Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  Stanhope said he looked upon ‘our liberties as good as gone’ and volunteered to lead an armed civil defence of the Hanoverian succession if and when the time came.120 He was in close communication with the exiled Duke of Marlborough, who was organizing to lead those British troops loyal to him back to Britain from garrisons in Ghent, Bruges, Dunkirk and Nieuwport, should the need arise. The journalist Abel Boyer recorded, as the Queen's death approached, that ‘measures were early concerted by the Kit-Cat Club with a Major-General [Marlborough's right-hand man, Cadogan] who had a considerable Post in the Foot-Guards, to seize the Tower upon the first appearance of Danger, and to secure in it such Persons as were justly suspected to favour the Pretender’.121

  Two surviving manuscripts strongly suggest the first military preparations to pre-empt a Jacobite uprising or invasion were plotted over a Kit-Cat dinner, and communicated from there to Marlborough on the Continent.

  The Kit-Cat Club simultaneously kept up its battle for hearts and minds. Wharton engaged Steele to prepare several further anti-Jacobite pamphlets, and Steele consulted with Walpole about their content over a dinner the night before Walpole left for his Norfolk estates. As other Kit-Cat grandees likewise prepared to leave the capital, all knew it might prove a short summer recess.

  In late July 1714, the crisis broke: Oxford, who had personally offended the Queen, was dismissed as Lord Treasurer on the 27th, and Bolingbroke was unable to form either a new ministry or an alliance with the Whigs to save his own political neck. Three days later, on Friday, 30 July, the Privy Council convened at Anne's bedside in Kensington Palace, where she lay too incapacitated to speak, following convulsions the previous day. After some discussion, the Tory Sir Simon Harcourt proposed Lord Shrewsbury as the man to head the government during the Queen's incapacity, and the Queen, only semi-conscious, was helped to physically pass Shrewsbury the Staff of Office. Though Shrewsbury had allied with the Tories to support the Utrecht peace, he was Whig enough to ensure the Acts of Regency and Settlement would be respected, and so his leadership was acceptable to Somers, Somerset and other Whigs in the Council. Somers, despite his own ‘bodily and mental ills’,122 attended the Council for the first time in four years the following day.

  With Shrewsbury's appointment, it suddenly seemed less likely that the plan of Marlborough and the Kit-Cats, to raise an armed defence force, would be necessary. Shrewsbury led the Council to authorize the taking of arms and horses from all British Catholics and the immediate closure of the ports. As Somers sat down to write to the Hanoverian Elector, apprising him of the situation and urging him to depart for Britain as soon as possible, Anne's life ebbed away. She died at seven o'clock the following Sunday morning.

  XVII

  BIG WHIGS: THE FIRST GEORGIANS

  A new Title or an unexpected Success throws us out of ourselves, and in a Manner destroys our Identity.

  JOSEPH ADDISON in

  The Spectator no. 162, 5 September 1711

  STEELE RECEIVED the momentous news of Queen Anne's death while taking his morning coffee at the Whig stronghold of St James's Coffee House. It was hard for the coffee house to suppress an unseemly celebration, with toasts drunk, before noon, to Great Britain's new King George. Afterwards, Steele walked down to the Thames where bright sunlight cast sharp shadows on the buildings and made the river sparkle, as if sharing his good mood. The Low Church divine, Archbishop Tenison, a recluse in Lambeth throughout the whole period of Tory rule, took a barge straight to Whitehall Stairs upon receiving the news, greeting Steele with the exclamation: ‘Master Steele, this is a great and glorious day!’1

  Carlisle heard the news the following day, at the York races. The local Lord Mayor proclaimed George was now King, after which most of the northern nobility abandoned the track, and commenced their own unseemly race back to London. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu complained at how she, Lord Carlisle's daughters and the other ladies were left alone and undefended in the great houses of the north—vulnerable, she implied, to a Franco-Jacobite invasion force should one land in Scotland or the northeast.

