Lord Godolphin, who had become, alongside Marlborough, a close ally of the Whigs in his final years as Lord Treasurer, died in September 1712, at the Marlboroughs' house, nursed on his deathbed by the Duchess. The Duchess and Dr Garth were also at the bedside of Kit-cat Arthur Maynwaring when he died in November from a dose of ‘Covent Garden gout’ (venereal disease),49 or possibly from taking mercury as a supposed cure. The loss of the Whigs' unofficial propaganda chief was a body blow to them in opposition. Addison, who effectively assumed this responsibility after Maynwaring's death, would be politer in his productions, and therefore less effective.
Lord Mohun was killed two days after Maynwaring's death, in a duel in Hyde Park. The Tory press speculated that this duel, ending not only in Mohun's death but also in that of his opponent the Duke of Hamilton, a crypto-Jacobite and Tory ambassador to the peace talks, was part of a Marlborough-linked Whig plot to obstruct the peace treaty.
Sir Henry Furnese then died on 30 November. Since the previous year, Furnese had been less active as a financier and more active in politics, gaining re-election as MP for Sandwich despite the Whigs' general defeat in 1710, then sitting as a City of London alderman. Lord Oxford had hoped to examine Furnese's accounts, like Marlborough's, and bring him down on corruption charges, but Furnese's death excused the banker from this audit. Furnese's will provided generously for the poor in his constituencies, buying them plots of land from which they earned rents in perpetuity.
It is not obvious who, if anyone, took up these three vacated seats in the Kit-Cat Club, nor those of Tidcomb and Carbery, who died of natural causes in late 1712 and early 1713. The string of Kit-Cat deaths, during a season when London felt, in Addison's words, ‘immersed in Sin and Sea-Coal’,50 darkened the Kit-Cats' already dejected moods. They believed their country was being sold cheap at the peace negotiations across the Channel, and their toasts in 1712 had none of the gaiety and libidinous optimism of earlier years. They wrote of themselves: ‘Kit-cats grown Sage, Love's looser Flames neglect, / Toast not from Passion, but Profound respect.’51
On 23 October 1712, The Spectator announced the death of Sir Roger de Coverley, leaving the fictional Spectator Club in the same state of mourning as the Kit-Cat Club. It was the prelude for the closure of The Spectator on 6 December. Steele wrote the final, 555th issue, saying, ‘It will not be demanded of me why I now leave off.’52 Given the paper's popularity and the fact that we know of no specific actions by Oxford's government to force its closure, Addison and Steele may simply have agreed to quit while they were ahead, to try their pens at other things. When Steele ended the mystery of the paper's authorship in that final issue, he thanked ‘all my creditors for wit and learning’, and especially Addison, saying: ‘I am indeed much more proud of his long continued Friendship than I should be of the Fame of being thought the Author of any Writings which he himself is capable of producing.’53
This declaration of pride in their friendship may also have been a conciliatory gesture, since the last few months of Spectator essays had contained pointed remarks showing tension between the paper's co-authors. Number 476, by Addison, seemed a jibe at Steele's increasingly lazy methods of composition: ‘Irregularity and want of Method are only supportable in Men of great Learning or Genius, who…choose to throw down their Pearls in Heaps before the Reader.’54 Ten days later, no. 484, by Steele, seemed to pick at Addison's insecurity about public speaking, saying ‘modesty’ was not, as Addison so often claimed, a justification for timidity: ‘[U]nder a Notion of Modesty, Men have indulged themselves in a spiritless Sheepishness, and been forever lost to themselves, their Families, their Friends and their Country.’55 The checkmate in this coded exchange of criticisms came in mid-November 1712, when Addison advised readers to avoid letting their hopes run away with them, as this was the rock on which ‘the Bankrupt, the Politician, the Alchemist and Projector are cast away in every Age’.56 Steele was, at some stage in his life, each and every one of these things. Yet, for all these little digs, Addison and Steele remained on broadly friendly terms, united by common enemies and patrons.
