Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  Steele emphasized that his audience was a cultural more than aristocratic elite (‘rather Elegant than Great’46), with a very Kit-Cattish mission to educate the wider public:

  VIRGIL shall be the talk of every Beau

  And Ladies lisp the charms of CICERO.

  The land shall grow polite from You, who sit

  In chosen ranks, the CABINET OF WIT.47

  The Epilogue, probably written by Addison, teased Steele for his life's catalogue of overambitious ventures and suggested his next would be a letter to convert the Pope to Protestantism. It was as if Addison rightly guessed that the Censorium would soon be added to Steele's list of commercial flops. The evening succeeded, on the other hand, as a model of Georgian spectacle and cultural consumption, inspiring the opening of numerous ‘concert rooms’ in spa towns across the country.

  At home at St James's Street nothing much changed between Steele and Prue. A vinegar merchant, one of Steele's many creditors, left a valuable oral record of how he and twenty to thirty other ‘dunners’ would gather in the entrance hall of Steele's house every weekday morning, where they were always told Steele was not at home. If Steele were hiding upstairs and needed to leave, he would summon a friend, so they could march straight out through the front hall, knowing the tradesmen would be too polite or intimidated to harass Sir Richard in company.

  Another story survives of a dinner party hosted by the Steeles for ‘a great number of persons of the first quality’. The guests were surprised at the number of servants surrounding the table. After a few drinks, one of them enquired how Sir Richard could afford such a large staff, at which Steele confessed they were bailiffs, whom

  he had thought it convenient to embellish with liveries, that they might do him credit whilst they stayed. His friends were diverted with the expedient, and by paying the debt, discharged the attendance, having obliged Sir Richard to promise that they should never find him again graced with a retinue of the same kind.48

  Some biographers have discounted this anecdote, not printed until 1753, as an eighteenth-century urban myth attached to various famous debtors, but if anyone had the humour to be its true source, it was Steele.49 The threat of further court proceedings was, of course, no joking matter—Steele had five children, if one includes his illegitimate daughter, to support.

  Steele was working on various Commons committees: to naturalize Palatine refugees; exempt Quakers from various religious oaths in law courts; and manage the wars against native tribes in South Carolina. Between these duties, which often kept him late at Whitehall, and his duties as a theatre manager, it is remarkable Steele was also writing a second series of The Englishman, printed twice a week. This series was not as strong as the first, written during Anne's last ministry on the adrenalin of Steele's political fears and idealism. The second Englishman was a production more of the head than heart: commissioned by Newcastle to win support for the government by publicizing the Committee of Secrecy's findings. Steele wanted to be fairly remunerated for these essays, and complained of working for the Whig party and public good ‘without regard to myself and Family, almost to Old Age’.50 Unfortunately, Newcastle was as deep in debt—relative to rank and income—as Steele. Newcastle and Townshend felt they had pre-paid for Steele's services by recommending him for the Hampton Court sinecure, the Royal Bounty and his knighthood. Steele viewed these differently, as payment for his pre-1714 services—the root of a festering misunderstanding.

  With Halifax gone, Walpole and Stanhope convinced the King that those responsible for what they viewed as the dishonour of Utrecht should be prosecuted and punished. In June 1715, Prior was charged with high treason and placed into ‘close custody’ in the Covent Garden home of the Commons' Sergeant-at-Arms. Nobody was supposed to visit him without Spencer Compton's permission, but his gaoler was an easy-going man who let visitors slip in and out.51 Prior later recounted contemptuously how the members of Walpole's Committee of Secrecy dismissed him from interrogation each time they became confused by the evidence before them. Prior laughed at their attempts to prove his associations with Papists, since that, he said, was a fair description of his entire Parisian acquaintance. Bored and deeply disillusioned, Prior spent a year detained in the Sergeant-at-Arms' house writing Alma, a poem that Pope considered a masterpiece.

