Winning the Stockbridge election, Steele was soon boasting that ‘as a Member of Parliament, I am accountable to no Man, but the greatest Man in England is accountable to me’.86 Steele's status as an MP, and the equality it gave him with friends like Addison and Stanhope, who were each returned to safe seats by their Kit-Cat patrons, were profoundly important to him. Steele had joined, he believed, the best club in England.
Tonson was in Paris on business at this time, and visited Prior, still serving as Britain's ambassador there. Prior was now so reviled by his old Kit-Cat friends for his part in the Treaty of Utrecht that he was understandably suspicious of Tonson's motives. An English Jacobite on the Continent reported to Oxford that ‘[a] famous printer, commonly called secretary to the Kit-Cat Club, is on this side, doing his friends all the services he can’.87 Prior asked Bolingbroke rhetorically whether Tonson could possibly be turning Tory (‘[C]an a leopard change his spots?’88), and promised to tell the publisher no secrets. If Tonson was attempting to use a business trip to cover some light espionage, he was inept; more probably the publisher just missed Prior's company, and felt freer to cross the Whig–Tory social divide while away from London's party tribalism.
The paper wars continued to rage unabated, and Steele was particularly active in fanning their flames. As part of his Stockbridge electioneering, he produced a pamphlet, The Importance of Dunkirk Consider'd (1713), accusing the Tory government of failing to insist on French compliance with the Utrecht article requiring destruction of Dunkirk's fortifications. The pamphlet also suggested Anne was easy prey for manipulative ministers because she was a woman unable to club with her ministers and learn ‘the Subdivisions of Affection and Interest among Great Men…in their unguarded leisure’.89 This prompted several replies from Oxford's ministry, including one by Swift, The Importance of the Guardian Consider'd (1713), which bitchily suggested Steele owed his literary reputation solely ‘to the continual conversation and friendship of Mr Addison’.
After his election to Parliament, Steele closed The Guardian and opened another paper called The Englishman, because, as he declared in the latter's first edition, the time for inference and subtlety was over: ‘It is a Jest to throw away our Care in providing for the Palate, when the whole Body is in danger of Death; or to talk of amending the Mien and Air of a Cripple that has lost his Legs and his Arms.’90
The Englishman—whose principal contributors were an Irishman (Steele) and a naturalized Huguenot (Abel Boyer)—was the voice of radical Whig patriotism. It was dedicated to raising the alarm about a civil war Steele believed inevitable after Anne's death, when the Jacobites, he believed, would immediately raise an insurrection.
Addison thought The Englishman a self-indulgent, vainglorious act of political suicide, telling a mutual friend:
I am in a thousand troubles for poor Dick, and wish that his zeal for the public may not be ruinous to himself; he has sent me word that he is determined to go on, and that any advice I can give him in this particular will have no weight with him.91
Faced with Steele wilfully ignoring his advice for perhaps the first time in their long relationship, Addison claimed to be ‘written out’, and retired to his estate of Bilton until mid-December 1713.92
Steele told Prue he had ‘resolved to go to the Club and ask for a Subscription myself, and, with as gay an air as I can, lay before them that I take it to be their Constitution to do it, as I am labouring in the common Cause’. At the bottom, a postscript: ‘It frets my proud heart to do this, but it must be.’93 This ‘Subscription’ was for yet another pamphlet, The Crisis, which would sound the alarm about the Oxford government's wavering commitment to the Hanoverian succession as Anne's health rapidly declined. Steele knew Bolingbroke was contemplating backing the restoration of The Pretender as ‘James III’, if only the Stuart exile would renounce Catholicism—a plausible option, as the English population seemed likely to have more loyalty to a Stuart son than to some unknown German. Steele's Crisis warned against trusting the French-backed Pretender even if he did convert, recalling the massacres of Protestants by Papists in Ireland, France and Savoy, and rallying his readers as if another civil war were already underway: ‘Whatever may befall the Glory and Wealth of Great Britain, let us struggle to the last Drop of our Blood for its Religion and Liberty.’94
The Hanover and Kit-Cat Clubs soon responded to Steele's request by issuing ‘a General Subscription for divulging The Crisis all over the Kingdom’.95 Halifax from the Kit-Cats and James Craggs from the Hanoverians most actively circulated the call for subscribers, which served the additional purpose of advertising the pamphlet to the widest possible readership. At the same time, certain members of the two clubs privately asked the Elector of Hanover, via his Envoy, to finance the publication. There is no record of whether the future George I did so, but a mysterious single, sizeable pledge may have originated in Hanover.
