A junior Whig MP first formally raised the matter in the Commons on 13 December, and the Whig-dominated House swiftly agreed that Sacheverell should face trial. During the following two months, while the trial was being prepared, the Tories elevated Sacheverell to their mascot and martyr. When the trial finally commenced at the end of February 1710, the streets surrounding Westminster Hall were lined with excited crowds of anti-government, pro-Sacheverell demonstrators. Feelings were running as high as when the seven bishops were tried on the eve of the 1688 Revolution. Then, young John Somers had been a counsel for the defence, with the mood of the people behind him; now, as Lord President, he must have sensed he and his friends were working against the popular will.
There were twenty ‘managers’ on the prosecution side, of whom eighteen acted in the trial. Nine were lawyers and, of the remaining nine who were MPs, five were Kit-Cats—or, more precisely, ‘Kitlings’: Walpole, Stanhope, Compton, Harry Boyle and Jack Smith. On the first day, Halifax's brother, Attorney General Sir James Montagu, was one of the first speakers for the prosecution. On day two, Walpole and Stanhope spoke to great effect. Walpole's speech was peppered with jibes against the Tories that amused the audience. He was feeling confident from his recent promotion to Treasurer of the Navy. He focused on the contradictions of the Tory position: ‘To recommend themselves to the Queen they condemn that Revolution without which She never had been Queen…[and] to manifest their Aversion and forever to blast all Hopes of the Pretender, they advance and maintain the Hereditary Right as the only true Right to the Crown.’11
Stanhope's speech, though the last of the day, was the most effective of all. Using few notes, he delivered a passionate attack on Sacheverell as a thinly disguised Jacobite intent on sedition. The Lieutenant-General turned Tory texts on their heads while playing upon the latitude allowed him, as a soldier, to speak heatedly:
There is such an Affinity, my Lords, between this Sermon and the Doctrines which are preached and propagated by a certain Set of Men…They are the Pure and Undefiled Church of England! The only Men of Loyal and Steady Principles! They never took the Oaths to the Government; never bent their Knee to Baal!…We are all Schismatics, that is, all the rest of England are Schismatics, Heretics and Rebels!…If they are in the right, my Lords, what are the consequences?…All the Blood of so many brave Men, who have died (as they thought) in the Service of their country, has been spilt in Defence of an Usurpation, and they were only so many Rebels and Traitors.
On the third day, Compton spoke, followed by Smith, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who delivered a clear extempore speech on Whig views about toleration of Protestant Dissent. The latter condemned Sacheverell on Christian grounds, for, ‘instead of preaching peace and charity and other moral virtues’, taking upon himself ‘to raise jealousies, foment divisions and stir up sedition’.12 Harry Boyle made the last speech of the day to a restless, exhausted audience.
That night, Tory mobs went on the rampage and central London saw more street violence than it had during even the peak of the Civil War. Armed rioters burnt down Dissenting chapels and meeting houses, and attacked the homes of Wharton and Furnese—from the mob's viewpoint, though Wharton had objected to Furnese joining the Kit-Cat, these men were birds of the same feather. Many Kit-cats felt in personal danger as their most alarmist fears about Jacobite rebellion seemed suddenly to be realized.
The morning after the riots, the trial proceeded, in a state of muted shock, to hear Sacheverell's defence. Sir Simon Harcourt was widely agreed to be the most eloquent defence manager, but Sacheverell also presented his own case brilliantly. Using the dock as a pulpit, the Doctor spoke to the city and countryside beyond Westminster Hall, knowing his speech would be published and disseminated before the trial's verdict. On some points Sacheverell remained unrepentant, but on the charge of sedition he declared his innocence before God, ‘the Searcher of Hearts’, and, as many in the audience cried with pity for his martyrdom, he prayed with seeming magnanimity for his prosecutors to be delivered from sin and error.
Addison was one Kit-Cat unable to attend Sacheverell's trial, having gone to Malmesbury to campaign for that seat—if winning the votes of only thirteen gentlemen, most of whom were thoroughly under the thumb of his patron Wharton, can be described as campaigning. Addison's interest in the trial was personal as well as political, since Sacheverell was a former roommate from Magdalen—yet another case of a man whose flamboyant self-confidence had attracted modest Mr Addison. It is unknown whether Addison was aware of Sacheverell's ‘high-flying’ views about the Church and Divine Right of Kings during those university years, but Sacheverell had preached against Dissenters as ‘crafty, faithless and insidious persons’ for almost a decade since.13 Addison was therefore particularly grateful for news of the trial in letters sent by Steele, who attended the trial every day and met with Kit-Cat friends to debrief on the proceedings in the evenings. Steele developed a particular friendship with Stanhope during this episode.
