Theatre, music and the visual arts remained the privileged recipients of Hanoverian patronage, however, with literature lagging behind. Though George spoke fair English by 1717, he remained, like King William, unmoved by poetry not in his mother tongue. Newcastle, as Lord Chamberlain, was therefore given greater personal scope to dispense literary patronage—a role that combined perfectly with his position as the leading Kit-Cat patron.
Newcastle self-consciously saw himself as inheriting the mantle of Dorset, who had similarly worn the two hats of Lord Chamberlain and Kit-Cat patron after 1697. As Dorset had been Dryden's patron and encouraged the Kit-Cats to admire the old Tory poet, so Newcastle now funded Congreve to finally fulfil his promise to ‘be kind to’ Dryden's literary remains. Congreve said Newcastle had had the ‘Taste and Discernment’ to suggest the publication of Dryden's collected dramatic works in six volumes, and submissively commended Newcastle ‘for doing a Thing which is, in truth, of a Public Consideration’.41 Tonson published this collection in January 1718, in which Congreve's dedication confirmed Newcastle as the arts' major patron: ‘You are now in a Station by which You necessarily preside over the liberal Arts, and all the Practisers and Possessors of them.’42 Though Dryden still lacked a monument of stone in Westminster Abbey, the Kit-Cat Club had finally given him a monument in print.
Congreve himself was nearing the time for monuments. Since the previous autumn, he had been convalescing at Ashley, the seat of fellow Kit-Cat Viscount Shannon. To memorialize his work before Congreve grew too unwell to give editorial assistance, Tonson instructed his nephew to prepare The Works of Mr William Congreve…revis'd by the author, which was published in 1719. The Whig schism made previous Whig–Tory battles seem safely in the past, allowing Tonson to also express the admiration he had never ceased to feel for Prior as a poet. Tonson produced a luxurious edition of Prior's poems in 1718, which Prior dedicated to Lionel, referring back to the debt Prior owed to Lionel's father, his first patron: ‘You have a Hereditary Right to whatever may be called Mine.’43 The profit from the enormous subscription list for this volume, including at least twentyseven Kit-Cats and Kit-Cat relations, was sufficient to provide Prior with a pension until his death. Despite Prior's merciless savaging of Garth's poetry in The Examiner during the paper wars of 1710, Garth was among the first to subscribe; he had never removed the lines warmly praising Prior's poetry from later editions of The Dispensary.
After Prior's imprisonment by Walpole's Committee of Secrecy, however, and after losing the snakes-and-ladders board game of eighteenth-century politics, Prior never fully rekindled affection for his old Kit-Cat comrades, no matter how attracted they remained to his wit and writing. When Oxford was released from the Tower in the summer of 1717, thanks to the squabbling Whigs' inability to conclude his prosecution, Prior felt greater affinity with this fellow outcast than with the Whig oligarchs, and the two maintained a close private friendship during their final years. During a stay with Oxford in Cambridgeshire in September 1721, Prior died of cholera. He asked to be buried in Westminster Abbey next to his old schoolmate Stepney.
In contrast to the nostalgia of Tonson's relationships with Congreve and Prior, Tonson's friendship with Vanbrugh after 1714 remained as vital as in the Kit-Cat Club's beginning. With no Club meetings to tie him to London, Tonson travelled on business to France in late summer 1718, remaining there for two years. As in 1703, Vanbrugh wrote to Tonson between 1717 and 1720 about renovations at Barn Elms: ‘[Y]ou are so far from forgetting your old mistress, Barnes, that you are inclined to compliment her in the spring with £500 for a new petticoat. For my part, I think she deserves it, for the pleasures she has given you.’44 Further comparing the house to a woman, Vanbrugh wrote:
Her charms don't lie in her Beauty, but her good Conditions…I always found a Tete-a-Tete more pleasing with you there than I should have done at Blenheim, had the house been my own, though without my Lady Marlborough for my Wife. For one may find a great deal of Pleasure in building a Palace for another when one should find very little in living in't oneself.45
Nothing suggests Tonson had any mistresses other than his Barnes house. The only evidence of women in Tonson's life comes from Ned Ward:
For kind Bocai though now he's past his Prime
Has been an old Sheep-biter in his time;
Not only in the Gainful skins a Dealer,
But of the Flesh has been a Fellow-Feeler.46
A ‘sheep-biter’ was a dog that worried sheep, and in this context a man who ran after ‘mutton’—that is, older women. Other than this one line, however, all of Tonson's relationships seem to have been intense friendships with men, especially Vanbrugh.