Swift, whom Oxford had recently promoted to be Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, took a turn around the Mall with Addison and Ambrose Philips a few weeks later. He recorded that they seemed ‘terrible dry and cold’ and exclaimed:
A curse of party! And do you know I have taken more pains to recommend the Whig wits to the favour and mercy of the [Tory] ministers than any other people. Steele I have kept in his place. Congreve I have got to be used kindly, and secured…and I set Addison so right at first that he might have been employed, and have partly secured him the place he has [Irish Record Keeper]; yet I am worse used by that faction than any man.57
Swift was mistaking for personal ingratitude the despond and mourning that had enveloped Addison and his friends, as they believed their country was on the verge of disaster.
Negotiations with the French were nearing completion by February 1713. The Whigs were convinced that after the peace a Jacobite invasion would follow. The ‘whole club of Whig Lords’ dined and cooked up ‘some damned design’ at Pontack's in the City,58 while their supporters gathered for anxious Pope-burnings and Protestant anniversaries that month at London's Three Tuns and Rummer tavern. Powys House—Somers' former home in Lincoln's Inn—was now rented out to the French ambassador; when it burned to the ground, Whig arsonists were suspected. The philosopher George Berkeley, in London to publish his Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, reported that ‘Mr Addison and Mr Steele (and so far as I can find the rest of that party) seem entirely persuaded there is a design for bringing in The Pretender.’59
Once again the Whigs treated the press as their first line of defence. Steele launched a new paper, The Guardian, printed by the Tonsons, in March 1713. Its fictional narrator, Nester Ironside, was this time an old man who said he spoke his mind for the good of his country. Regarding party politics, Ironside declared: ‘I shall be impartial, though I cannot be neuter.’ Addison and several from the Button's crowd contributed, suggesting that Addison and Steele's friendship remained strong enough to sustain a certain level of continued collaboration.
On 11 April 1713, Britain, Holland, Portugal, Prussia, Savoy and France concluded the Treaty of Utrecht—referred to by the Kit-cats as ‘Matt's Peace’ because of Prior's prominent role in its making.60 The War of Spanish Succession was over as far as these countries were concerned, though Austria continued fighting to defend its claim to the Spanish throne for a further year.61 Utrecht was not a bad peace, and in concluding it the Tories assisted Britain's emergence as a front-rank power. Louis XIV agreed to give up only a few towns in Flanders, but was also obliged to recognize Britain's Protestant succession and to expel The Pretender from France. Britain was allowed to keep Gibraltar and Minorca, making her the dominant power in the western Mediterranean, and to gain legal possession of the Hudson Bay territory, with obvious advantages for trade in North America. The commercial status quo in the Spanish Americas, and the balance of power within Europe, were restored by the Treaty, with Britain additionally gaining her first rights to trade (mostly slaves) in the Spanish Indies. All Britain conceded—apart from the Habsburg claim to the Spanish throne—were points offered as inducements to hold the Grand Alliance together during the war, not points of pressing national interest. Above all, Britain's new power was shown by her ability to sit alone with the French and redraw the world map (splitting North and South Carolina into two separate colonies with the sweep of a pen, for example), and for these terms to be so quickly accepted by the Dutch, the Prussians and other Allies.
The Junto Whigs, however, viewed the Treaty of Utrecht as a national humiliation that handed away several fruits of Marlborough's victories, along with colonial territories like Cape Breton. The Kit-cat Club was despondent and directionless as its members prepared to disperse for the summer. George Berkeley observed:
The very day peace was proclaimed, instead of associating with the Tories,
I dined with several of the other party at Dr Garth's, where we drank the Duke of Marlborough's health, though they had not the heart to speak one word against the peace. Indeed the spirit of the Whigs seems quite broken.62
Above all, the Junto Whigs felt the Treaty betrayed several Continental allies, most notably by abandoning the Habsburg claim to the Spanish throne. This view was shared in Hanover by Britain's future George I.
After news of Utrecht's terms arrived in London, on the evening of 14 April 1713, a new play by Addison opened at Drury Lane—a Roman tragedy entitled Cato. Its reception by London audiences was to demonstrate exactly how highly strung the political mood had become.