  In contrast to his 1701 betrayal of his Kit-Cat friends, Prior demonstrated great loyalty to his Tory colleagues. Only a man of Prior's ingenuity could have avoided incriminating the former ministers, Oxford and Bolingbroke, and so saved them from the death penalty—refusing to testify, for example, as to who was present at the secret talks with the French agents in his Duke Street parlour. Prior also escaped conviction, and was released in late June 1716.

  Throughout the summer months, while the Committee of Secrecy was in session, the country was racked with rioting, mostly in Tory-dominated towns like Oxford. On the King's birthday, many churchwardens claimed to have lost the ropes to ring the celebratory bells, while the next day, the anniversary of the 1660 Stuart Restoration, the ropes were suddenly found and mobs smashed windows not displaying commemorative candles. On 10 June, The Pretender's birthday, the militia had to be called to quell a London riot that resulted in several deaths, and on the day Oxford was indicted for high treason, a crowd of supporters, shouting angrily against the King, accompanied the former minister to the Tower. England had not seen such unrest since the pro-Sacheverell protests. In response, Stanhope's government adopted the famous ‘Riot Act’, making rioting a capital offence.

  This was the context in which Steele was pressed to write The Englishman in defence of the King and his ministers, as well as to ghost-write Newcastle's patriotic speeches in the Lords. In July 1715, Steele warned he would have to stop such work if he were not better ‘supported in it’,52 leading Newcastle to arrange a one-off payment of £500 (almost £60,000 today) for Steele from secret service funds. Kit-Cat patronage of propaganda remained as necessary as ever.

  More urgent defensive measures were required when, in July, reports were received from France that The Pretender was planning to launch an invasion attempt. As in 1708 and 1714, national security was put on high alert. Stanhope directed the government's military preparations, his first step being to suspend habeas corpus. In September 1715, the Earl of Mar fulfilled every paranoid Whig fear by raising a Jacobite rebellion of 15–20,000 Scotsmen. Mar had favoured the Union in 1707, but was one of many Scots who afterwards grew disaffected when not offered any share in Georgian power. Mar's Scottish rebellion was premature, however—the English Jacobites were unprepared to join it, having been under close surveillance since Anne's death and having lost their leaders to exile or the Committee of Secrecy's investigations. A small uprising occurred in Northumberland in early October 1715, inspiring civil disobedience among Catholics in Lancashire, but there were no other major English rebellions. While the Whigs may have exaggerated the scale of the Jacobite threat, the Jacobites were equally deluded about the number and strength of their supporters.

  The Scottish rebels were routed by government troops in bloody clashes at Preston and at Sheriffmuir in Scotland in mid-November 1715. On the sensitive anniversary of 17 November, violent hand-tohand clashes ensued in London, and two Jacobites were shot dead. Though no records or rumours of Kit-Cat activism from this fraught month survive, we know the Club met later that winter and probably backed Whig counter-demonstrations, drawing on the grassroots members of Whig ‘mug-house clubs’—large gatherings of Whig ‘gentlemen, lawyers and tradesmen’ who drank ale from mugs emblazoned with Whig symbols and portraits, while singing Whig drinking tunes.53 Newcastle organized at least one Whig mob sent to intimidate London's Tory printers.

  A number of Kit-Cats were also sent, through blizzards over hazardous roads, to rally government support around the country. James Dormer commanded a brigade to suppress the Jacobites in Preston, and was badly wounded. Burlington, as Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding and the City of York, ordered the arrest of Ja
cobite suspects there. Garth was sent to his home district of Durham, telling Newcastle he would not go from Northumberland into Scotland ‘till an Earthquake heaves me thither. I wonder that the Devil, who can be where he pleases, should at present take a fancy to be so much there.’54 By ‘the Devil’ he meant The Pretender, who belatedly landed in Scotland in December 1715.

  Stanhope moved to extend the suspension of habeas corpus in January 1716. Various lords, who felt this measure needlessly undermined civil liberties when The Pretender's attempt already seemed close to defeat, opposed the extension. Addison started a new paper, called The Freeholder (after the small landowners he wanted to dissuade from Jacobitism) in which he supported the suspension. Steele complained Addison's propaganda was not raising the alarm loudly enough: ‘[T]he Ministry made use of a lute, when they should have called for a trumpet.’55

  Disheartened by the defeats already suffered in November, The Pretender fled back to France by 4 February 1716, ending an episode that became known in Whig history books as ‘The Fifteen’ (after the year 1715). Though the Jacobites were left bedraggled and humiliated by their attempt, the Whigs in London could not have been confident of the final outcome: parts of Scotland had effectively been out of Westminster's control for almost five months, and the Jacobite advance guard had reached impressively far south.

