Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  not the Product of a Mind at Ease, but written by a Man neither out of Pain in Body or Mind; but forced to suspend the Anguish of both, with the Addition of powerful Men soliciting my Ruin, shy Looks from my Acquaintance, surly Behaviour from my Domestics, with all the Train of private and public Calamity, and that for no other Reason but pursuing what he thought just.27

  In the tone of a son wronged by a father, the near-50-year-old Steele told his former patron, 27-year-old Newcastle, that he planned to challenge the loss of the Drury Lane licence in the law courts. Steele spoke of having been ‘expelled’ from the playhouse, just as he had been expelled from Parliament, as if everything in life were a matter of membership. Steele would take action for the sake of ‘my Creditors and my Family, to neither of whom am I able to be just, Except I am justly dealt with by others. My Heart throbs and my Eyes flow when I talk thus to my Once Dear and Honoured Duke of Newcastle.’28

  Despite such quarrels, the Kit-Cats did not regard their Club as formally dissolved. Many hoped it would resume when Tonson returned from the Continent. Tonson's return, however, was deferred because of his investment in a French colonial project and stockmarket ‘bubble’ called the ‘Mississippi Scheme’.29 The publisher advised Vanbrugh to invest in the Mississippi Scheme too, which the architect said he would have done, ‘But, to tell you the Truth, I have no money to dispose of.’30 The Duchess of Marlborough was still suing Vanbrugh over Blenheim, forcing him to mortgage property to his brother. Years later, Vanbrugh assured Tonson he too would have retired, ‘had I made a good voyage to the Mississippi’.31 Tonson, it seems, received a tip-off to sell his stock just before the Mississippi Scheme crashed in May 1720.

  In exchange for Tonson's financial advice, Vanbrugh recommended the South Sea Company to Tonson as ‘a sort of Young Mississippi’.32 In 1711, Oxford had founded this Company for political as much as economic reasons, to create an investment outlet for Tories long excluded from directorship of the Bank of England and to free his government from indebtedness to the Kit-Cat Furnese. The South Sea Company had assumed £8.9 million of governmental debt and raised a further £500,000 (£59.5 million today) for Oxford's ministry. Its directors' meetings were run like a Tory club, with fines for nonattendance. After the Treaty of Utrecht, the Company reaped profits from the asiento (the monopoly on the Atlantic slave trade), and, following the Tories' fall in 1714, the Whigs took over the Company.

  The King replaced his son as the South Sea Company's Governor when the royal family feud became public in 1717. All directors related to the dissident Walpole–Townshend faction were purged. Tonson invested £10,000 in the Company soon after this. Then, in April 1720, the King assented to a scheme by which the South Sea Company would assume much more of the national debt, and this began the bubble. Walpole publicly criticized the scheme, and Steele wrote against it in the press, pointing out that ‘Credit cannot subsist without a Store’.33 Sunderland and Stanhope nonetheless pushed the South Sea Bill through the Lords and ensured their friends had access to stock (though one letter shows James Craggs, Addison's replacement as Secretary of State, apologising to Newcastle for being unable to help him or his ‘friends’ obtain South Sea stock any more easily than the ‘rest of the world’34). Vanbrugh seems to have borrowed money from his relations to invest.

  The South Sea bubble's beginnings during the spring of 1720 corresponded with a period of reconciliation among the Whigs in what Steele called ‘this miserable divided Nation’.35 Walpole and Townshend recognized that the ministry was riding high on the economic boom, and that their best hope of regaining power (and a slice of the financial profits) was through conciliation. The Court meanwhile felt the Walpole–Townshend faction commanded too much influence for comfort in the Commons and wanted it on side to pass the South Sea legislation. A superficial truce was therefore engineered between the King and his son in April 1720, and one diarist recorded a snapshot of Sunderland, Stanhope, Walpole and Townshend in this state of brief and insincere friendship, walking ‘all four with their arms round each other to show they are now all one’.36

  Walpole was appointed Paymaster General and Townshend Lord President of the Privy Council.37 On the same day, 11 June 1720, the ‘Bubble Act’ was passed, requiring any prospective joint-stock companies to obtain a parliamentary or Crown charter, and so preventing the foundation of any rivals to the South Sea Company.

