Addison's other great, pro-government journalistic intervention concerned the 1719 Peerage Bill. This Bill, which proposed that membership of the House of Lords be fixed to allow the creation of only six further peers, resulted from the royal family's feud, the King attempting to ensure his son could not undo current legislation by appointing a new batch of lords the moment he came to the throne, as Anne had appointed the ‘Tory Dozen’ to force the Utrecht Treaty through the Lords. The government tried to argue this was a constitutional reform to strengthen the upper house's independence and prevent corruption of the honours system for party political ends. The opposition, led by Walpole and meeting at the Duke of Devonshire's house, saw it as the ministry's attempt to disempower the Lords, much as the Septennial Act had disempowered the Commons. It would turn into an important constitutional debate, which presaged many parliamentary reform debates in the centuries to come.
A printed skirmish over the Peerage Bill began immediately. Steele published The Plebeian, a paper attacking the Bill as tampering with Britain's constitutional balance. The paper's title pointed to Steele's conviction that his style of Whiggism was more democratic and antiauthoritarian than the present government's: ‘[I]f those who have a power entrusted to them by their Principals only for a few Years can seize it to themselves and their Posterity forever, what use will be made of Power so acquired[?]’ he asked.2 Steele said the peers who supported the Bill, including several Kit-Cat colleagues, were nursed on the milk of contempt for everything except their own ‘imaginary dignity’.3 Steele and Walpole criticized the Bill for aiming to establish ‘the worst sort of oligarchy’.4
Addison, on the government's behalf, answered Steele's attacks anonymously, in a paper called The Old Whig. Addison regretted that The Plebeian's author, whom he knew to be Steele, had resorted to an ‘angry strain’ rather than arguing calmly and rationally. Addison tried to present the Bill as correcting a long-standing constitutional defect and limiting the monarchy in the old Whig tradition.
Steele replied in two further issues of The Plebeian. Referring to The Old Whig's author as ‘somebody or other that is used to masquerading’—a jibe at Addison's tendency to hide his authorship—Steele cast the ‘Old Whig’ as old-fashioned in failing to imagine threats to English liberty from any source other than an arbitrary monarch. The line aimed at Addison's heart, however, was Steele's remark: ‘I am afraid he is so old a Whig that he has quite forgot his principles.’ Above all, Addison believed himself to be a man of principle, partly because Steele had admired and applauded him as such for decades. Steele also accused Addison of ‘wilfully’ misunderstanding The Plebeian because Addison was writing in the government's pay. After years of sitting on the fence during the Whig–Tory paper wars precisely to avoid such accusations, Addison must have been wounded. When Addison did not respond immediately to Steele's rebuttals, Steele smirked that ‘Age is apt to be Slow’—perhaps only friendly teasing prompted by Addison's choice of the ‘Old Whig’ persona, but a joke suggesting Steele was unaware how sick and frail Addison was growing by this time.
When Addison's reply came, it displayed unprecedented and uncharacteristic aggression. Steele was writing ‘like a son of Grub Street’, yet Addison mocked Steele's hypocrisy in calling himself a ‘plebeian’ when this was ‘a title which he is by no means fond of retaining’—the insinu ation being that Steele opposed a cap on new peerages because he himself aspired to one. Addison said he shuddered to remember, in light of Steele's radical fears about the House of Lords' exorbitant power, Steele's years of flattering peers as patrons: ‘I must…remind this Author of the Milk with which he nurses our Nobles, not to omit [i.e. forget] his stagnated Pool.’5 Although Addison's defenders have argued we should not read this as a personal insult to Steele's failing Fishpool project, but as referring to Steele's earlier comment that the Peerage Bill would make the House of Lords ‘as corrupt and offensive as a stagnated pool’,6 any ambiguity was likely intentional. Addison concluded with a condescending recommendation to Steele, ‘as a friend’, to put his considerable journalistic talents to the service of some better cause.
