Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  Plays were performed at Dublin's Theatre Royal (known as the Queen's Theatre, like Vanbrugh's in the Haymarket, for the duration of Anne's reign). The repertoire was imported from London, albeit authored by many Anglo-Irish playwrights like Congreve and Wycherley, and Wharton invited a London comedian named Anthony Aston to Dublin to act in a comedy and musical.

  There was no programme of patronage for Anglo-Irish writers comparable to that of the Kit-Cat Club in London, however. For all his ballad and toast writing, Wharton had less interest in literature than Halifax or Somers. Wharton encouraged the reprinting of certain English political tracts in Dublin, but did not commission original works of propaganda.

  Dublin was little different from numerous medium-sized English towns in mimicking, after an inevitable lag, the fashions and values of London. An increasing number of Irish nobles were purchasing townhouses in Dublin where they spent the winters; the coaching ring in Phoenix Park imitated that in Hyde Park; and foreign tutors were setting up shop to teach Anglo-Irish boys French for their Grand Tours. The city's councillors were increasingly concerned with Dublin's image, as shown by a complaint about butchers throwing animal hides into the streets, ‘by which evil practices this city has suffered in its reputation and character abroad’.43

  Traffic between Dublin and London was also increasing. With Irish private bills and court rulings open to appeal in Westminster, each Anglo-Irish family had to send at least one representative to London to manage its affairs. Meanwhile, many English Whigs took advantage of Wharton's rule to visit Dublin. Steele wrote that Wharton's Court ‘was crowded with People of Quality who came from England on purpose to have the pleasure of his Conversation’.44

  Tonson promised to visit, but Congreve was soon observing that ‘Mr Addison surely knows Mr Tonson too well to think he will come to Ireland for having said so, unless some considerable subscription may be set afoot to induce him.’45

  Unlike York or Oxford, fashions, goods, news and even ideas could enter Dublin directly from Europe or the other English colonies, without having to transit London first. ‘We hear by our East India ships lately arrived in Ireland that the Factory at Borneo has been ruined by the Natives, who it is said rose upon Our Countrymen and cut their throats,’ Addison wrote.46 Ships from Jamaica, which often docked first at Galway, if they made it past the French privateers, carried luxuries like sugar and indigo, while ships from Spain, which docked in Kinsale and Cork, brought wine, brandy, salt, oil and lemons. Six days after Wharton and Addison arrived, a ship from Bilbao brought these foodstuffs, which were as quickly shipped up to Dublin as across to London. Added to plentiful supplies of Irish butter, cheese, beef and honey, all among Ireland's major exports to England in 1709, Dublin did not lag behind London in culinary terms. The dinners hosted at Dublin Castle by the Kit-Cat colonialists must have rivalled the feasts at Barn Elms or the Fountain, minus Mr Cat's pies.

  Addison was responsible, in the summer of 1709, for pushing a less popular import upon the Irish. In July 1709, a proposal of the Privy Council of Ireland, of which Addison was a member, was sent to Anne suggesting a group of war refugees from the Palatinate (a territory on the Rhine, including the cities of Heidelberg and Mannheim) be resettled in Ireland. These Palatines were currently in Kent, where their presence was provoking protests from the locals who thought the refugees were taking their jobs and parish charity. Some 10,000 were encamped on Blackheath. Stepney had educated Addison on the persecution of the Protestants in places like the Palatinate, which Stepney witnessed at first hand during his diplomatic travels—the French army's complete destruction of Heidelberg in 1693, for example, was often held up as incontrovertible evidence of Louis XIV's savagery. Later Addison wrote against the use of torture as the ‘Method of Reasoning which has been made use of with the poor Refugees’.47 Wharton and Addison saw that resettling some Palatine refugees to Ireland would alleviate the tensions they were creating in England, while bringing in ‘such a Colony of Protestants could not but add to the Security and Advantage of the English Interest’ in Ireland.48