  It was lucky for the Whigs that they were even superficially unified at the time of the South Sea Company's crash in October 1720. In London, banks closed, property prices collapsed, the Strand and Exchange were deserted and a fog of disgruntled depression settled over the City. Many of the ‘middling sort’ had long feared, since the culture wars of the late 1690s, that urbanity might come adrift from its moral moorings, and this was how much of provincial, Christian England viewed the South Sea scandal—as the Whig oligarchs finally exposed in their true colours as crooks and conmen.

  Tonson, as with the Mississippi Scheme, had the business acumen or inside information to sell just before the crash; others, like Prior, Carlisle and Vanbrugh, lost heavily, in Vanbrugh's case nearly £2,000 (over £245,000 today).38 Kneller was another loser, to the tune of £20,000 (£2.5 million today).39 The crash was also hard on those, like Newcastle and Steele, whose creditors were investors and now suddenly needed to call in their credit. Several subscribers in Steele's Fishpool company wanted to withdraw, and new investors were now very unlikely to step forward.

  The King and his mistress lost heavily in the South Sea bubble. He returned from Hanover to face the crisis in mid-November, and the following month summoned a Parliament baying for the blood of those responsible—meaning his chief ministers. Walpole, whose hands were relatively clean, saw his chance to outmanoeuvre Sunderland and Stanhope. He and his banker devised a scheme to reorganize the South Sea Company's debt, ensuring compensation was paid out in certain cases, and key Company directors (including the King's ministers) were protected from prosecution. By the time Parliament met, Walpole had already proposed his rescue scheme to a grateful King, and brokered the necessary deal with the Bank of England.

  In the House of Lords in January 1721, Wharton's son by Lucy Loftus, 23-year-old Philip, 1st Duke of Wharton,40 launched a vicious verbal attack on his father's old friend, Stanhope, over the South Sea crisis. Philip had lost a fortune—£120,000 (or £14.8 million today)—in the crash, which explains his anger. The young man's allegations were unfair: Stanhope was not party to the criminal corruption of his fellow ministers in the South Sea project, though he did subscribe to the Company. Yet Stanhope sat looking haggard on the front benches, as Philip Wharton further accused him of having deliberately inflamed the royal family's quarrels. Wharton insinuated Stanhope was riddled with venereal disease; Stanhope was, in fact, suffering from an enormous hangover, having drowned his sorrows with Newcastle and others the night before. After this attack, Stanhope took himself home to be bled by his doctors, and did not get up again. On 5 February, Stanhope died of a brain haemorrhage. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, with a full military funeral.

  Walpole's plan for economic recovery was never implemented—the wider economy was in fact healthy enough to recover on its own—but the impression that Walpole had come to the rescue in a crisis was created. Walpole's decision to ‘screen’ certain South Sea directors was also a masterstroke: instead of destroying men like Sunderland, who was charged with having accepted a bribe of £50,000, Walpole defended them and cast himself as the government's saviour.41

  Steele also recommended clemency for the South Sea directors, rather as he had recommended clemency for Catholic rebels after The Fifteen. Asked how he could do so when he had argued passionately against the Bubble Act, Steele answered that he was following Walpole's lead. Steele hoped Walpole's political resurrection would revive his own fortunes, and his hopes were well placed. In April 1721, Walpole was appointed First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer—the King's now undisputed chief and, though
he denied the name, Britain's first true ‘Prime Minister’. The following month, Walpole reinstated Steele's Drury Lane theatre licence, and issued a warrant ordering that Steele be compensated for lost profits. Steele, thrilled to triumph over Newcastle, said he now considered himself under Walpole's permanent ‘Observation and Patronage’.42

  Walpole used his own seat of Houghton and the stately home of Eastbury in Dorset, belonging to his friend George Bubb Doddington and rebuilt by Vanbrugh, as venues for the commerce between politicians and writers, following the pattern of the Kit-Cat Club. Recalling a house party at Houghton in 1731, the Prince of Wales described a ‘snug little party of about thirty odd, up to the chin in beef, venison, geese, turkeys, etc., and generally over the chin in claret, strong beer and punch…In public we drank loyal healths, talked of the times and cultivated popularity; in private we drew plans and cultivated the country.’43 When Doddington fell out with Walpole, Eastbury switched to hosting the ‘Patriot’ anti-Walpole opposition faction—a role shared by another important Kit-Cat property.

  Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, belonged to Sir Richard Temple, who in the 1690s had been an MP loyal to the Junto, a drinking companion ‘six nights in seven’ of Congreve and Beau Stanyan (Temple's cousin), and a founding member of the Kit-Cat Club.44 Congreve loved Temple for his affectionate temperament (‘By nature formed for love and for esteem’45) and intellectual candour (‘Sincerest critic of my prose, or rhyme’46). Temple distinguished himself fighting in Spain and under Marlborough in Flanders during the War of Spanish Succession; he was described by Swift as ‘the greatest Whig in the Army’.47 Congreve, who remained his drinking companion whenever Temple was home between campaigns, described him as ‘no less in arts than arms’,48 and one source suggests that Tonson was jealous of their friendship.

  After Congreve's dearest childhood friend, Joe Keally, died in May 1713, Congreve retired to spend the following winter with Temple at Stowe. At that time, when the political landscape looked bleak for the Kit-Cats, Temple and Congreve discussed how to improve Temple's estates and garden landscape at Stowe. In 1714, Temple had the twin honour of being created Baron Cobham (hereafter referred to as ‘Cobham’) and of being dispatched to Vienna to inform Emperor Charles VI of George I's accession, where Cobham remained until 1716. Upon his return to Georgian Britain, Cobham was made a Constable of Windsor Castle and member of the Privy Council. In May 1718, Cobham was created a Viscount, and in 1719 was sent to command the expeditionary force that sacked the Spanish port of Vigo in retaliation for Spanish funding of the attempted Jacobite invasion of Scotland.

  Before sailing to Spain, Cobham spent the summer at Stowe, planning its gardens. Vanbrugh, thanks to their Kit-Cat Club connection, was hired to design ornamental buildings, gleefully telling Tonson that Cobham was spending ‘all he has to spare’ on the property.49 Vanbrugh designed temples, ruins, rotundas, bathhouses, orangeries and other follies, including a pyramid, secluded seats and a gothic cave, all adding picturesque variation, sometimes springing dramatically on the unsuspecting stroller amid the Charles Bridgeman-designed gardens, sometimes amusingly witty upon close inspection. Vanbrugh's Kit-Cat patrons had always encouraged him to draw on English history and classical imports, to usher in Britain's new ‘golden age’, and here the recipe mixed references to Augustans, English medievalism and other exotic elements. He particularly emphasized Germanic elements in tribute to Britain's new royalty, telling Carlisle that Cobham approved his designs because he had ‘seen the very thing done to a great Palace in Germany’.50 Pope's Epistle to Burlington (1731) praised the house and gardens at Stowe for their elegant combination of artifice and nature, neoclassicism and wilderness.51 The gardens demonstrated control rather than rejection of nature; the manipulation of the landscape in a way symbolizing Kit-Cat ambitions to remodel the nation as a whole, right down to its very soil.

  Cobham was the last of Vanbrugh's Kit-Cat architectural patrons. As if to complete the circle, one of Vanbrugh's garden features at Stowe—an amphitheatre built circa 1727—was known to Cobham as ‘The Queen's Theatre’, in homage to the theatre in the Haymarket. Inspection of Vanbrugh's neoclassical temples, which still stand at Stowe today, reveals the close connection between the ‘show’ put on by these palatial eighteenth-century estates and the stage-sets in Vanbrugh's theatrical productions: behind the follies' creamily smooth, classical fronts, incomplete backs show they are built from cheap brick.

  Since 1714, Vanbrugh had also been working on Newcastle's Claremont, designing and locating the Belvedere Tower and various temples in the grounds, while Charles Bridgeman again designed the gardens. Bridgeman's landscaping, which emphasized non-symmetrical harmony, and Vanbrugh's innovative garden buildings, were widely emulated throughout the later Georgian period. In the late 1720s, after a two-week summer visit to Stowe in 1725, Carlisle returned with Vanbrugh to build the beautiful Temple of the Four Winds in Castle Howard's grounds. As at Stowe, the design of Castle Howard's surrounding landscape celebrated English nature, including its woodlands, but treated it at the same time as a blank canvas. What Vanbrugh painted on that canvas was a visual narrative referencing the Roman Campagna, a classical landscape full of political significance to the Whigs. In its imaginative complexity, Castle Howard is now regarded as a ‘quantum leap’52 for English landscape gardening.