In 1713, aged 49, Vanbrugh had made (in the midst of severe money worries) a sudden, belated entrance onto the marriage market. He had been spending the winter with Carlisle at Castle Howard, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, also staying in York, wrote mercilessly to a London friend:
'Tis credibly reported that he [Vanbrugh] is endeavouring at an honourable state of matrimony and vows to lead a sinful life no more…Van's taste was always odd; his inclination to ruins has given him a fancy for Mrs Yarbrugh. He sighs and ogles that it would do your heart good to see him; and she is not a little pleased, in so small a proportion of men amongst such a Number of Women, a whole man should fall to her share.47
The object of Vanbrugh's attentions was Miss Henrietta Maria Yarbrugh, daughter of Colonel James Yarbrugh, an aide-de-camp to Marlborough and distant relation of the Dowager Duchess of Newcastle. This ‘ruin’ was, in fact, a 21-year-old girl—too plain to be a plausible Kit-Cat toast, but blessed with these useful connections. Lady Mary does not reveal of what Vanbrugh's previous ‘sinful life’ consisted, but one wonders, in light of a total lack of gossip about earlier affairs and the satire about his relationship with Peregrine Bertie, whether she was laughing at a ‘confirmed bachelor’ taking his first interest in the opposite sex.
He had visited Henrietta Maria again in York in the summer of 1716, full of his new appointment as Surveyor to the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, and just as he was resuming work on Blenheim. By November 1716, however, Vanbrugh had fallen out with the Duchess of Marlborough and resigned from the Blenheim works for the final time, leaving the workmen under the Duchess' direction. Following the political trauma of the Whig schism of 1717–18, Vanbrugh again spent Christmas at Castle Howard, where he wrote to Newcastle that it was ‘so bloody Cold, I have almost a mind to Marry to keep myself warm.’48
On 14 January 1719, Vanbrugh finally married Henrietta Maria, now 26 to his 54. The ceremony took place at St Lawrence's in York, Carlisle acting as best man, though crippled with gout. A short tour of Carlisle's relations followed the wedding. Vanbrugh wrote to Newcastle to tell him the news, but burying it within a lot of other architectural talk and self-mockery, suggesting that Vanbrugh guessed his friends might find his marriage cause for amusement, such that he wanted to laugh at himself first. He said Tonson would be ‘frightened out of his Wits and his Religion too when he hears I've gone at last. If he is still in France, he'll certainly give himself to God, for fear he should now be ravished by a gentlewoman. I was the last man left between him and ruin.’49
In his cross-Channel correspondence, Vanbrugh informed Tonson of his marriage, assuring him, ‘whatever evils Marriage may design me, it has not yet lessened one grain of my Affections to an old Friend’.50 Vanbrugh joked that marriage would ‘possibly do me as much good as it has mischief to many a one we know’, and that the chain of matrimony ‘hangs a little easy about me’. After receiving correction of a false report from Paris of Tonson's death, Vanbrugh said he had told his new wife so much about his publisher and friend ‘while you were alive, after you were dead, and since you are alive again, that she knows you well enough to desire to know you better’.51
In August 1719, Vanbrugh was once again passed over for the top job of Surveyor of the Royal Works, writing to Tonson that it was a bitter pill ‘now I come
just to the time (and disgrace) of Swallowing it. I don't, however, blame anybody, nor think them wanting. But 'tis one of [the] hardest pieces of Fortune that ever fell to anybody.’52 The reason for taking it so hard, as he confided to Tonson, was simple: ‘I have no money to dispose of. I have been many years at hard labour to work through the cruel difficulties that Haymarket undertaking involved me in…nor are these difficulties quite at an end yet.’53
One grief Vanbrugh did not confide to Tonson in this letter was that his first child by Henrietta Maria, a daughter, had been stillborn. Fourteen months later, however, Vanbrugh's wife gave him a son—named Charles as much after the boy's godfather, Lord Carlisle, as after Vanbrugh's favourite brother. Tonson hinted heavily that, if Vanbrugh were not too ashamed of Tonson's ‘old Testament name’, he should like to stand godfather to one of Vanbrugh's future sons.54 A couple of years after the birth of Charles, in 1722, Vanbrugh boasted to Tonson:
I am now two Boys Strong in the Nursery but am forbid getting any more this Season for fear of killing my Wife. A Reason that in Kit-cat days would have been stronger for it than against it: But let her live, for she's Special good, as far as I know of the Matter.55
Vanbrugh was genuinely surprised to find his wife so likeable, in contradiction to his deeply ingrained misogyny. Vanbrugh later told Tonson he did not repent his ‘great Leap in the Dark, marriage’,56 but was ‘confirmed my Old Opinion was right: That whatever there is good or bad in Marriage, it was fitter to end Our Life with than begin it’.57 This belief that marriage was only good for a man's retirement seems to have been a common Kit-Cat view. Gentlemen did not need to marry to increase their domestic comfort, since servants took care of that, so for the more libidinous members, whatever their sexual orientations, late marriages simply prolonged their right to enjoy promiscuity without reproach. The average age of men's first marriage in this period (1700–49) was 27.5 years old, and of 118 sons of dukes born between 1680 and 1729 who reached the age of 20, forty died bachelors. At least a dozen of the fifty or so Kit-Cats never married.58 The golden age of clubs was also, in other words, a golden age of bachelors. Not only Newcastle's meeting of March 1717 but the Kit-Cat Club as a whole can be regarded, in this light, as a kind of extended stag party. These relationships, despite the satires written about Vanbrugh and Stanhope as sodomites, were more ‘homosocial’ than homosexual, though the line between the two was never absolute.
To the eighteenth-century mind, family was directly associated with nature, and friendship with civilization—the first being the product of animal urges, the second the product of reason. The Kit-Cats therefore saw friendship as heroically improving upon a world based on random, biological ties (though many Kit-Cat relationships were cemented by marriages of their children). They chose as their authority Cicero, for whom same-sex friendship was a higher calling than the family, as opposed to Epicurus who, though he conceived of friendship as an escape from repressive government, included women and children in that escape. Even Steele, for all his idealization of marriage, conceived it as the rival to male friendship in coffee houses, taverns and clubs. Steele believed you had to choose, warning that ‘the married Man who has not bid adieu to the Fashions and False Gallantries of the Town is perplexed with everything around him’.59 From this viewpoint, the Kit-Cat Club was undone as much by its literary members' late marriages after 1716 as by the political schism souring public life.
Several Kit-Cats' married lives were starkly unhappier than their Club lives. Pulteney married in 1714 a woman who was beautiful but adulterous, nicknamed ‘Mrs Pony’ for being a good ride. They were said to argue so acerbically that they lived ‘in a vinegar bottle’.60 Edmund Dunch also married a ‘lewd, handsome’ woman who lived for most of their marriage with other men.61 Walpole and his wife, likewise, agreed to live apart, and Walpole's adoring son Horace may not have been his. The most extreme case of marriage-aversion among the Kit-Cats, however, must be Scarbrough: on the eve of his late marriage to Isabella, the young widow of Lord Manchester's son, Scarbrough ordered dinner to his bedroom and a chariot to go out and meet friends for cards afterwards; then, after finishing his meal, put a gun to his mouth and blew his brains out.
Steele's marriage had long become like that of a cursed couple he described in The Spectator: ‘In Company they are in a Purgatory, when only together, in an Hell.’62 When Steele returned from Scotland, he seems to have quickly asserted his conjugal rights, since Prue, at 40, was soon pregnant with their fifth child. As no correspondence survives from the months they lived together at their Hampton Court home during 1718, it is impossible to know how peaceful or fractious they were. All we know is that, while Steele was restaging Cato at Drury Lane over Christmas, Prue suddenly fell ill, perhaps due to complications in the pregnancy. On 27 December 1718, Steele sent a note of only a couple of lines to his wife's brother, informing him that Prue had died the previous night.