  It was not so simple politically. Since the Palatines were not Anglicans, they would add to Ireland's much-resented Dissenting population. Thomas Lindsay, Bishop of Killacoe, called the refugees ‘a parcel of beggars’ that Ireland could ill afford.49 Wharton lobbied to persuade the Irish MPs and clergy that the refugees should be admitted, and encouraged the reprinting in Dublin of English tracts describing the persecution of the Palatines. In the end, with the agreement of the Kit-Cat-dominated Board of Trade in London, over 800 Palatine families (some 2–3,000 individuals) were brought over from England to settle in Limerick and Kerry. It is a tribute to the skill of Addison and Wharton that the Irish Commons declared they would ‘cheerfully embrace’ the resettled refugees (‘Their Calamitous Circumstances justly remind us how lately we were turned Out of our Dwellings by Violence and Oppression and forced to seek shelter in England’), though the Irish MPs coolly asked for £5,000 (£480,000 today) a year from the Treasury in London as compensation.50

  The refugees received discounted rents and financial support, but it was difficult finding work around Limerick and Kerry, so many drifted towards Dublin, where there was already a sizeable Huguenot refugee population, or back to England. Some refugees did settle in western Ireland—on the estate of Sir Thomas Southwell near Rathkeale, for example, where the remnants of that engineered Protestant community remain discernible in the area today.

  In mid-July 1709, Wharton retired to the Lord Lieutenant's allocated country house, Chapelizod, with fifty armed guards, their tents pitched in the grounds. Addison and his staff of clerks followed. Chapelizod was known as ‘The King's House’ because William III had retired there after his victory at the Boyne. It lay to the left of the road out of Dublin that skirted the banks of the Liffey. The Temple family owned the land surrounding it, and famous Dutch gardens adjoined the house.

  Before leaving town, Wharton sent a letter back to the Southern Office warning Sunderland that any attempt by the Privy Council to amend the Irish Money Bill (for taxes to supply the war) would offend those he was trying to win over to the Whig side in Dublin. Amendments were made, however, as the English and Scots tried to protect their wool and linen producers against the Irish. When the Bill returned thus amended to Dublin, it was an embarrassment to Wharton, who looked as if he lacked the London ministers' full support.

  Steele said the Tories in London hoped to keep Wharton out of the way in Dublin for the winter session of 1709–10, as the political contest between the Junto and their Tory opponents was heating up. Wharton, however, cunningly sent Lady Wharton to the Queen to beg she might see her husband in London one last time before she gave birth that winter, so Wharton was allowed home.

  After a fortnight's holiday in Ireland, touring the east coast and visiting the site of the battle of the Boyne, Addison also planned to head home to England—crossing paths with the Palatine refugees who were being shipped in the opposite direction. Before departing, however, he met briefly with Jonathan Swift.

  The expectations that Halifax's and Somers' flattery of Swift had raised in 1701 had soured by the time Swift dedicated A Tale of a Tub (1704) to Somers. While at first glance this dedication bid for Somers' patronage, its wording had an undertone of facetious resentment, which Somers was too intelligent to miss. Congreve expressed a relatively cool opinion of his old schoolmate's bestseller, and it was Addison and Steele who had been invited into the Kit-Cat Club in 1704–5, not Swift. Swift later disparaged Halifax's literary discernment in the same breath as he expressed his disillusionment with Halifax's unfulfilled promises: ‘His encouragements were only good words and dinners…I never heard him say one good thing, or seem to taste what was said by another.’51 Swift's awkward combination of unctuousness, social insecurity, sarcastic pride and quirky genius did not, at any rate, suit Halifax's palate.

  Swift unsuccessfully lobbied Godolphin, Halifax and Somers on behalf of the Irish clergy (regard
ing their taxes) for two years after 1707. Swift's letters to Halifax in 1709 are such an odd mixture of obsequiousness and veiled insult that it is easy to understand why this lobbying failed (in one, for example, Swift tells Halifax that His Lordship is ‘universally admired by this tasteless People [the Irish]’52).

  In 1709, Swift then switched his attention to the new Lord Lieutenant, Wharton, but was no more successful. At Swift's first attempt to seek a meeting, Wharton told him to return another day, and when he did so, Wharton received him ‘dryly’ and broke off the interview in a temper. Swift tried one last time, but when he was heard with no greater sympathy, he left Wharton's office bitterly offended, and humiliated by the failure he was forced to report to Archbishop King.