  After it was over, the Whigs were relieved that the great test, so long anticipated, had been survived. Sunderland, who in August 1715 had successfully claimed the Cabinet place that Wharton's death had left vacant, hosted a celebratory banquet at his house on Piccadilly. Addison's reward for having produced The Freeholder during the invasion was to receive the appointment as a Commissioner of Trade and Plantations he had coveted since discovering he would not be Secretary of State. It brought a salary of £1,000 (some £120,000 today), and inside information about the progress of merchant companies and colonial investments.56 The Board of Trade, post-Utrecht, was now at the heart of the eight-year-old Great Britain's infant empire, as the nation became one of the most prosperous and powerful in the world. Steele, meanwhile, hardly had money to pay for coal to heat his house.

  Walpole, who had become Chancellor of the Exchequer in October 1715, used the mood following The Fifteen to accelerate the purging of Tories from minor Treasury offices. He also led the push, in February 1716, for execution of six Jacobite lords convicted of participating in the Scottish insurrection, including the popular Earl of Derwentwater. Addison and Steele argued for clemency. Steele saw something ruthless and not a little vindictive in the determination of his two patrons, Walpole and Stanhope, on this issue—a ruthlessness unmentioned in the literary dedications he wrote to them. Later, Steele explained to the Commons his thinking on northern England's Catholic minority: ‘[T]o put Severities upon men merely on account of Religion is a most grievous and Unwarrantable proceeding…Let Us not pursue Roman Catholics with the Spirit of Roman Catholics.’57 On hearing this speech, more rabidly Whig colleagues jeered that Steele was turning Tory.

  Addison did not oppose the government so openly, but privately suggested certain traitors be accidentally allowed to escape and those of lesser rank transported to the American plantations rather than hanged (one function of the Board of Trade on which he sat being to arrange criminal transportations). The government was determined on the harshest deterrent, however. Forty rebels were executed, including Derwentwater, some 600 of their followers were transported, and an equal number died in prison or were released. Catholic property was seized, and more repressive anti-Catholic laws were introduced.

  On 26 April 1716, the Kit-Cat Club lost another founding father. At 65, the cause of Somers' death is broadly agreed to have been syphilis, this disease probably being the only legacy left to Mrs Blount, the ‘housekeeper’ with whom he had long cohabited at his house in Bell Bar. It is unknown whether Somers' sisters, who inherited the bulk of his estate, shared anything with Mrs Blount. Somers left a library of 9,000 volumes.

  On the day of Somers' Hertfordshire funeral, Addison published a moving tribute in The Freeholder, praising his late patron's consistency (‘his whole Conduct of a Piece’) and loyalty (‘so tender a Concern for his Friends, that whatever Station they were in, they usually applied to him for his Advice in every Perplexity’).58 The essay was close to a modern obituary in an age where deaths were usually noticed with no more than a tally of fortune and heirs. Somers was the Kit-Cat whom Horace Walpole later described as ‘the model of Addison’.59 Somers' softly spoken, restrained manners, admired and imitated by Addison, had been taught to the entire nation by Mr Spectator, thereby contributing to the formation of the new ideal of ‘polite’ Georgian male manners.