Steele dined with Halifax on 24 December 1713, probably to deliver The Crisis‘ first draft for his patron's approval. Addison and several other Whigs assisted Steele with revising it, though Steele's name alone appeared on the title page. This recognized the fact that Oxford and the Tory press had been singling Steele out for attack since his election, so he had less than others to lose. Steele later recalled being bullied from his first parliamentary appearance, Tories jeering and interrupting his statements. Unlike most Kit-Cat politicians, Steele had no rank or family connections, with ‘not one Man living of his Blood’,96 making him an easy target for the Tories and an easy sacrifice for the Whigs. They were kind to their sacrificial lamb, however: Steele likely spent the night before The Crisis‘ publication celebrating with either the Kit-Cat Club or the Hanover Club, since he wrote in The Englishman about how his friends teased him that night for falling asleep after dinner, quoting lines at him from Dr Garth's Dispensary about the God of Sloth. Steele said he hoped The Crisis would rouse the British nation from its own collective ‘Lethargy’ the following morning.97
The Crisis sold at least 40,000 copies, at a shilling each, by subscription alone—a sensational number, marking a turning point in the history of political propaganda. For the first time, thanks to the Kit-cat and Hanover Clubs' coordinated publicity and distribution, Junto Whig arguments reached a truly mass audience, throughout the provinces, in Ireland and other European nations.
Socially, Addison and Steele were drifting further apart at this time. Addison was increasingly spending time with his Buttonian friends, especially Budgell and Tickell, after returning to London in December 1713. Steele turned to the company of tradesmen friends who had always bailed him out (sometimes literally, from debtors' prison) and who shared his unabashed Whiggery. The Tory Examiner mocked Steele for socializing with his foot doctor, haberdasher and tobacconist. One such Examiner, by Swift, was in the form of an open letter to ‘Mr Jacob Kit-Cat, Bookseller’, warning Tonson that Steele was forming a rival club among the working classes.98
It was, in fact, Swift who was involved during late 1713 in founding another club to rival the Kit-Cat Club: the literary clique that later became known as the ‘Scriblerus Club’. It started not as a Tory club but as a proposed collaboration, coordinated by Pope, on a spoof volume of memoirs by one Martinus Scriblerus. Addison and Congreve were invited to contribute, and a piece by deceased Kit-Cat Anthony Henley was considered for inclusion. Following Pope's falling out with Addison over the pamphlet defending Cato, however, Swift swooped in to befriend Pope and the project then became exclusively Tory. The Kit-Cats dropped out quietly, and Swift gathered the remaining contributors (Pope, John Gay, Dr Arbuthnot and the Irish poet Thomas Parnell) for literary dinners on Saturday evenings. To these five was added Oxford, whose involvement required that the Club's dinners often took place, for the minister's convenience, at Dr Arbuthnot's lodgings in St James's Palace.
The Scriblerus Club only met regularly between the end of 1713 and spring 1714, though its friendships were to prove as lasting as the Kit-Cat Club's.99 It cemen
ted, and made less baldly mercenary, Oxford's relationship as patron to Swift as a propagandist. The minister commissioned, for example, a piece of counter-propaganda to answer Steele's Crisis, resulting in Swift's The Publick Spirit of the Whigs (1714). Wharton and Devonshire introduced a Lords motion to condemn this pamphlet, offering a £300 reward to uncover its author's identity, on the grounds that it contained a libellous attack on the Scottish peers. The printer was arrested, and Swift reportedly found a man who for a fee would pretend, if necessary, to be the pamphlet's author. Another anonymous Tory tract attacked Steele as a chronic debtor who had given his wife syphilis (an unverified allegation), and a satirical poem, The Steeleids: or, the Tryal of Wit (1714), attacked Steele's membership of the Kit-Cat Club, where ‘Pert Dullness…acquires unjust Renown’.100
Oxford and Bolingbroke were grateful for anything distracting the public while they negotiated, through various secret channels, with The Pretender regarding his religion. In part to manufacture such a distraction, they started proceedings in March 1714 to expel Steele from the House of Commons. The charge was seditious libel, yet it was not a criminal prosecution, since the Kit-Cats had taken the precaution of having lawyers review The Crisis with an eye for libel before its publication and since Steele enjoyed parliamentary privilege.