  Swift acknowledged Wharton to be a man of political conviction (‘in Point of Party…[Wharton] is one to be confided in’53) but considered his toleration of Protestant Dissent to be both religiously and constitutionally reckless. It was this attitude that ultimately precluded Swift from developing or maintaining solid friendships with the Kit-Cats, including Addison.

  Wharton's first year of government in Ireland had avoided the contentious issue of Dissenters' rights almost entirely, yet Wharton and Addison also avoided granting the Irish Church any new benefits. ‘During the greater part of [Wharton's] government, I lived in the country, saw the Lieutenant very seldom when I came to town, nor ever entered into the least degree of confidence with him,’ Swift later wrote.54 Indeed, Wharton's snubbing of Swift pushed the latter decisively in the direction of the Tories and made Wharton into Swift's personal bête noire. In December 1710, Swift would anonymously publish A Short Character of His Excellency Thomas Earl of Wharton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, vilifying Wharton,55 and in the marginalia of a history book Swift jotted down his damning verdict beside Wharton's name: ‘The most universal villain I ever knew.’56

  Wharton—who was capable of having a man dismissed from his place one day, then the next, ‘as if nothing at all had passed, lay[ing] his hands with much friendliness on your shoulders’57—hardly noticed the deep offence he had caused Swift by snubbing him. It is unknown whether, when Addison and Swift crossed paths in Dublin in the late summer of 1709, Addison recognized how a little seed of resentment had been planted in the soil of Irish religious politics that would soon grow to produce, from Swift's pen, the most toxic anti-Junto and anti-Kit-Cat propaganda. As Swift hitched a lift back to England on the Lord Lieutenant's yacht, there was already lying among his papers just such a piece of sulphurous invective against Wharton that would deeply wound its victim the following year.

  XIV

  THE MONOPOLY BROKEN: WHIG DOWNFALL

  A Party Man indeed, and such most of Us are or must be, is an Animal that no Commentator upon Human Nature can sufficiently explain. He has not his Opinion…in his own keeping. Quo ad hoc, he is Mad.

  MATTHEW PRIOR, An Essay Upon Opinion1

  THE END OF the previous year, 1708, had seen the Junto Whigs at the zenith of their power and influence, dominating commerce, trade, government and culture. The attainment of this dominance, however, coincided with military setbacks for Marlborough and with growing public anger about the financial and human cost of the war. It was no longer possible to tell whether Kit-Cat interests were based on a principled vision of the national good, as they claimed, or whether they defined that public good only by what was good for themselves. Soon the argument between these two viewpoints would burst into the public realm through a ferocious ‘paper war’ between Whig and Tory propagandists.

  A man widely seen as a living stereotype of Whig greed and self-interest, Sir Henry Furnese, joined the Kit-Cat Club in 1709. Furnese embodied all the social alliances, formed since the Glorious Revolution, which the Tories feared and hated: a Dissenter, a selfmade merchant turned financier, married into old money and land, then raised to a baronetcy in 1707. Furnese did vast deals with Halifax's Treasury during the 1690s, and made private loans to Tonson in the early 1700s, around the same time that he became Marlborough's personal banker. In 1705 Godolphin's Treasury gave Furnese a six-month monopoly on remittances to the Low Countries, Germany and Portugal, on which he received substantial commissions. By the time he joined the Club, Furnese's combined holdings in the Bank of England and East India Company were over £16,000 (some £1.5 million today). The high interest rate on Furnese's loans meant the Tories and rival Whig investors characterized him as a wartime profiteer, though, without such loans, for which Furnese sometimes personally shouldered the risk, the Grand Alliance might have collapsed on several occasions.

