keeping up appearances that summer involved the Steeles buying a second home in the village of Hampton Wick, near Hampton Court and not far from Tonson at Barn Elms and Addison at Sandy End. Steele referred to it self-deprecatingly as ‘The Hovel’, in contrast to Halifax's neighbouring residence of Bushy House.40 In September 1708, Steele stayed at Addison's house on more than one night and was taken to visit Addison's sister Dorothy. Yet Steele's borrowing from Addison before receiving his conjugal inheritance must have strained their friendship, both men having been raised on the Roman motto that self-sufficiency was a precondition for true friendship—a view Steele echoed when he famously declared that ‘Equality is the life of Conversation’.41
Dr Johnson recounted how, when a friend embarrassed by a debt started to agree with everything Addison said, Addison snapped: ‘Sir, either contradict me, or pay me my money.’42 While this obsequious debtor was not necessarily Steele, it gives a sense of how such financial imbalance would have exacerbated the men's already lopsided friendship. Addison, whose father had taught him to regard the proper use of money as a matter of moral rectitude, once remarked, ‘When I hear a Man complain of his being unfortunate in all his Undertakings, I shrewdly suspect him for a very weak Man in his Affairs.’43 Steele, on the other hand, was allergic to being beholden to anyone, even his most admired friend, and said the ideal benefactor was a man who gave assistance ‘with the mien of a receiver’.44One suspects that Addison, for all his vaunted modesty, was not quite as devoid of condescension as that.
Steele's wife, who wished her husband was more like Addison, her ‘Favourite’ among Steele's friends,45 continued her barrage of complaints about their straitened circumstances. Finally, in August 1708, Steele said he would not have his business governed by his wife's orders, no matter how much he loved her, and returned her letter so that ‘upon second thoughts, you may see the disrespectful manner in which you Treat Your Affectionate Faithful Husba
nd’.46 When £9,300 of the first Mrs Steele's money finally came through, Steele repaid almost all his debts, and hired a footman, but this reprieve from debt was brief. In October 1708, Steele refused to deliver a note from his wife to his mother-in-law because he suspected it contained complaints of his ‘unkindness’, which he denied: ‘If you want for anything it is that you will not supply yourself with it, for I very regularly send you wherewithal.’47
October 1708 brought a fresh disappointment to the Steeles. Queen Anne's husband Prince George sickened with asthma and died, despite the best attentions of Dr Garth and the royal physicians. Steele therefore lost his Court place as a Gentleman Usher to the Prince. When the seriousness of the Prince's illness had first become apparent, Steele had pursued another £300-a-year place as Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber by drinking all night with the Kit-Cat patrons until he was hung over the next day. Steele described himself as ‘busy about the main Chance’,48 but nothing seems to have come of his networking.
While Steele stood on duty guarding Prince George's corpse on 28 October 1708, a bailiff (or ‘bum’) was standing stolidly outside the Steeles' front door on Bury Street, sent to collect the rent. Prue, pregnant with their first baby, had to face this harassment alone. Steele shortly after brought her to stay in Kensington with a friend, while his creditors sued him. The following month Steele borrowed cash from a tradesman, ‘for I find Friendship among the Lowest when disappointed by the Highest’.49
On balance, the Queen's bereavement ended up profiting the Kit-cat Club, sapping her energy to resist the Junto's political pressure. She promoted their members, friends and relations in the months that followed. Somers became Lord President of the Privy Council and Wharton was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Wharton picked Addison to go with him to Dublin as his right-hand man. Jonathan Swift, looking on, described it as a ‘new world’.50
The Junto credited the Duchess of Marlborough with having helped convince her husband, and thereby Godolphin and the Queen, to make these Whig appointments, especially Somers', which Vanbrugh had thought hopeless as recently as July 1708. As a result, another poem ‘to the tune of a French ditty’ was added to the Kit-cat repertoire in November, in which Hopkins and Topham (‘the Wits / Of Windsor Town’) toasted Marlborough's wife adoringly.51
The Junto's rapid elevation to high office healed the remaining divisions within the Kit-Cat Club; all Whigs now effectively became Court Whigs, lessening the pivotal importance of moderates like Walpole and Smith. A dinner at Smith's house marked the reconciliation between the former Treasurer's faction and the Junto.
Only three of the seventeen Kit-Cat MPs who convened at the opening of the new Parliament in November 1708 received no income, military or civilian, from the government. The dramatic expansion in State bureaucracy begun under William was continuing, with an increasing number of revenue offices created to raise war funds—the bureaucracy would treble its 1689 size by 1720, meaning treble the patronage opportunities for those with power over appointments. Encouraged by spyhole authors like Ned Ward, whose books on clubs were bestsellers, London readers were becoming fascinated by the Kit-Cat Club's enormous power and influence—the eternal fascination of the velvet rope. ‘The Bath, the Wells, and every Fair, each Chocolate, Gaming House and Tavern, resounds with your Noble Exploits,’ one contemporary, addressing the Kit-Cats collectively, remarked.52
In this context, Sir Richard Blackmore finally revised and published his 1704 poem, The Kit-Cats.53 Blackmore admired the Kit-Cat Club's ‘native Fire’, which might rekindle and enlighten English arts, but also felt disgust at the cliquishness of Tonson and his friends. The poem describes an assault on the ‘Kit-Cat State’ by the God of Dullness and his forces. Echoes of the recent Jacobite invasion were intentional. The God of Dullness calls the Kit-Cat Club an ‘Upstart Sect’ threatening his empire by efforts to ‘with Arts the British Heads refine’. The Kit-Cats are ironically presented (in light of the real war being waged at the time) as squadrons fighting a mock-defence of Wit. In the penultimate stanza, Blackmore predicts a glorious future will be sabotaged not by the God of Dullness but by political factionalism within the Club. Blackmore foretells that nothing will corrupt them like success, and that the Club, ‘Embroiled in Feuds and sour with Discontent’, finally
Shall into various Warring Parties split,
Which brings the Downfall of Imperious Wit.
