Steele asked Halifax's ‘favour in promoting’ The Tatler, by means of a subscription, but wittily did so as if he were just an agent for his fictional creation, Bickerstaff, who was ‘naturally proud’ and therefore would only accept cash in excess of the subscription price if Halifax would take ‘so many more books’ in exchange.61 The Tatler fast became the most popular paper in Britain, forging a new kind of community through print.
Bickerstaff addressed himself to women too—the result of Steele having learned to write for the mixed audience of the theatres. What this meant, in practice, was keeping the writing conversational, relying on analogies or allegories to explain big ideas, and leavening political news or debate with entertaining social observations and fanciful stories. Like the modernized translations of the ancient classics by Dryden and Tonson decades earlier, the central purpose was to educate and edify the nation, but the pill was mixed with a good deal of jam. As women took the paper with their real bread and jam, it created new reading habits in the domestic realm, and ended the idea that devotional books were the only fit reading matter for the female sex. At this date, literacy figures were around 45 per cent for men and 25 per cent for women, but the vogue for The Tatler actively expanded those percentages and helped turn Britain into a country of readers. Steele wrote for the merchants on the Exchange, the Customs men on the docks, the law students lying on the grass outside Gray's Inn and the shoppers in the Exchange—the whole litany of humanity that made London feel like a heaving world city—but also for the rest of the country who received The Tatler by subscription in the tri-weekly post. Nationwide debate could now be conducted at unprecedented speed, compared to previous pamphlet debates.
The periodical tried to answer, for example, all those who were wearying of a long, expensive world war. Tenant farmers and the landless poor were suffering hardships thanks to the heavy rains and bad harvests that followed the Great Frost, and landowners were unable to collect rents to pay the wartime taxes. In August 1709, Marlborough won the battle of Malplaquet only after enormous loss of life and high casualties among his largely conscripted men. Nor was it the decisive victory for which everyone had hoped. After the blood spilled at Malplaquet, Anne began to lose her stomach for war and joined the popular majority in seeking a speedy end to Britain's involvement.
The Queen blamed the collapse of peace talks in The Hague in May 1709 on the Junto's excessive demands. Afterwards, the parties publicly argued over whether the war should continue. Patriotic aggression had overtaken the Whigs' genuinely defensive grounds for starting the war, as they now sought total Bourbon surrender, not just the maintenance of a balance of power. Satirists scorned the Kit-Cats for dealing in poetry during wartime and for fine dining during food shortages: Ned Ward called the Kit-Cats ‘Luxurious Heroes of the Pen’, and criticized even the physically disabled Tonson as a mock-hero who only dared ‘to storm the crusty walls’ of Mr Cat's pies when his compatriots were storming the French town of Tournai.62 Mary Astell's sarcastic dedication ‘To the most Illustrious Society of the Kit-Cats' in Bart'lemy Fair: or, an Enquiry after Wit (1709) was similarly scathing about the Club's self-congratulation while soldiers died every day in Flanders: ‘You who are our Household Gods could not indeed be permitted to leave the Island and expose your precious Lives.’ Astell wondered whether Marlborough could ever have brought home a victory if ‘his Army were composed of such Men of Wit and did they allow themselves time to think’. She further commended the Kit-Cats, tongue in cheek, for having ‘Fortitude to let the Cries and Tears of whole Troops of Orphans and Widows go unregarded, but who will suffer no part of Voluptuousness to pass by them, nor meanly curb any of their loosest Desires’.63
Steele's Tatler became a crucial mouthpiece for the Kit-Cats and other pro-Marlborough Whigs in answering such attacks, the paper's fifth issue, for example, containing a panegyric on Marlborough. What Steele did most brilliantly was to report the news in a seemingly impartial tone, while slipping in a good deal of Whig editorializing. He avoided the usual tone of the propagandist—superlative praise of one side, personal insults of the other, dogmaticsounding assertions—instead giving Bickerstaff the voice of a charming, tolerant man of sense. In many ways, Steele wrote Bickerstaff to sound like Addison—the man Steele (and Steele's wife) essentially wished he could be.