  Furnese's admission to a Club already containing some of the richest private citizens in Europe was offensive to those who opposed the war not only because of the resources the war consumed but also because it accelerated unwelcome social changes in England. Mary Astell sarcastically declared that the Kit-Cats ‘cease not to endeavour, by the Assistance of your darling Luxury, that great Leveller and Transferrer of Property, to make the Tradesman equal to the Lord’.2

  In November 1709, Furnese—whose ‘correspondents’ had extended further enormous loans to the English and Allied governments that spring—hosted a dinner for the Kit-Cats to celebrate his ‘promotion’ into the Club. Maynwaring told the Duchess of Marlborough that her husband had intimated he might attend Furnese's Kit-Cat feast, and that Furnese had promised, if the Duke did attend, to

  carry the Club into the City, and give such an entertainment as never was seen there…[I]f his Grace shall be at leisure to be there next Thursday, it will be an honour which every member will be proud of…and they will certainly testify their gratitude by some public act.3

  Marlborough was successfully brought to Furnese's feast, a publicity coup of enormous significance for the Junto Whigs. Tory non-members gossiped that he was ‘admitted extraordinary to the Kit-Cat Club, and Jacob Tonson ordered to dedicate Caesar's Commentaries to him and not to the Duke of Ormonde, as he has promised, and six of the members are to write the epistle [dedication] to him’.4

  The first point of this gossip was false—Marlborough never joined the Kit-Cat Club, but the Whigs were happy to let the story circulate that he had. Twenty-four Kit-Cats subscribed to Caesar's Commentaries prior to its publication, demonstrating their support for its new dedicatee, Marlborough, at a time when he was under increasing pressure from the Tories, after the failed spring 1709 peace talks and the bloody battle of Malplaquet.5

  On the Saturday morning following Furnese's feast, Maynwaring congratulated the Duchess of Marlborough ‘upon the victory which your servant, Sir H. Furnese, obtained last Thursday in the Kit Cat Club’. Maynwaring said Wharton, who distrusted Marlborough as a Tory at heart, tried to obstruct the admission of the Duke's banker, while Lord Mohun, so loyal to Marlborough that he later offered to second the Duke in a duel, ‘prepared to open the debate’ in support of Furnese. In the end, ‘the members were so visibly on the knight's side that there was not a word said against him, and he was peaceably introduced to a place which he had as much a mind to as all the world has to places of another kind’.6

  A few days before Furnese's feast, Dr Henry Sacheverell, a High Church, High Tory firebrand, had preached a sermon in St Paul's Cathedral challenging the country's post-Revolutionary constitution. Sacheverell had been invited to do so by the Tory Lord Mayor, but the Mayor could not have guessed how inflammatory the sermon would be—threatening the current government of ‘False Brethren’ with ‘the lake which burns with fire and brimstone’. In 1688, Tory defenders of the Church of England had ultimately set aside their religious doctrine of ‘non-resistance’ or ‘passive obedience’ to the supremacy of the Crown and helped oust James II; now Sacheverell condemned their pragmatism, implying the Revolution should be reversed.

  It was Sacheverell's second anti-Whig sermon of the year. A warweary populace, strained by inflation and food shortages, and resenting the refugees arriving in London when a quarter of their countrymen were receiving parish relief, were excited
by Sacheverell's militancy. They bought copies of the printed sermon in their hundreds of thousands.

  The Kit-Cats were alarmed by this charismatic preacher rallying the mobs for the Tory cause, and rose to the Tory Lord Mayor's bait. A letter from one Tory to another in December 1709 reported that a plan to impeach Sacheverell before Parliament had been ‘some time since fully concluded upon at the Kit-Cat Club, where my Lord Marlborough, they say, was present, assented to it, and has actually enrolled himself a member of that detestable society’.7 This suggests the impeachment may have been discussed at Furnese's feast. Another source says the decision to impeach Sacheverell was taken by the Junto at some ‘consultation’ where the Duchess of Marlborough was also present ‘to fill out their tea and wash their cups’8—probably not, therefore, a Kit-Cat meeting but a mixed-sex gathering around the Duchess' tea-table.

  Wherever the idea was first mooted, it was finally resolved upon at another unofficial ministerial confab in mid-December 1709, including many Kit-Cat politicians but also non-Kit-Cats like Godolphin, Sunderland and Orford.9 One source has Wharton and Sunderland as the most fervent proponents of impeachment, overcoming Somers' cautious preference for a lower-profile approach, while another, contradictory source states that no man was ‘so pressing’ as Somers ‘to have Dr Sacheverell tried; and one of his arguments…was that if they did not do it, the Queen would be preached out of the throne and the nation ruined’.10 Whoever was responsible, the decision to impeach would prove a terrible miscalculation.