This Doom attends the Upstart Kit-Cat State,
This shall be Wit's, this shall be BOCAJ's Fate.
This was a prophecy that would one day apply to another more fatal schism than that of 1707–8.
As prizes rained on others and the Kit-Cats' fame reached new heights, Steele told Prue he was chasing ‘that life we both pant after with so much earnestness’.54 He hoped to step into Addison's vacated post as Under-Secretary of State in the Southern Department. ‘[T]here is a thing in Agitation that will make me happy at once,’ Steele wrote confidentially to his wife two days after Addison switched to his new, Irish post. ‘Your Rival [for Steele's company], A[ddiso]n, will be removed and if I can succeed Him in His Office It will answer all Purposes.’55 Addison suggested Steele for the job, and Steele lobbied for it with every spare moment.
Steele was to be bitterly disappointed: a Scotsman named Robert Pringle received the post instead. This period left a sour taste in Steele's mouth years later when he regretted wasting his life in ‘Fruitless attendance’ upon powerful men. Steele claimed to have known dependants of such men who ‘have been for twenty Years together within a Month of a good Employment, but never arrived at the Happiness of being possessed of anything’. If someone else obtains the employment a man is after, Steele wrote, it is often someone who never even solicited for it, since great men thereby seek to expand the circle of those indebted to them; and if a man ‘grow out of Humour’ upon such a discovery, everyone will think him unreasonable.56 Steele knew the real reason Somers had not secured the post for him: ‘I am reckoned in general an ill manager, and know also that it is made a bar against doing for Me.’57
Steele must have given way to envy, depression and bitterness that winter, as London suffered sub-zero temperatures and heavy snowfalls. Only Dr Garth was not, it seems, oppressed by the Great Frost. Whenever anyone complained of the cold, he was said to reply: ‘Yes sir, 'fore Gad, very fine weather, sir, very wholesome weather, sir; kills trees, sir; very good for a man, sir.’58 Amid the snowstorms, Steele continued to attend the Kit-Cat Club, helping Tonson make selections for the sixth Miscellany of contemporary poetry. Defrosting his ink stand, Steele penned a note to his seven-month pregnant wife that he was ‘indispensably obliged’ to dine with Tonson, where papers were to be read after dinner ‘whereof, among others, I am to be a Judge’.59 The young Alexander Pope's poetry was among the work selected for this Miscellany, not only on Steele's recommendation but also on that of Garth, Congreve and Addison. Walsh, Halifax and Tidcomb had previously encouraged Pope's writing, though Pope was excluded from Kit-Cat membership and barred from receiving a Court or government place by his Toryism and Catholicism. The Kit-Cats' recognition of Pope's genius, however, demonstrates that Whig critics were never entirely blinded by ideology.
On 26 March 1709, Mrs Steele gave birth to a daughter, christened Elizabeth like Steele's first, illegitimate daughter. While Steele was seeking a gift or loan to keep a roof over his family's head, half the Kit-Cats were personally guaranteeing the national debt. In April, the Bank of England agreed to advance the government large sums without interest in exchange for the exclusive right to issue notes (‘Exchequer Bills’). The subscription was swiftly filled, mainly by Whigs eager to demonstrate loyalty to the new Kit-Cat governors. It was the second such subscription in three months; the first, in February 1709, doubled the Bank's capital, its Charter having been extended by Parliament despite strong Tory opposition. The February subscription list was filled within a few hours, with many would-be signatories turned away. Among the names on the list are
several Kit-Cats peers: Somers is down for £3,000, Somerset for £5,000 and Halifax for £10,000. Not only the peerage got in on the Bank's profits, however; by 1710, Kit-Cat Anthony Henley, for example, had at least £4,000 invested under his own name and an equal amount invested as part of a group. These enormous sums were a measure of how fully such men endorsed continuing the war at this critical juncture, when there was growing pressure from the Tories and others to negotiate a peace.
Originally, back in the 1690s, the Bank of England and deficitfinancing had been criticized based on the argument that, when the personal wealth of MPs, peers and Cabinet members was tied up in government stock, they would be less independent and less ready to hold the monarchy accountable. In 1709, with the Whig leaders visibly less enthused than most of the nation about a possible end to the war, many felt these suspicions justified. This impression was reinforced when the Old and New East India Companies merged in 1709 to form the United Company, the former Whig directors and investors of the New Company holding the controlling majority. Whether there was ever truth in the accusations that the Kit-Cat Club monopolized literary patronage and the arts, the Club's members and associates certainly had a credit monopoly firmly in place by 1709.
Steele's career disappointments had one positive result: they forced him to concentrate on writing. The Tatler's first issue appeared on 12 April 1709, less than a week after Steele's daughter's christening, as spring weather belatedly warmed London's icy streets. Hoping that this new production would be a money-maker, Steele told Prue to ‘depend upon it that I shall bring you home what will make things have a cheerful aspect’.60
The Tatler consisted of a single essay per issue, on a folio sheet printed on both sides, and folded to create four pages. The first four issues were distributed free, to hook the largest possible number of readers. Steele had gained the confidence to launch the paper through editing The Gazette, but The Tatler would give him a much freer outlet for the views he could not express in the government press. Its essays were narrated by the fictional Isaac Bickerstaff, and the paper's stated purpose was to reach the man in the street or London coffee house, but also to create a new readership that aspired to emulate Bickerstaff's urbane life, with his club of friends who met at the Trumpet tavern (a real tavern halfway down Shire Lane, where Mr Cat lived).
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