Steele sowed the seeds of Whiggish attitudes in countless Tatler essays. One allegory about a scholar, a tradesman and a courtier who were cousins, for example, taught the interdependence of England's classes and professions—a central tenet of Whig political economy. Another essay lectured on how poor commoners should be appreciated for their ‘Heroic Virtue’ as much as the famous, powerful or rich—the same kind of socially levelling lesson taught by the translations of Stepney or Prior in the 1690s.64 The Tatler successfully occupied the political centre ground with claims to neutrality and detestation of factionalism, but at the same time, everyone knew Steele and his friends were Whigs. The publication thus transformed Whiggism from a purely political ideology into a wider moral code, claiming a monopoly on common sense and good taste (a ‘monopoly of our Sense’, as Prior put it65). To spread urbane values was never politically neutral; the London boroughs remained more Whig than the rest of the country, so making provincial society more like London society was a way to make it more inclined to think, and vote, Whig. Steele thereby helped transform the Whig party's longer-term fortunes by making its policies seem the thinking-person's only reasonable choice, however hostile the current electoral climate. No Tory writer was ever as adept at such beguiling, almost subliminal, cultural propaganda.
In May 1709, six weeks after his daughter's birth and during The Tatler's first month of publication, Steele was arrested for a debt of £120 (£11,500 today). To add insult to injury, debtors' prisons charged fees and rent. During his imprisonment, Steele tried to prevent Prue from panicking, telling her: ‘There is no doubt but We shall be easy and happy in few days.’66 It was a tradesman who bailed Steele out, while fellow Kit-Cat Spencer Compton, then a royal Paymaster, secretly advanced Steele his pension as Gentleman Usher to the late Prince George, enabling him once again, temporarily, to clear his debts. Addison's gesture of assistance was to write an anonymous contribution to The Tatler. It was to be the start of a journalistic collaboration between the two men that would extend beyond The Tatler and forever change the art of journalism.
By October 1709, Steele was again begging Halifax for cash because ‘I am at this time in danger of being torn to pieces for £150.’67 Cash and credit problems were ubiquitous at this period, even if someone lived frugally, which Steele did not. Members of the gentry often settled bills no more than once a year, and there was little distinction between business and household expenses or income, often obscuring a man's real financial situation. Steele later wrote, with some envy: ‘Our Gentry are, generally speaking, in debt; and many Families have put it into a kind of Method of being so from Generation to Generation.’68 Steele's own debts seem to have arisen from ‘imprudence of generosity, or vanity of profusion’69—what he called ‘Faults of a Person of Spirit’.70
Whatever his financial situation, Steele felt that drinking with Kit-cat friends would improve his prospects. Prue was less convinced, scolding him when he regularly came home drunk to Bury Street. While Bickerstaff was a bachelor, having only the ‘family’ of a cat and dog awaiting him by the fire every evening, Steele was greeted by Prue's recriminations, and it seems he sometimes responded with violent outbursts. The Tatler exhorted men to reform their violent tempers, both in public life and at home; for Steele this was a mission of self-reform—an effort to live up to the models of Bickerstaff's good nature and Addison's self-control.
XIII
IRELAND: KIT-CAT COLONY
[A]s I am an Englishman, I am very cautious to hate a Stranger, or despise a poor Palatine.
ADDISON AND STEELE,
The Tatler no. 111, 24 December 1709
AFTER WHARTON'S APPOINTMENT as Lo
rd Lieutenant of Ireland in autumn 1708, his choice of Addison as Irish Secretary meant that the two highest executive posts in that kingdom were occupied by Kit-Cats. In addition, Tom Hopkins was Addison's primary correspondent in the Southern Department, which administered Irish affairs from Whitehall, and Harry Boyle was the Lord Treasurer of Ireland, also based in London. A Kit-Cat therefore held every senior post in Ireland's colonial administration in 1709, with the exception of the Club's close ally Lord Sunderland at the head of the Southern Department. The reason for the Club's monopoly on Irish government, like everything else at this date, related to the War of Spanish Succession: following their triumphant suppression of the Jacobites in Scotland, they were now focused on shutting another back door to The Pretender and French invasion. Ireland's coastal defences remained on alert in 1708–9, and the Protestant populace were ‘almost frightened out of their wits’.1 At the same time, since the Catholics were as much an internal as external threat in Ireland, the Kit-Cats' short rule would reveal the dark, repressive underside of the Whigs' aggressive Protestant patriotism—to be replicated throughout Britain's empire in the centuries to come.