  Until the King's arrival in Britain, which was delayed for some weeks, the regents ruling the country included five Kit-Cats: Halifax, Carlisle, Devonshire, Scarbrough and Somerset. Somerset may have been readmitted to the Kit-Cat Club at this juncture in recognition of his loyalty to the Hanoverian succession when it had most mattered, at the Queen's deathbed. Congreve once said the Hanoverian succession would bring ‘no longer a glimpse but a glare’ of good news for the Whigs.2 Such Enlightenment imagery befitted his Kit-Cat friends' radiant mood during those summer months, as they basked in the glow of their fellowship and bright futures.

  On 3 August 1714, Addison was appointed Secretary to the regents—the highest administrative post in Britain, which he received largely in recognition of his financial probity, given that such a post would be bombarded with offers of bribery from people hoping to be recommended to the new king. Addison's responsibilities included securing Britain's coastal and other domestic defences against a possible Franco-Jacobite invasion—much as he had done in the spring of 1708—and dealing with the Tories in Ireland, who were seen as dangerously loyal to Ormonde and/or Bolingbroke.

  Foreign ambassadors also had to be notified of the Queen's death and its consequences. Addison sent Prior, his former friend and guide in Paris, a poignant letter informing him that his days as a British ambassador were numbered. Prior was forced to resign before the month was out, and, on his fiftieth birthday, wrote the following epitaph for his own tumultuous career:

  Yet counting as far as fifty to his years, His virtues and vices were as other men's are;

  High hopes he conceived, and he smothered great fears,

  In a life party-coloured, half pleasure, half care.

  Nor to business a drudge, nor to faction a slave,

  He strove to make int'rest and freedom agree;

  In public employments industrious and grave,

  And alone with his friends, Lord! How merry was he!3

  Addison further organized the regents' role in the Queen's funeral and in George I's ceremonial welcome. To assist with this enormous list of duties, Addison turned for administrative support not to Steele (who was expectantly hanging around Westminster), but to young Thomas Tickell.

  On 18 September, 54-year-old ‘Georg Ludwig’ finally arrived in England, having been escorted from Hanover by Lionel, Earl of Dorset. George was rowed from his ship, through the heavy fog, to the landing steps in front of Wren's great buildings at Greenwich. Waiting to greet him in the first row of the crowd, their beaming faces lit by torches in the soupy twilight, was an array of Kit-Cats. Of the regents, only Carlisle was unable to attend, due to gout. They watched as George disembarked, accompanied by no queen (his wife having eloped, been divorced, then locked away) but by two comically shaped women: the ‘elephant’ Kielmansegg (his illegitimate half-sister) and the ‘maypole’ Schulenburg (his mistress). Behind this trio came George's two Turkish manservants, Mehemet and Mustafa. This unmistakably alien retinue was quickly whisked away to a banquet inside Inigo Jones' Queen's House—a venue chosen by the Kit-Cat regents to emphasize cultural continuity with England's former monarchs.

  George had visited England when a young man in 1680, but spoke little English. Many, watching his reception at Greenwich, must have assumed he would be little more than a pawn in the hands of the Whig lords who knelt before him. Lionel's role as escort, and Addison's as Secretary to the regents, together with Vanbrugh being the first man knighted after the new king set foot on the Greenwich lawns, were clear reminders of the Kit-Cats' auspicious diplomatic visit to Hanover in 1706. That Halifax, leader of that trip, should now be rewarded with the highest post of government was widely expected. Halifax was so confident that he muttered to Addison, as they waited on the waterfront, that if Addison could only overcome his ‘silly Sheepishness…that makes thee sit in the House and hear a Fellow prate for half an Hour altogether who has not a tenth Part of thy
good Sense’, then Halifax would gladly recommend Addison to become a Secretary of State, replacing Bolingbroke.

  The Kit-Cats and other Whigs had spent the seven-week regency jostling for position and cutting deals with one another, knowing that they had little competition to fear from the Tories. George detested Oxford's and Bolingbroke's followers as makers of the Utrecht peace, judging Englishmen primarily by their views on international relations. The Marlboroughs had visited Hanover during their exile and reinforced these prejudices, schooling the future king in a partisan narrative of recent history in which there was no such thing as a Hanoverian Tory. Yet, despite these prejudices, George did at first try to form a mixed ministry, offering important posts to two prominent moderate Tories with relatively clean hands in terms of foreign affairs. Both refused, perhaps thinking they could do better if the forthcoming general election returned a large number of Tories. Missing this one offer of power-sharing, the Tories would not be offered another. Bolingbroke tried to console Swift that adversity would make Tory friends reunite, to which Swift replied that though the Tories had ‘certainly more heads and hands than our adversaries…it must be confessed, they [the Whigs] have stronger shoulders and better hearts’.4 By mid-August 1714, Swift had returned to his deanery at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, where he spent the rest of his life exiled from London politics.