Halifax remarked, possibly at a Kit-Cat dinner on Thursday, 11 March 1714, that if the Queen read The Crisis ‘she would think quite otherwise of the book than they [her Tory ministers] do’.101 During the next two days, formal charges against Steele were presented in the Commons. Steele was not present, on Halifax's advice, but afterwards accompanied Tonson to meet ‘some Friends’ at Walpole's house on Dover Street. Steele confided to his wife that Queen Anne's health was reported to be truly precarious. He signed this note as ‘Your Faithful very Cheerful Husband’,102 suggesting that he was reassuring her, but also that he was genuinely buoyed by being at the centre of his Kit-Cat friends' supportive attention.
The ministry gave Steele less than a week to prepare his case. The Commons debate on whether Steele should be expelled took place on 18 March, running until midnight. He first formally confirmed his authorship of the two publications on which the charges were based—The Crisis and no. 46 of The Englishman. Believing it best to climb onto a very high horse in such situations, Steele declared: ‘I writ them in behalf of the House of Hanover, and I own them with the same unreservedness with which I abjured the Pretender.’103 Steele then made a three-hour speech in his own defence. Addison, who had worked with Steele on this speech throughout the previous week, sat beside him and prompted him ‘upon Occasion’ with little notes.104
‘Though I had too much at Stake to be in Humour enough to enjoy the Scene,’ Steele recalled, ‘there was, with all the Cruelty of it, something particularly Comic in the Affair.’ It had the air of a show trial, in which the verdict was predetermined: ‘The Accuser arraigned a Man for Sedition with the same Indolence and Indifference as another Man pares his Nails.’105 There were disturbances in the upper galleries and Speaker's Chamber, where rowdy Whig protesters ‘refusing to withdraw, were by Order of the House taken into Custody’.106
The orators who defended Steele most powerfully were the same Kitlings who had spoken so brilliantly at Sacheverell's trial four years earlier: Walpole and Stanhope, aided by Pulteney. Walpole and Stanhope had each spent a year in captivity after the Whigs' fall from power in 1710. The Bourbon army had captured Stanhope in Spain when his forces surrendered at Brihuega in December 1710, a disastrous end to the Allies' Iberian campaigns, and a personal tragedy for Stanhope at the age of 37. He wrote to the Tory Secretary of State for the South, Lord Dartmouth, at the time: ‘I cannot express to your Lordship how much this blow has broken my spirits, which I shall never recover.’107 While Stanhope was in captivity, the new Tory government blocked all deals with the French and Spanish for his release and return. When he did return to Britain, Stanhope was defeated in the August 1713 election. His friends therefore had to find him the safe Whig seat of Wendover in a by-election. Stanhope's defence of Steele was therefore his first major speech since re-entering the Commons.
Walpole's defence of Steele was also his first in the Commons for some two years. In January 1712, Walpole had been convicted of corruption (while Secretary-at-War), expelled from the Commons and committed to the Tower of London. Wharton and other Kit-cat friends visited Walpole in prison, though on his release in July 1712 he was disappointed that he was greeted with ‘no music nor dinner prepared for him by the Hanover Club’.108
Steele said Walpole's speech that night may not have altered the vote but at least made many of those who voted with the government against him feel ashamed. Walpole pointed out that this use of parliamentary expulsion, in lieu of prosecution, threatened MPs' rights to criticize a government and hence threatened free speech in Britain. Ironically, given his later career, Walpole defined patriotism as the bravery to criticize an unjust government, asking the crucial, provocative question: ‘How comes writing for the [Hanoverian] succession to be a reflection upon this ministry?’109
Other Whigs used the debate to air complaints about the crypto-Jacobitism, as they saw it, of Oxford and Bolingbroke. Two Scottish peers spoke about taxpayers' money going to the Highland clans whose loyalties were with The Pretender. The Whigs, in other words, made the most of a debate they knew they could not win. Despite the full flexing of the Kit-Cat Club whip to secure the vote of every Kit-Cat's Commons clients and relations, the vote was lost by ninetythree votes, and Steele was brought back into the chamber to be found guilty of writing libels designed ‘to alienate the Affections of her Majesty's good Subjects and to create Jealousies and Divisions among them’.110 Tellingly, The Examiner was ready to go to press, announcing Steele's expulsion, hours before the verdict was proclaimed.