Steele claimed to have seen the first draft of Cato as early as 1703, after Addison returned from Italy, but said Addison then did not have ‘Courage enough’ to stage it.63 In 1712, as Whig prospects darkened, Addison's friends asked him to revise the play, thinking it ‘a proper time to animate the Public with the Sentiments of Cato’.64 The Kit-Cat patrons hoped the subject matter—heroic resistance to a tyrannical government—might encourage civil resistance to Oxford's government. The Spectator once referred to ‘Cato amidst the Ruins of his Country preserving his Integrity’,65 and that was exactly how the Whigs imagined themselves since their fall from power. Addison consulted various Kit-Cats—Congreve, Garth, Halifax and, of course, Steele—as he hurriedly reworked the play.66
Pope, who had contributed Cato's Prologue, attended the first night and observed Addison's nerves before the curtain rose. For all his talk about worldly success being but a shadow, Addison feared the audience reaction, undoubtedly recalling his last experience of an opening night at Drury Lane: the failure of the opera Rosamund six years before. Addison sat in a side-box with several friends, where they had a table ‘and two or three flasks of Burgundy and Champagne, with which the author (who is a very sober man) thought it necessary to support his spirits’.67 Addison need not have worried. Steele, acting, he said, as Addison's ‘officious’ aide-de-camp,68 had packed the house with their friends, so that ‘the Vulgar’, as Steele put it, could not condemn the play too soon.
Addison also worried that such a political play might lay him open to charges of sedition. He had therefore sought the advance approval of Secretary of State Henry St John (newly created Viscount Bolingbroke, as he is called hereafter) on the play's text. In March 1713, there had been a brief reconciliation between Addison, Steele and Bolingbroke, culminating in Swift and Bolingbroke inviting Addison to a ‘mighty mannerly’ Good Friday meal,69 which made this consultation possible. By Cato's first night, however, the truce had broken down, as news of the Treaty of Utrecht's exact terms enraged the Whigs.
Respecting Addison's wishes, supporters of both political parties were permitted entry. From his side-box, Addison could see they had segregated themselves: the Tories sitting beneath Bolingbroke's box, the Whigs beneath the Kit-Cats'. In other boxes, footmen sent ahead to reserve seats for their masters were playing cards ‘with a perfect Disregard to People of Quality sitting on each Side of them’.70 Addison would have looked down through his ‘perspective glass’ (a small tube hired for six shillings) upon the women fluttering their fans in the pit below—the Whig ladies identified by orange-coloured hoods and dresses.
When the curtain went up on the Prologue, the Whig side of the house received it with such enthusiasm that Pope, its anonymous author, felt ‘clapped into a staunch Whig sore against his will’.71 Then the actors came on in their lavish costumes and very un-Roman perukes, and started declaiming the first scene. Soon it was obvious Addison had a hit on his hands. The more patriotic lines elicited frenzied clapping from all sides, since the Kit-Cats and their followers could view the play's tyrant, Caesar, as James II or Lord Oxford, while the Tories could view him as Marlborough. The author broke into a fresh sweat of anxiety as the applause, coming ‘more from the hand than the head’,72 turned into a mindless clapping match, each party trying to claim ownership of the play's patriotic sentiments.
After the final curtain, Bolingbroke publicly presented the actor playing Cato, Barton Booth, with fifty guineas ‘[f]or his honest Opposition to a perpetual Dictator; and his dying so bravely, in the Cause of Liberty’. The gesture seemed premeditated—a way for the government to demonstrate that Marlborough (now in exile on the Continent) was the only ‘dictator’ of Britain. Debate broke out among the actors as to whether it was disloyal for Booth, who admired Marlborough, to accept this prize. The situation was resolved when the Kit-Cat patrons hurriedly called the actor over to their side and offered the identical amount, so that, as Garth laughed to himself, Cato ‘may have something to live upon after he dies’.73
Cato played to packed houses for an unprecedented twenty nights. It could have run for longer, but Mrs Oldfield, who played Cato's virginal daughter, was heavily pregnant and suddenly needed the services of ‘a midwife behind the scenes’.74 Buying a ticket for the play had become like casting a vote for the Whigs in a public opinion poll. Addison donated all his profits to the theatre company, uneasy at becoming known as such a party political author. Later, the play transferred to a theatre in Oxford, turning many student poets into Addison fans. A performance was even staged at Leghorn by an acting troupe among the British merchants.