On 9 March, the prosecution replied to Sacheverell's defence, and on 16 March the lords began considering their verdict. Among some thirty peers who spoke that day, Wharton was one of the boldest. He dared argue, before Anne, that ‘if the Revolution were not lawful, many in that House and vast Numbers without were guilty of Blood, Murder, Rapine, and Injustice; and the Queen herself was no lawful Queen’.14 Conscious that, though they might win the vote in the Lords, they had lost in the court of public opinion, Halifax and Somers said little and sat looking grim.
When the trial ended on 20 March, Sacheverell was found guilty by a margin of only seventeen lords' votes. He received a light sentence, escaping imprisonment, but was banned from the pulpit for three years, with copies of his sermons and speeches to be confiscated and destroyed. Though Carlisle had proposed this light sentence, in order to salvage some of the Queen's favour for his party, other Kit-Cats were outraged. Smith muttered that this was a ‘ridiculous judgment’ that would deter nobody from Jacobite sedition.15Most depressing for the Kit-Cat Club, the Duke of Somerset was among five lords absent from the critical vote. Somerset claimed ill health, but his absence was interpreted as confirming his decision to defect and join with Harley against the Junto. There had been rumours since September 1709 that the flame-haired Duchess of Somerset was becoming Anne's personal favourite, supplanting the Duchess of Marlborough, while Harley, with the Queen's tacit approval, was urging Somerset to abandon his old Whig friends and colleagues. After Somerset's no-show at the Sacheverell trial, he and Shrewsbury (back from Italy) became leaders of a splinter grouping of Whigs willing to work with Harley and the Tories to form a ministry dedicated to ending the war.
The rest of the Kit-Cat Club, led by Wharton and Somers, remained firmly behind Marlborough and the policy of pursuing the conflict until the French were thoroughly contained and Spanish trading rights firmly secured for England. Halifax came closest to being seduced by Harley's offers of cross-party cooperation, since he had long nursed resentment about receiving no high office (being considered a man of ‘unreasonable vanity’ and ambition by Marlborough and Godolphin, and coveting Godolphin's own Treasury job16). It was Wharton who gave Halifax some ideological backbone and persuaded him not to go the same way as Somerset.
An emergency meeting of the Kit-Cat Club, to discuss and condemn Somerset's ‘elopement’ with Harley,17 was convened in April 1710. The ‘good-natured’18 but rarely sober Charles Lenox, 1st Duke of Richmond, was chosen to host it because of his high rank and birth (an illegitimate son of Charles II by Louise de Kérouaille), and because he had been a Kit-Cat for as long as Somerset, since the 1690s. Maynwaring said it was considered essential for ‘a thing of that consequence to be done in a Full House’—using parliamentary jargon to describe the Club's proceedings.19 Whether the lisping Somerset deigned to attend his own expulsion is unknown, but nonmembers, hearing about it on the political grapevine, reported the meeting's outcome, saying Somerset ‘was expelled the Chit-cat by a vote brought in r
eady cut and dried by Ld Wharton: the crime objected, the words of the vote say, was for being suspected to have held conferences with Robin the Trickster [Robert Harley]’.20 Addison, supporting Wharton, commented that Somerset seemed, by aligning with Harley, ‘to have pulled down the pillars like Sampson to perish among those he destroyed’.21
Another place in the Club also became vacant because of the Earl of Essex's sudden death in January 1710. The members most likely to have filled these two vacancies were 25-year-old Richard Lumley, later 2nd Earl of Scarbrough, and 20-year-old John, 2nd Duke of Montagu. Scarbrough was the son of a loyal old Whig signatory to the invitation to William, yet said to be without ‘the least pride of birth or rank’.22 An MP for East Grinstead after 1709, Scarbrough inherited his peerage upon his elder brother's death in 1710, and established himself as ‘one of the best speakers of his time’ in the Lords.23 The young Duke of Montagu, meanwhile, was Halifax's cousin—a boy of 9 at Boughton House when Congreve stayed there in 1699, working on The Way of the World. Montagu was eccentrically generous and soft-hearted, loved childish pranks, and held radical views about educating African slaves.24
In 1709, he had inherited his dukedom and fortune, including Montagu House, in central London, and Boughton. Montagu was also Marlborough's son-in-law, married to Henrietta's younger sister, the hot-tempered Mary, so his admission was a further signal of the Club's definitive positioning as Marlborough's defenders.