  Sunderland called Somers ‘the life, the soul and the spirit of his party’,60 and though he was not actively involved in Westminster politics after 1714, Somers' death seemed to mark a change for the worse in the spirit of the Whigs. It was as if a watching conscience had closed its eyes. Immediately after his death, in April 1716, the Whig majorities in both Houses of Parliament passed the Septennial Act, which extended the time permitted between elections to seven years, thereby weakening a fundamental guarantee of executive accountability. Townshend conveniently claimed Somers gave the Act his deathbed approval, but this is unverified.61 Addison, as a leading minister, wrote in support of this Act in The Freeholder. Forty-three rebel Whigs, including Somerset, voted according to their consciences to defeat the Bill, however. The Act, which was not amended until 1911, brought stability to Britain, but sacrificed Whig principles to Whig party supremacy and self-interest. With the election planned for 1718 now postponed until 1722, opposition to the King's ministers was constitutionally obstructed and had to find other outlets.

  The Septennial Act can be blamed for the Kit-Cat Club's demise after 1718. The Club had flourished under the constant pressures of electoral contest—coordinating campaigns before elections, commissioning propaganda, keeping underling MPs in line—and, during the war, its members had been united by the ideal of ‘liberty’ in its broadest sense. Referring to the threat they believed emanated from Catholic Europe, the Club's young leaders were dispensing with laws—first habeas corpus during The Fifteen, now the requirement of regular elections—as if consolidating the status quo of Whig control over Georgian Britain were all that mattered.

  XVIII

  PARADISE LOST

  Forsake not an old Friend, for the new is not comparable to him: A new Friend is as new Wine; when it is old thou shalt drink it with Pleasure.

  ECCLESIASTES 9:10, quoted by JOSEPH ADDISON in

  The Spectator no. 68, Friday, 18 May 1711

  WITHOUT EXTERNAL ENEMIES to unite them after 1715, the ambitious Whigs of Walpole's generation began fighting bitterly over the spoils of power that the Junto had taken so many decades to win. Attempts were made to use the Kit-Cat Club to reunite old friends, but as Tonson's commitment to the Club began to wane, and as other key Kit-Cats turned their attentions elsewhere, the all-male paradise of late night London revelry began to fall away.

  Steele suffered a minor stroke in the spring of 1716, but could not afford the luxury of a rest cure, his time consumed by new duties and projects. As reward for supporting the Septennial Act, he had just received a seat on the commission for redistributing Scottish estates taken from Jacobite rebels, the Commission of Forfeited Estates, which was a job with a £1,000 salary. The Commission ordered Steele's presence in Scotland in September, but he was preoccupied by a private commercial enterprise: the construction of a tanker, containing a machine to pump water through its hull, by which to transport live fish fresh from Ireland and northern England to London's Billingsgate Market. Steele called his invention the ‘Fishpool’, planning to launch it as a joint-stock company and believing it would make his fortune, finally freeing him from the constant need to seek patronage.

  Steele was also managing the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane. He had persuaded Addison to let the theatre stage a previously unperformed play, The D
rummer, which Steele hoped would be a hit on the back of Cato. Addison, however, did not want to publicize his authorship of the play, hiding his identity even from its printer, Jacob Junior. It had been written in response to the Collierite reformers' challenge to produce comedy without lewdness or immorality, but this no longer fitted with the new decadence of the early Georgians. Though attended by the Prince of Wales, The Drummer was not a success.

  Among its themes, The Drummer celebrated marriage, criticizing those who ridiculed the institution, like Congreve and Vanbrugh:

  Too long has Marriage, in this tasteless Age,

  With ill-bred Raillery supplied the Stage;

  No little Scribbler is of Wit so bare,

  But has his fling at the poor Wedded Pair.

  Addison and Steele emphasized that the model wife should dote on her husband, even if that were viewed as quaint and unfashionable behaviour. Steele may have promoted female literacy and liberty in print, yet privately he lectured Prue that ‘'tis the glory of a woman to be her husband's friend and companion and not his sovereign director’.1 This was not a remark that Congreve, with his love and understanding of strong and intelligent women, would ever have made. Addison further argued that marriage was morally beneficial for both partners, taking the rough edges off male manners and conversation, while drawing the hysteria out of women's bodies. He believed every man needed to be softened and polished by the sensitivity and vivacity of women. As dying a bachelor would therefore have been like leaving a stylistic ugliness uncorrected in his prose, at 44, on 30 July 1716, Addison finally announced his engagement to the 36-year-old Charlotte, Countess of Warwick.