Given the playwright's political connections, most obviously his Kit-Cat membership, the Whigs soon won total possession of Cato and set it within their propaganda artillery. Tonson purchased the play's copyright for the then unprecedented sum of £107. 10s. (nearly £12,000 today), and proceeded to publish eight editions within a year, all bestsellers. Cato was one of the contemporary works Tonson published in a format to match his critical Cambridge editions of English classics, thinking it would deserve such a place within the future canon. Hawkers sold copies in the street by crying out the play's most famous lines. Cato was also translated into several European languages, Voltaire praising it as the first ‘reasonable’ English tragedy.75
The only critic at the time who disliked Cato was John Dennis. Steele seems to have encouraged Pope, without Addison's authorization, to reply to Dennis' criticisms in a pamphlet so savage that Addison subsequently made Steele write letters to Pope and Pope's printer, expressing Addison's displeasure. This needless misunderstanding led to a cooling in relations between Addison and Pope. Pope afterwards wrote lines reinterpreting Addison's vaunted modesty and moderation as mealy-mouthedness, imitated by his sycophantic Buttonian protégés:
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
…
Like Cato, give his little Senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause;
While Wits and Templers ev'ry sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise.76
When Congreve saw these harsh lines, he sighed that Pope now dwelt ‘among the incurables’.77
Addison and Steele's relationship with Swift suffered its final rupture about the same time as their falling out with Pope. Steele's Guardian in May 1713 heavily hinted that Swift was the author of recent Examiner essays celebrating the peace treaty (and one which accused the Kit-Cat Club of being the Junto's ‘consistory’78). They were, in fact, by William Oldisworth, allowing Swift to ask Addison indignantly: ‘Have I deserved this usage from Mr Steele, who knows very well that my Lord Treasurer [Oxford] has kept him in his employment upon my entreaty and intercession?’79
Steele was undeterred: ‘You do not in direct terms say you are not concerned with him,’ he replied to Swift. ‘I believe you an accomplice of the Examiner.’80 The argument continued in print through several issues of The Examiner and The Guardian, ending further social contact between Swift and the Kit-Cats. In sour mood, Swift departed for Dublin the following month.
Steele decided it was time to resign his Stamp Office post, in order to s
tand in the coming elections. Holding on to the post for so long under Oxford's administration had allowed even close acquaintances to mistake Addison for the ‘more earnest’ Whig of the pair.81 Now, in June 1713, Steele sent a letter of resignation to Lord Oxford, accusing the chief minister of using his political talents against the nation's interests: ‘[I]t is impossible for anyone who thinks and has any public Spirit not to tremble at seeing His Country in its present Circumstances, in the hands of so daring a Genius as Yours.’82
A fortnight later, Steele told Prue he was dining with Addison who ‘engaged me to meet some Whig Lords’83—presumably to select a safe parliamentary seat for Steele. This news did nothing to calm Prue, who was in ‘lamentation’84 over her husband resigning his only secure salary, and was subjecting him to regular ‘curtain-lectures’ (reproofs by spouses within curtained beds). Some of Steele's letters that July were addressed to ‘Dear Tyrant’ instead of ‘Dear Prue’.
Steele stood for election in Stockbridge, Hampshire, a town of seventy-one voters who each sold their vote for about £60, in August. One of his electioneering gimmicks was said to be offering an apple stuck with guineas as a prize to the woman who gave birth to the first child exactly nine months after the vote—a cunning way of bribing electors with sexually willing spouses, the inspiration for which may have been his own wife's refusal of sex until their debts were cleared. The previous summer Steele had written about other enticements needed to tip the balance in an election: ‘[S]aluting Rows of old Women, drinking with Clowns, and being upon a Level with the lowest Part of Mankind in that wherein they themselves are lowest, their Diversions, will carry a Candidate.’85
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