  On 22 September, George attended the first meeting of his Privy Council, at which his decisions on ministerial appointments were announced. The roll-call of appointees confirmed that the Tories would have no share in the new government. Even Sir Simon Harcourt, who had ensured Shrewsbury was handed power at Anne's deathbed, was dismissed rather than rewarded. The Kit-Cats' alleged monopolies in the past (1696–7 and 1706–10) turned into the true monopoly of the Georgian Whig oligarchy, with purges from government and Court offices of all but those Tories who could be converted to Whiggery. One such case was Nottingham who was trusted despite his past Toryism because he had opposed Utrecht. He was joined in George I's first Cabinet by Marlborough (who had returned to England on the day of Anne's death), Sunderland, Townshend and three Kit-cats: Devonshire, Halifax and Somers. Halifax was appointed First Lord of the Treasury, but not Lord High Treasurer—the Treasury instead being put into commission, to be run by a board of several ministers and, at a distance, by the King himself. This was a bitter dis appointment to the old Junto leader, effectively denying him the role of chief minister. Observing Halifax soon after the announcement, the Duchess of Marlborough said: ‘He hardly spoke a word the whole dinnertime, looked full of rage, and as if he could have killed everybody at table.’5

  The truth was that, at 53, Halifax's mind was not as sharp as it once was. An anecdote told by Pope, intended to demonstrate Pope's independence from patrons and especially from Halifax, illustrates this fact. One day, Garth, Addison and Congreve took Pope to meet Halifax, so that Pope could read aloud to Halifax from his manuscript translation of the Iliad. Halifax criticized several passages, telling Pope to alter them, which upset the author. When Pope complained about this in the carriage home, Garth laughed and told him to leave the lines exactly as they were, thank Halifax, and then read them out again in a few months' time. Pope followed this advice and, on the second reading, Halifax exclaimed, ‘Ay now, Mr Pope, they are perfectly right!’6

  Addison's hopes of replacing Bolingbroke as Secretary of State for the South were also disappointed; Stanhope instead got the job and was soon effectively acting as the King's leading minister. Addison returned to his former, relatively lowly 1708–9 post as Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who was now Sunderland. Neither he nor Sunderland bothered to go to Ireland, preferring to administer the country by post and via Addison's cousin Budgell, appointed Under-Secretary. Addison complained to Halifax of this ‘great fall in point of Honour from being Secretary to the Regents’, begging for some post on the Board of Trade, or ‘some other method to let the world see that I am not wholly disregarded’.7 Addison also told Halifax, full of wounded pride, he would accept no less than £1,000 for the work he had done as Secretary to the regents, since anything less ‘will look more like a clerk's wage than a mark of His Majesty's favour’.8

  After Anne's death, Steele had excitedly told Prue he was being ‘loaded with compliments from the regents and assured of something immediately’.9 In fact, for all his suffering as a Whig scapegoat the previous year, Steele received relatively modest rewards from the new Georgian Court: the Governorship of the Drury Lane theatre worth £700 per year (around £93,000 today), as well as £500 (around £66,000 today) in cash from the King's Bounty, a small sinecure as Surveyor of the Royal Stables at Hampton Court and, in April 1715, a knighthood. That Steele, Stanhope's great admirer, and Vanbrugh, a distant kinsman to Stanhope, were the ones knighted—rather than Addison and Congreve—resulted from Stanhope's rise to power and the new lines of allegiance that subsequently began bisecting the Kit-Cat circle. These would grow into deep fissures during the next few years.