Steele would not let Addison's condescension be the final word. He reiterated his belief that Addison was writing ‘in support of vassalage’ on orders from his former bosses, and that the lack of integrity was evident if one compared The Old Whig with Addison's earlier journalism. Steele quoted Addison's Cato against its author, implying Addison was a hypocrite, and concluded he was sorry to see his old friend selling out in this way.
Part of the tragedy of Addison's and Steele's public falling out was that neither was a hypocrite—the Peerage Bill simply revealed a genuine difference in the radicalism of their Whiggery. Posterity has generally sided with the more progressive Steele (even the pro-Addisonian Macaulay admitted Steele ‘blundered upon the truth’7), but Addison's arguments were based on Lockean principles in which he sincerely believed, and on fears about the Prince of Wales' character and future actions.
Dr Johnson blamed politics for ruining this lifelong friendship and literary collaboration (‘Why could not faction find other advocates?’8), but the friendship was over long before, broken by wounded pride, not political differences. Steele once described the consequences should the 1707 Treaty of Union be undone as follows: ‘Two Warlike Nations that should separate, after being under solemn Obligation of perpetual Union, would like two private Men of Spirit that had broken Friendship, have ten thousand nameless and inexplicable Causes of Anger boiling in their Bosoms.’9
For Addison and Steele, the ‘ten thousand nameless and inexplicable Causes’ derived from failings in the carefully calibrated reciprocity necessary to keep a friendship strong despite inequalities of circumstance. Addison's elevation to Secretary of State finally tipped the balance in what had always been an unequal relationship. With the Whig schism, the Kit-Cat Club's suspension, and Addison's marriage and move to Holland House, the men had stopped meeting months before the Peerage Bill controversy.
Addison and Steele were not the only adversaries in the Peerage Bill paper war. Addison helped his former ministerial colleagues hire other journalists, while Walpole used the Prince's purse to hire writers to assist Steele, including Addison's cousin Eustace Budgell, who was angry with Addison at the time. Years later, Budgell threw himself into the Thames with pockets full of stones, leaving a note on his desk that suggested residual guilt for having betrayed his cousin in 1719: ‘What Cato did [i.e. suicide] and Addison approved, Cannot be Wrong.’
The effectiveness of Addison's and Steele's competing propaganda regarding the Peerage Bill, and of Stanhope's and Walpole's competing oratory and political skills, was tested at the Commons vote. The Bill was allowed to drop, to Steele's immense satisfaction. This was a major setback for the government and a great encouragement to the Prince's party.10 An even more dramatic Whig schism was averted only by the lucky return of an external threat: the landing of Spanish forces in Scotland to support an uprising of Jacobite Highlanders, defeated in June 1719 at Glenshiel.
That month, Addison refused to see a doctor as his condition deteriorated dramatically. He was terrified of death, admitting frankly that it was his first reason for being a Christian (‘There is something so particularly gloomy and offensive to Human Nature in the Prospect of Non-Existence’,11 and if an afterlife was a delusion, ‘let me enjoy it, since it makes me both the happier and better Man’12), but he was also morbidly fascinated by the question of how to have a heroic death. Addison was working on a tragic play about Socrates' death, and was read extracts on the deaths of ancient heroes during his last days. The mode of death, he said, was the most instructive part of any biography.
At the end, Addison summoned three people. One, to everyone's surprise, was the poet John Gay, whom he apparently begged for forgiveness over a wrong of which Gay himself was unaware—possibly blocking Gay's preferment when Addison was Secretary to the Lords Regent in 1714. Another was Milton's last surviving daughter, to whom Ad
dison reportedly presented a purse of gold in honour of her father's genius. The third was Addison's stepson, Lord Warwick, whom Addison summoned to ‘See in what peace a Christian can die.’13 This last anecdote was quoted with much pathos by future generations, helped on by Thomas Tickell writing of Addison: ‘There taught us how to live; and (oh! Too high / The price for knowledge) taught us how to die.’14 When Virginia Woolf heard the story, her sympathies were instead ‘with the foolish, and perhaps fuddled, young peer rather than with the frigid gentleman, not too far gone for a last spasm of self-complacency, upon the bed’.15
Addison once wrote a Spectator complimenting Thomas More's death as being ‘of a piece with his Life. There was nothing in it new, forced or affected’16 and, in its own way, the slight affectation or staginess of Addison's death was of a piece with his life. Selfconsciousness was one of the author's intellectual assets but also his greatest handicap. Steele's unselfconscious personality was, at the height of their friendship and professional collaboration, the perfect antidote. Thus Steele wrote a very different essay on how to die in The Tatler, saying that ‘[n]one but a Tragedian can die by Rule, and wait till he discovers a Plot, or says a fine Thing upon his Exit. In real Life, this is a Chimera, and by Noble Spirits it will be done decently, without the Ostentation of it.’17
Addison sent no last-minute summons to Steele. Believing himself to have done no injustice to his friend, Addison saw no reason to heal their rift. This omission has negated Addison's efforts to gain posterity's admiration for his manner of dying.