Addison's career so far had been almost entirely guided by Kit-cats—Halifax, Somers, Manchester and Wharton. Wharton was a very different character from the other three, and it has often been assumed Addison had trouble respecting his new boss for the same reasons Queen Anne found Wharton personally offensive: his blaspheming, gambling, wild living and brash manner. Macaulay contrasted Wharton's crude masculinity to the Irish Secretary's ‘gentleness and delicacy’. They were, in a sense, personifications of the Kit-Cat Club's double nature—the crude mixed with the refined.
But Addison did respect Wharton, who, though no intellectual, ‘had too much Penetration to be shuffled with’, as well as a natural gift for politics.2 When Addison and Steele later penned a dedication to Wharton, they carefully complimented him less on his vision than on his ‘utmost Industry’.3 Addison also perceived an element of self-parody in Wharton's swaggering and backslapping, as if he were playing up to his reputation, distracting opponents from his acuity. Addison was fastidious almost to the point of asexuality, yet his letters suggest he sometimes envied Wharton's gregarious, relaxed manner, which must have been popular with the Irish. Steele testified Wharton had, in return, ‘a particular Esteem and Friendship for him [Addison] to his Death, consulting him on the most important Affairs’.4
Wharton was in his early sixties when he was posted to Ireland. His fair eyebrows were white underneath the fringe of his eternally youthful periwig and his waistline had expanded to the point of no return, but he was otherwise in good health. Wharton was appointed Lord Lieutenant partly because he had a vested interest in Irish prosperity; his family owned land in the Irish counties of Carlow and Westmeath. Through his second marriage to Lucy Loftus, a Kit-Cat toast of 1698, Wharton acquired a large estate in Rathfarnham, southeast of Dublin, worth several thousand pounds in rents.
Wharton's departure for Ireland was delayed, officially by the illness of his wife, but unofficially to benefit his colleagues, who recognized Anne was sending him to Dublin partly to remove his influential voice from Westminster. By mid-April 1709, departure could be deferred no longer. Wharton and Addison sailed a week after Steele's Tatler launch. The crossing to Dublin took three days and involved risk of capture by French privateers who often forced ships to St Malo. When Wharton and Addison arrived on 21 April, Dubliners were glad not only for their governors' safety but also to receive news from England, since the last packet boat from Holyhead had been captured, and its mailbags thrown overboard.
As Wharton's yacht sailed up to Dublin's Wooden Bridge, escorted by convoys of small boats, greeting crowds waited on the Strand. Large numbers of the Irish nobility and gentry had turned out in their coaches to watch the governors' procession up troop-lined streets to Dublin Castle, the viceregal residence and English secretariat. Dublin was predominantly an army town, the military list far exceeding the civil, so the quayside would have been filled with bright uniforms, mixed with the distinctive dark dress of the town's Quakers and other Dissenters.
Ireland's Dissenters were an economically successful, fastexpanding minority. In Ulster, over half the population were Presbyterians and others who had fled from political persecution and economic hardship in Scotland. The Reverend Joseph Boyse was the chief Dissenter in Dublin at this date and would certainly have been out to welcome Wharton as ‘the Dissenters’ Friend'. Before leaving England, Wharton helped pass a Whig Bill to naturalize foreign Protestants living in England (thus creating many new citizens likely to vote Whig). This Bill was a litmus test of Whig loyalty; every Kit-Cat MP voted for it. The Irish Dissenters therefore celebrated Wharton's appointment as Lord Lieutenant, believing it would improve their rights. They saw Wharton as their co-religionist, even if he conformed in appearances to Anglicanism and was a religious sceptic in private.