While the Kit-Cat Club was busy restocking its members, and getting into tavern brawls with Tories over whether Sacheverell should be toasted or cursed,25 Sacheverell was celebrating as if he had been acquitted rather than convicted. The Whigs saw, from reports of the crowds that greeted Sacheverell as he toured the country, that their party would lose the next election if the Queen called it anytime soon. The Tories, seeing the same thing, organized addresses to the Queen from every corner of England, begging her to do so.
In the spring of 1710, Addison returned with Wharton to Ireland for their second year as colonial governors. Addison had become a regular contributor to The Tatler—and hence Steele's secret collaborator behind the mask of Isaac Bickerstaff—over the preceding winter. Now The Dublin Gazette, ‘at the request of several Persons of Quality’ (namely Addison and Wharton), advertised that The Tatler would be reprinted locally three times a week, as in England, so long as the packet boats brought the originals over safely.26
As Wharton and Addison made the same ceremonial procession up to Dublin Castle in 1710, their mood was very different from that on the same occasion a year before. Their success in winning over the majority of the Irish Parliament during 1709 was now irrelevant. Their Dublin opponents were emboldened by reports that their governors' friends no longer had the Queen's backing and were likely to lose control of the English Commons at the next election. Members of the lower (predominantly High Church and High Tory) Irish clergy disseminated a message to local churches to pray for ‘Thomas Wharton, being very sick and weak’—a genuine request from the wife of a sick Dublin butcher named Thomas Wharton, put to malicious use.27Reports of civil unrest in England, surrounding Sacheverell, probably also emboldened the Irish: the first signs of what would later become widespread agrarian unrest were seen in Connaught in 1710, when evicted tenants protested by ‘cattle-houghing’ (cutting the sinews or tendons in their landlords' cattle's legs).
The Irish Parliament convened in May 1710, Wharton promoting several local men tolerant of Dissenters, and granting a pardon to a Presbyterian preacher at Drogheda. Repealing the Test Acts was now even more of a non-starter than in 1709, and the Irish Commons, particularly its Tories, more assertively resisted approving the war supply. They argued that Irish taxes should be saved for Irish armaments and fortifications, or for suppressing domestic Catholic unrest, such as the ‘riotous tumult’ of ‘about Ten Thousand Papists’ that Wharton's soldiers quashed in County Meath in June.28 Wharton's parliamentary skills were once again evident as he overcame these objections and got Marlborough's supplies voted through. Numerous other small political defeats in Ireland, however, reflected the Whigs' coming fall from power in London: the appointment of a Tory Provost at Trinity College Dublin; the vandalization by Tory students of a statue of William III; a delay in funds from London to demolish the Tories' favourite tavern in order to build a wider entrance to Dublin Castle.
Addison—preparing to lose his income as Secretary for Ireland after the next general election in England—purchased a lifelong sinecure as Keeper of Records of Bermingham Tower in Dublin Castle. This post had been worth only £10 per annum, but Addison had the salary raised to £400 (over £42,000 today), as a kind of pension. Addison once defined a corrupt man as one ‘who upon any Pretence whatsoever receives more than what is the stated and unquestioned Fee of his Office’,29 and the evidence suggests that he lived up to this probity in all his offices,30 while feeling no guilt about giving himself a post and then raising its salary.
A second, unexpected fortune came to Addison at about the same time. Addison had had his younger brother Gulston appointed President of the United East India Company's Council and Governor of Fort St George in Madras in December 1708. It was a job worth up to £20,000 a year (or over £2 million today). Now Addison received news that Gulston had died in suspicious circumstances at Fort St George, bequeathing Addison his United East India Company holdings.