Steele was devastated by the loss. He had once invented a letter to The Spectator from a widower who described having to excuse himself from male company to cry: ‘I sat down with a Design to put you upon giving us Rules how to overcome such Griefs as these,’ Steele's exemplary widower wrote, ‘but I should rather advise you to teach Men to be capable of them…To want Sorrow when you in Decency and Truth should be afflicted, is, I should think, a greater Instance of a Man's being a Blockhead than not to know the Beauty of any Passage in Virgil.’63
Steele moved into bachelor's rooms in York Buildings, where he still held a lease. He instructed his 10-year-old daughter Betty that she would have to be mother to her little brother and sister now. Lady Steele's best friend, Mrs Keck, in fact, took the children in and raised them, and one might note that the way Mrs Keck had taken Prue into her cramped home above a shop during Prue's various pregnancies, and cared for Prue's infants when she was in Wales and again after her death, evidences a selfless and practical bond of trust between these two women that no Kit-Cat friendship, even between Addison and Steele, can quite match.
Steele was still in mourning for Prue when he received news of another loss. Dr Garth had fallen ill earlier in the season and, while confined to bed at his house at Harrow-on-the-Hill, judged himself to be dying. He wrote to the equally housebound Congreve in Surrey Street, to inform him he was ‘going his Journey’ and asking how soon it would be before Congreve followed. Congreve replied that ‘he wished him a good journey but did not intend to take the same road’ just yet.64
Among Garth's final visitors was Addison, who said he visited Garth to try to prepare him for the afterlife, but the doctor declared he had been long convinced ‘that the doctrines of Christianity are incomprehensible and the religion itself an imposture’.65 Once, when called to the deathbed of an actress named Miss Campion who was in a panic about her sins, Garth had assured her she could ‘rest contented’ for ‘upon his honour there was neither a God nor future State’.66 Understandably, therefore, this final, misguided interview with Garth upset Addison, who recounted it regretfully to a bishop.
Garth told another visitor he would be glad to die, ‘for he was weary of having his shoes pulled off and on’.67 Behind this brave flippancy, Garth was in excruciating pain. Once he knew himself beyond recovery, he sent for two different surgeons by two different servants. He tricked each surgeon into bleeding him from a different arm, then, when left alone, undid the bandages and tried to bleed himself to death. The attempt merely left him weakened. He did not die until 18 January 1719, four days after Vanbrugh's wedding. Garth was buried beside his late wife in a Harrow-on-the-Hill church, leaving one daughter, Martha, his only heir.
XIX
THE END OF THE CLUB
The Old Roman Friendships were a composition of several ingredients, of which the Principal was Union of Hearts (a fine Flower, which grew in several parts of that Empire), Sincerity, Frankness, Disinterestedness, Pity and tenderness, of each an equal quantity; these all mixed up together with two rich oils, which they called perpetual kind w
ishes and serenity of temper, and the whole was strongly perfumed with the Desire of Pleasing, which gave it a most grateful smell and was a sure restorative in all sorts of Vapours. The Cordial thus prepared was of so durable a Nature that no length of time would waste it, and what is very remarkable, says our Author, it increased in Weight and Value the longer you kept it.
The Moderns have most greatly adulterated this fine recipe; some of the Ingredients, indeed, are not to be found, but what they impose upon you for friendship is as follows: Outward Profession (a common Weed that grows everywhere) instead of the Flower of Union, the desire of being pleased, a large quantity of self-Interest, convenience, and Reservedness many handfuls, a little of pity and tenderness (but some pretend to make it up without these two last) and the common Oil of
inconstancy (which, like our Linseed Oil is cold drawn every Hour) serves to mix them all together; most of these ingredients being of a perishable Nature it will not keep, and shows itself to be a counterfeit by lessening continually in Weight and Value…
JOSEPH ADDISON, A Sketch Upon Friendship (n.d.)1
IN JUNE 1717, Addison was having heart palpitations and trouble breathing as he strained to commute between London, Kensington and Hampton Court for his work as a Secretary of State. Illness confined him to Holland House later that summer, and by March 1718 Addison told the King he could not continue. He retired with a pension of £1,500 (around £196,000 today), and instead served the Sunderland–Stanhope ministry through journalism supporting their policies. Addison and Ambrose Philips, for example, produced a paper called The Freethinker, which discussed liberty of conscience within Protestantism, supporting Stanhope's moves to repeal the Occasional Conformity laws that the Junto Whigs had allowed to pass for tactical reasons in 1713.
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