Addison died on 17 June 1719, and his remains were conveyed from Holland House to Westminster Abbey in the middle of the night. He was buried, at his request, beside his first and last Kit-Cat patron, Halifax, in the north aisle of Henry VII's Chapel—next to the nation's leaders rather than in Poets' Corner, beside Dryden, Prior and Stepney. It is unknown who, if anyone, from the Kit-Cat Club was at the funeral. Tonson was still overseas, Congreve was in poor health, and Steele may not have felt welcome, though one hopes he attended in any case.
Addison's will left almost everything to his wife and baby daughter. A separate letter gave his successor as Secretary of State for the South authority over his papers. This was because there were politically sensitive items among them, but it also effectively made Thomas Tickell, Under-Secretary of State thanks to Addison's patronage, into Addison's literary executor. Though this was logical, and the donnish, devoted Tickell was the perfect administrator, the arrangement must have been difficult for Steele.
A rivalry that Tickell and Steele mastered during Addison's life soon surfaced after he died. Tickell and Addison had become friends after Addison was famous, when Addison preferred to surround himself with young acolytes rather than Kit-Cat colleagues. Like the young, last wife who often controls the materials of a great man's reputation after his death, though she may not have been the love of his life or muse of his art, Tickell earned his legacy by being physically at Addison's side at the end. Tickell had been staying at Holland House and helping Addison's wife and servants care for him in his sickness since the summer of 1717. Steele discovered Tickell was compiling a four-volume edition of Addison's collected works, for which Tickell was trawling through their collaborative publications, mostly The Spectator and The Tatler, and separating Addison's essays from Steele's. Though this was likely what Addison had instructed (touchingly, Addison seems to have ordered Tickell to omit The Old Whig pamphlets attacking Steele from the collection), Tickell failed to even consult Steele on the selection. The whole process was therefore felt by Steele as an insult.
Steele produced a new paper in 1720 containing his valediction to Addison. Describing their relationship as one of complementary opposites, Steele explained:
There never was a more strict Friendship than between those Gentlemen; nor had they any Difference but what proceeded from their different Way of pursuing the same thing; the one with Patience, Foresight, and temperate Address, always waited and stemmed the Torrent; while the other often plunged himself into it, and was as often taken out by the Temper of him who stood weeping on the Bank for his Safety.18
Sugar-coating their lost intimacy, Steele continued:
[T]hese two Men lived for some Years last past, shunning each other, but still preserving the most passionate Concern for their mutual Welfare. But when they met, they were as unreserved as Boys, and talked of greatest Affairs, upon which they saw where they differed, without pressing (what they knew impossible) to convert each other.19
In November 1721, Tickell finished editing Addison's Collected Works, for which Tonson and Jacob Junior compiled a list of 1,046 subscribers. Jacob Junior had the courtesy to send a copy to Steele at his lodgings in York Buildings, in which Steele found, as he expected, that Tickell had underestimated the extent of their collaboration. Tickell effectively set up a caricature of Addison as faultless scholar in contrast to Steele as boozy ex-soldier, insinuating that Steele had profited by claiming credit for Addison's work. Steele also found mistaken biographical details—Tickell did not know, for example, that it was Halifax who had persuaded Addison from taking religious orders—and that Tickell had not included The Drummer in the collection. Whether Addison had instructed Tickell to omit The Drummer, or whether Tickell was unaware of the play's true authorship, is unclear. Steele immediately bought the copyright from Tonson so he could bring it out in a new edition, with Addison named on its title page. In its dedication, addressed to Congreve, Steele answered Tickell's insinuations.20