While Irish Dissenters were mostly shopkeepers, tradesmen and merchants, the Established Church's members tended to come either from ‘the quality’ or the urban poor. A class conflict therefore underlay the confessional one. In Dublin, social ascents could be dramatic: Sir William Robinson, the city's Surveyor-General and Accountant-General in 1702, for example, started life as a scullery boy. Most of the Irish nobility, on the other hand, were, like their Scottish equivalents, living on incomes inadequate to match their pretensions, thanks to low Irish land rents. This made competition for sinecures, pensions and government posts especially fierce, and the Protestant Establishment deeply defensive of their privileges, especially the right to hold office.
It would therefore have been with some trepidation that William King, Archbishop of Dublin, welcomed Wharton. The Irish Establishment could not comprehend a man whose religious convictions were subservient to his political ideology. As Steele put it, Wharton ‘often declared that he was a Friend to the Dissenters, not taking them in a Religious but a civil Capacity, because they were always Friends to the Constitution’.5 Wharton's prominent role in ensuring the Scottish Presbyterians were tolerated within the 1707 Act of Union did not recommend him to the Anglo-Irish either; as Swift wrote: ‘We make a mighty difference…between suffering thistles to grow among us, and wearing them for posies.’6
Swift, a prebend in the Irish Church at this date, reassured Archbishop King that Addison, ‘le plus honnête homme du monde‘,7 was a much more God-fearing man than Wharton and could be trusted to defend the Irish Establishment. Swift described the new Secretary as ‘a most excellent Person; and being my most intimate Friend, I shall use all my Credit to set him right in his Notions of Persons and Things’.8 It was true that Addison and Swift were friends at this date: the previous summer in London, Swift had boasted that the ‘triumvirate of Mr. Addison, Steele and me come together as seldom as the Sun, Moon and Earth’ though ‘I often see each of them, and each of them me and each other’.9 But Swift was underestimating the strong Kit-Cat bond between Wharton and Addison. When Swift openly criticized Wharton, he was baffled to find Addison becoming ‘nine Times more secret to me’.10
The crowd on the Dublin quay would not have represented the country as a whole. Contemporaries estimated there were six Papists to every Protestant in Ireland, while modern historians estimate that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the country's population was Catholic—those then referred to by Irish Protestants as ‘the Irish’.11 Since William III's victory at the Boyne, and the Treaty of Limerick that followed it in October 1691, the Protestant minority had been in the ascendant. Swearing religious oaths, including one denying the Pope's authority, became a requirement for holding office, practising law, joining the army or standing for election, and Catholics were required to pay tithes to the Anglican Church. Catholicism was further restricted by persecution of its clergy. The Catholics' poverty arose not so much from these Penal Laws, however, as from the peasantry's exploitation by landlords of both denominations and due to a rapid population increase that in
flated rents. Swift saw the English as pursuing a deliberate policy of restricting trade and keeping Ireland poor, but not too poor, so as to limit the number of popular Catholic uprisings.
The year 1709 was one of high food prices in Ireland. In March 1709, a proclamation banning food exports declared that ‘the poorer sort of the Inhabitants of this Kingdom are in danger of perishing’ thanks to a bad harvest and then to bulk-buying by merchants who, ignoring the famine, exported what corn, grain and meal there was ‘to parts beyond the Seas’.12 Dutch merchants had been attacked in Cork by hungry mobs, and along the Dublin quayside many curious spectators out to greet Wharton and Addison would have depended on the relief granted by their English governors in the form of the city's single workhouse and a small cash fund for widows.
The two Kit-Cats probably looked down from their carriage upon the mob with a large dose of English bigotry. Swift said he and his fellow Protestants thought the Catholic poor ‘as inconsiderable as the Women and Children’,13 yet he knew his English friends did not think much more highly of the Protestant ruling class:
As to Ireland, they know little more than they do of Mexico; further than that it is a Country subject to the King of England, full of Boggs, inhabited by wild Irish Papists; who are kept in Awe by mercenary Troops sent from thence: And their general Opinion is that it were better for England if this whole Island were sunk into the Sea.14
Kit-Cat Club, The Page 23