The following day, Steele wrote to the Speaker of the House to ask whether he could appeal the Commons' censure in a court of law, but was told this was impossible. That night he assured Prue: ‘I am in very good Humour and in no concern, but fear of your being uneasy. I will go to the Club tonight, for as you say, I must press things well now or never.’111 The club in question was the Kit-Cat.112 Having been expelled from what he considered the best club in the world, Steele sought solace in the second best, to which he felt all the deeper loyalty—particularly to Walpole and Stanhope. Later Steele would dedicate a collected edition of The Englishman to Stanhope, complimenting his friend on his ‘natural and prevailing Eloquence in Assemblies’, his ‘gentle and winning Behaviour in Conversation’ but also his ‘Plain-dealing, Generosity and Truth’.113 Stanhope was, to Steele's mind, the new model Englishman.
When Steele spoke of the need to ‘press things’, however, he clearly sought more than words of comfort from the Kit-Cats: he was being sued by his wigmaker, and needed a fast cash injection to avoid another spell in debtors' prison. For once, Steele's wishes seem to have been answered; in late March 1714, he told his wife that a Mr William Ashurst was giving him £3,000 (or £370,000 today), via a goldsmith, as an anonymous grant. Steele wrote joyously that ‘all would do beyond my expectation’114 but was unable to ‘dive into the Secret by what hands I am to be obliged’.115 It may have been thanks to his Kit-Cat patrons, or the money may even have come into Mr Ashurst's hands from Hanover. If the grant was a collected ‘kitty’ from the Kit-Cats, it was not pure charity, since Steele was now a famous Whig mascot and his imprisonment for debt would have been an embarrassment to their party.
On Easter Sunday 1714, financially resurrected, Steele wrote penitently to Prue, who had moved to stay with her friend Mrs Keck: ‘[Y]ou and Betty and Dick and Eugene and Molly shall be henceforth my principal cares.’ Yet Steele was too much in love with his recent role as Whig martyr not to add that Prue and his four ‘Brats’, as he affectionately called them, must still come second to ‘Keeping a good Conscience’.116
Since MPs then earned no salary, Steele's expulsion did not mean a loss of income. His only journa
listic income at this time was from a non-political broadsheet, The Lover, narrated by one Marmaduke Myrtle, a gentleman who once again drew on reports from his ‘little Club’ in London.117 Steele started producing The Lover as soon as he closed the first series of The Englishman, but The Lover closed in turn at the end of May 1714. Addison contributed a couple of issues to it, but this was to be the pair's last literary collaboration. Despite their teamwork at Steele's trial, the friendship had lost its former dynamic, based on a clear understanding of one man's superiority to the other.
The Whigs were given a new spurt of energy that spring, when it became public knowledge that James III had categorically refused Bolingbroke's entreaties to renounce Catholicism and conform to the Church of England. This made it highly improbable that a popular uprising in England would return the Stuarts to the throne, and made Jacobitism thereby unpatriotically synonymous with support for a French invasion. This in turn led to division in the Tories' ranks, exacerbated by deepening personal rivalry between Oxford and Bolingbroke. ‘Those warm, honest Gentlemen of the Hanover Club’, as Vanbrugh called them, started meeting on successive days, to capitalize on the Tories' sudden disarray, and the Tory Postboy reported that the Kit-Cat Club was similarly meeting every evening. The two Clubs organized, for example, parliamentary opposition to Bolingbroke's ‘Schism Bill’, which proposed to suppress Dissenters' schools—the kind of proposal that unified the Whigs and temporarily obscured the common ground between the majority of Whig and Tory MPs (as staunch Anglicans with no wish to see a Catholic monarchy).
Electress Sophia of Hanover died on 8 June 1714, leaving her son George the legal heir to the British throne. Queen Anne's health then took a sudden turn for the worse. The British political world sat poised, apprehensive about what might happen if and when she died. Steele predicted ‘nothing but Divine Providence can prevent a Civil War within [a] few years’,118 but he and his friends were to some extent victims of their own propaganda, exaggerating the level of the Jacobite threat. Addison described the Whigs living in patriotic, vigilant martyrdom: ‘Most of our Garrets are inhabited by Statesmen, who watch over the Liberties of their Country and make a Shift to keep themselves from starving.’119
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