Steele argued Tickell had done Addison's reputation a disservice by presenting him as faultless but also humourless. Steele reclaimed The Spectator and the Spectator Club framework as joint ideas, while insisting that what he had failed to attribute to Addison ‘I had his direct Injunctions to hide’. This arrangement may have partially benefited Steele's reputation, he admitted, but Addison's ‘oblique Stokes’ against other people had also made Steele many enemies on Addison's behalf. Steele was ‘a Man who had, for the greatest part of his Life, been his [Addison's] known Bosom Friend, and shielded him from all the Resentments which many of his own Works would have brought upon him’. Steele claimed he ‘rejoiced in being excelled’ by Addison's talent, making the double-edged boast that Addison could always send for him ‘as much as he could send for any of his clerks when he was Secretary of State’. Candidly admitting Addison's ‘natural Power over me’, Steele said he felt ‘supererogatory Affection’ for his dead friend.21 Above all, Steele credited himself with having coaxed Addison's talent into the daylight for the benefit of the British public.
Steele ultimately triumphed over Tickell to be immortalized as The Best Friend, his name and Addison's now being inseparable in literary history. As Addison, for all his love of solitude, once observed, ‘neither Virgil nor Horace would have gained so great a Reputation in the World had they not been the Friends and Admirers of each other’.22 Tickell is remembered solely for a beautiful elegy upon Addison's death, and the verse Dedication to Addison's Collected Works. On his tomb, Tickell correctly inscribed his life's highest achievement as having been ‘the friend of Addison’.23
Rivalry between Tickell and Steele had been primed before Addison's death, in the autumn of 1718, when Newcastle, as Lord Chamberlain, had insisted that a prologue by Tickell to a new production of The Beaux Stratagem replace one by Steele. This was largely Newcastle's way of expressing his disapproval of Steele for siding with the Walpole-Townshend faction against the government. Steele interpreted it as a threat to the Drury Lane company's independence. After a series of polite remonstrations failed to move Newcastle, Steele asked Jacob Junior to act as his intermediary, saying he could no longer trust his temper to speak directly with his patron.
Steele's toleration for supplication to those above him in rank was always brittle: ‘[T]here is nothing to be done with those Poor Creatures called Great Men, but by an Idolatry towards them, which it is below the spirit of an Honest Free and Religious man to pay,’ he once declar
ed to Prue.24 Now, after the Peerage Bill debates, Steele's respect for British hierarchies was at a low point.
Newcastle was frustrated by the Peerage Bill's defeat, having much to lose when the Prince of Wales, who loathed him, became king. That Steele, who owed Newcastle his seat in Parliament, should join with the Prince's Party was a humiliation he took personally. Years later, Newcastle candidly said his temper was ‘such that I am often uneasy and peevish, and perhaps, what may be called wrong-headed, to my best Friends, but that always goes down with the Sun and passes off’.25 In Steele's case, Newcastle's peevishness did not pass off so easily.
In December 1719, Newcastle again overruled Steele's management at Drury Lane by ordering the dismissal of the actor Colley Cibber, who had written a dedication critical of Newcastle. Steele refused to fire Cibber, causing Newcastle to revoke Steele's licence and suspend performances at the theatre in January until further notice. Steele was forced to resign, but took his indignation to the public in yet another journal, The Theatre (January–April 1720), and also a pamphlet.26 Steele was at his nadir in early 1720, depressed by the deaths of Prue, Garth and Addison, and by his continuing inability to escape debt (a new £500 debt to Tonson appeared in Steele's accounts, probably representing the dowry for his illegitimate daughter). In The Theatre's final issue, Steele complained there had been a ‘Concert to undo me utterly…since the Beginning of this Winter’ and that the paper he was closing was:
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