  Before Anne's death, when Vanbrugh lost his £400 patent as Comptroller of the Royal Works as a result of expressing sympathy for Marlborough's ‘bitter persecution’,10 he had had personal debts of £3,000 to £4,000 (between £330,000 and £440,000 today), in addition to debts from the Haymarket theatre. Vanbrugh therefore drew up speculative plans for a new palace in St James's that he hoped George I would commission upon his accession. George, however, held back on commissioning ostentatious new buildings in styles that might be criticized for being ‘foreign’. Vanbrugh had to make do, instead, with receiving back the patent for the Royal Works, with the additional title of Surveyor of the Gardens and Waterworks.11

  Congreve was also given two sinecures: Undersearcher of Customs for the Port of London, and Secretary to the colony of Jamaica. These posts (together worth approximately £98,500 a year by today's values) marked the end of the poet's money worries, allowing him to retire in relative comfort and to invest in various stocks. They can be attributed to Congreve's long allegiance to the Kit-Cat patrons, particularly Halifax, since the Duchess of Marlborough's disapproval of his affair with her daughter would otherwise have blocked his recommendation, and George had no particular agenda of his own to honour retired British authors.

  Other politically ambitious Kit-Cats also got their cream. Wharton, who presented addresses from Britain's Dissenters to the new king in September 1714, was made Keeper of the Privy Seal. Carlisle joined the Privy Council as the First Commissioner of the Treasury in May 1715, though he only held the post for a few months before retiring. Thirty-year-old William Pulteney was appointed Secretary-at-War—one of the younger generation of Kit-Cats who would feature as key political protagonists through the next half century.12

  George's coronation took place in Westminster Hall on 20 October 1714. One Kit-Cat noble (Grafton) bore the crown, another (Somerset) the orb. Though the Kit-Cat Club had spent almost a decade preparing the British public to accept a monarch chosen for his religious principles rather than his hereditary claim, the day was greeted with rioting in about thirty towns and villages, mostly swing constituencies, as a warm-up to Tory electioneering.

  New titles were also among the Kit-Cats' rewards: Harry Boyle was created Baron Carleton, for example, and Halifax was raised from Baron to Earl. Lionel was the first Knight of the Garter invested by George I, and a full third of the thirty-five Knights of the Garter invested between August 1714 and 1733 were to be Kit-Cats. Among the slew of Court appointments bestowed upon Kit-Cats was the appointment to the King's Bedchamber of Richmond, Berkeley, Grafton and Scarbrough.13 Provincial offices were likewise dispensed liberally to the Kit-Cat nobility, reflecting their local power bases. Only four of thirty-nine Kit-Cat members did not hold some government or Court office immediately following George's accession.

  There were changes too within the Kit-Cat Club itself. A descendant of Tonson wrote that the publisher remained secretary of the Club ‘till the Hanover family came to the Throne’.14 If
this is a precise statement, Tonson may, at 58, have decided to mirror the change of monarch with his resignation from the Club's ‘throne’. This would make sense of the surprisingly prominent role in Club business of a new and youthful member, dating from the summer of 1714.

  Twenty-one-year-old Thomas Pelham-Holles, created Earl of Clare by George I the day before the coronation, was said to have joined the Kit-Cat Club at Devonshire's nomination ‘after the accession of George I’,15 though Clare had belonged to the Hanover Club during the final, tense year of Anne's reign (after which the Hanover Club disbanded, having attained its sole objective). The son of a Sussex magnate, Clare inherited a fortune—including a quarter of a million pounds' worth of land in central London and eleven other counties—from his uncle, John Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle. This unexpected legacy propelled Clare into the national limelight while he was still a student at Cambridge. Clare started ‘anticipating’ his inheritance (a gross annual income of some £26,000 to £27,000, or over £3 million today) long before he received any actual income. The bankers and goldsmiths of London were more than happy to extend him credit, and Clare was soon heavily in debt, from overspending on a lifestyle intended to impress friends and neighbours. While under the Club's tutelage, Clare was at the same time its literary members' most promising patron—a man who believed that the Club's Ciceronian tradition of generosity to the arts should extend into the new Georgian period. Premature spending and precocious patronage were symptoms of a single, insecure hunger in Clare: for recognition and approbation. This insecurity showed itself in Clare's mannerisms, described as a man who babbled and fidgeted with a constant ‘limbfever’16 as he tried desperately to impress everyone he met.