Steele's finances were also improving, in keeping with his rising status within the Kit-Cat Club thanks to The Tatler's unprecedented popularity. Steele was no longer simply Addison's sidekick, though Addison still complimented his friend on particular Tatlers in the tone of a teacher patting a pupil on the head. In January 1710, before the Sacheverell trial announced the reversal of their political fortunes, the Kit-Cat patrons saw to it that Steele received a Commission in the Stamp Office, worth £300 a year (some £32,000 today). Nearly forty Kit-Cats and Kit-Cat relations also recognized The Tatler's achievement by subscribing to the publication of a first collected volume of its essays. Tonson collected the subscriptions at his new premises, marked by the sign of Shakespeare's Head, on the south side of the Strand, facing Catherine Street, which then cut across today's Aldwych.
In July 1710, Steele dedicated this collected Tatler volume not to any patron with deep pockets, but to his Kit-Cat colleague, Maynwaring, declaring nobody had a ‘nobler Spirit for the Contempt of all Imposture’.31 This dedication recognized that Maynwaring, keenly observant under deceptively heavy eyelids, and said to be ‘the ruling man in all conversations’,32 had assumed the role of the Whigs' unofficial chief of propaganda since the 1708 election. The most political Tatlers that summer (nos. 187 and 193) were written by Maynwaring, or based on his hints. Maynwaring persuaded Steele that the time had passed for Isaac Bickerstaff's cosy, avuncular reports from his club—that a new political situation demanded less subtle rhetoric. The Tatler therefore started risking more essays that explicitly defended the current Whig ministry. Steele filled one issue that should have celebrated the Queen on her birthday, for example, with a celebration of her leading ministers instead. This ‘Constellation’ of talent, he wrote, reflected ‘a lustre upon each other, but in a more particular manner on their Sovereign’,33 suggesting power and influence now shone in a radically reversed direction, from subject to monarch. This was the great Whig inversion of traditional political philosophy, to which Steele subscribed all the more enthusiastically after listening to the Sacheverell trial's contest of ideologies. It was the kind of journalism, subtly undermining the Queen's authority, which caused the Tory leader Henry St John to denounce ‘all the Pains which have been taken to lessen her Character…by the Wits of the Kit-Cat’.34
Steele continued to struggle in his private life. A disgruntled letter in April 1710 told Prue, who seems to have passed the last month of another pregnancy at Addison's summer cottage at Sandy End, that she was neglecting the simple wifely duty of companionship: ‘Rising a little in a morning and being disposed to cheerfulness…would n
ot be amiss.’35 Mrs Steele's moodiness is explained when we learn that, despite his sizeable Stamp Office income, Steele was once again confined to a ‘sponging house’, an institution for debtors kept by a bailiff or sheriff's officer, later that same month. Swift recorded that Steele was only ‘a little while in prison’,36 but other published pamphlets suggest he was still required to sleep in the sponging house six months later. During the daytime, Steele worked to pay off his debts, writing little notes to Prue to send him clean laundry before various business meetings. Tradesmen friends, rather than Kit-Cat patrons, kept him in pocket money. ‘Why should it be necessary that a Man should be rich to be generous?’ Bickerstaff asked in The Tatler, which continued to appear despite its editor's incarceration.37
Steele would therefore have been in curfewed custody when his son Richard was born on 25 May 1710. Two Kit-Cats, Halifax and Hopkins, stood as godfathers at the boy's baptism at St James's Church, Piccadilly, in June. Steele must have been bitterly amused that he could summon such powerful and wealthy godparents, and receive the whole town's applause for The Tatler, yet could not find the relatively small sums needed to buy his own freedom.
That same spring, legislation colloquially known as the 1709 Copyright Act passed into law. It was the first statutory protection of literary property in England, and Tonson was a prime mover behind it. Tonson's motive in lobbying for the Act was not to secure better rights or incomes for authors like Steele, struggling to make ends meet, but to address the growth of piracy. Grub Street publishers like Edmund Curll printed pirated editions of plays or poems circulating in manuscript, without the author's permission, and though Tonson might ultimately profit from such piracy if the unauthorized edition prompted the author to print a ‘correct’ one afterwards, more often the author's text was gazumped at the last minute by some inferior imitator. Tonson therefore used his Kit-Cat contacts to lobby for the new law, and Addison established a committee to consider ‘amendments made by the Lords in a Bill to encourage learning by vesting the property in printed books in their authors and publishers’.38 Addison and Steele also raised public awareness by writing in The Tatler of professional authors' hardships, comparing themselves to merchants who come home after long voyages and find their countrymen can immediately plunder whatever they bring into port.
Kit-Cat Club, The Page 26