  Vanbrugh's landscaping aesthetic can be linked to views espoused by Addison years earlier in The Spectator about a new, distinctively English style of garden, eschewing excessive topiary and geometry. The semi-wild garden was to Addison a place of contemplation, uniting allusions to the biblical earthly paradise and Horatian ideals of ‘otium‘.53 Years before he was able to purchase and landscape his own estate at Bilton, Addison had spoken of learning as a wealth equal to that of a peer's ‘delightful Gardens, green Meadows, and fruitful Fields’.54 Such idealization of nature and pastoral escapism, relating back to Whig pastoral poetry after Dryden's Virgil in 1697, resurfaced during the four years (1710–14) when the Junto Whigs roamed the political wilderness—the period in which Halifax remodelled his gardens at Bushy Park—and it was then revived again after 1720, when Walpole held power and sent every colleague who dared challenge him, even his oldest Kit-Cat confrères, to political Siberia. It was partly a practical matter of keeping occupied in unemployment, but also a question of dramatizing, through the semiotics of houses and gardens, a declaration of the individual's freedom from state control. In this sense, gardening became part of certain Kit-Cats' Whig cultural weaponry, as The Spectator or the opera had been in earlier years.

  Cobham loyally supported Walpole for many years, though disapproving of the way he protected the South Sea directors. Only in the spring of 1733 did Cobham openly oppose Walpole, for which Walpole immediately dismissed Cobham from his army regiment, despite his heroic military record. After this, Stowe became a central venue for gatherings of the anti-Walpole, cross-party opposition, and then was opened to public tourism as early as the 1740s. Like Tonson's presses and Addison and Steele's journalism, Stowe continued the Kit-Cats' communal endeavour to educate the public in Whig styles and ideas.

  Cobham's 1730s political activism did not mean he forgot his older, Kit-Cat friendships. Cobham dedicated a sixty-foot-high pyramid in the Stowe grounds to Vanbrugh, as much his friend as his architect, and still standing on an island in the middle of Stowe's Octagon Lake is Cobham's stone monument to Congreve, designed by William Kent. It shows a monkey gazing at himself in a mirror—a fitting emblem of Congreve's satire. The inscription commemorates the pleasures of Congreve's private company as much as his literary talent, complimenting: ‘the piercing, polished Wit, and civilised, candid, most unaffected Manners, of WILLIAM CONGREVE.’

  Congreve's ‘monument’ to Cobham was of words, not stone. His ‘Epistle to Lord Cobham’ (1729)—also known as ‘Of Improving the Present Time’—is perhaps Congreve's most beautiful and subtle poem. In it, Congreve asked Cobham whether he sometimes paused from his mania for erec
ting Vanbrugh's temples, statues and obelisks and wandered out to

  Catch the morning breeze from fragrant meads.

  Or shun the noontide ray in wholesome shades;

  Or lowly walk along the mazy wood,

  To meditate on all that's wise and good.

  In this pastoral arcadia, Congreve described Cobham in a semimocking tone as the man who had it all:

  Graceful in form, and winning in address,

  While well you think, what aptly you express;

  With health, with honour, with a fair estate,

  A table free, and elegantly neat.

  What can be added more to mortal bliss?

  What can he want that stands possessed of this?

  Though written before Cobham opposed Walpole, and by one of the least political of the Kit-Cats, the poem alluded to the opinion that Britain was, with her current foreign policy favouring entente with France, staining ‘with her pen the lustre of her sword’. Nonetheless, in contrast to Pope's Scriblerian pessimism about the degeneracy of modern times, and also in contrast to the bombastic Whig triumphalism of some earlier Kit-Cat poetry, Congreve concludes that little ever fundamentally changes:

  For virtue now is neither more or less,

  And vice is only varied in the dress:

  Believe it, men have ever been the same,

  And Ovid's Golden Age is but a dream.55

  The lasting friendship between Cobham and Congreve, long after the former ceased to be an active patron to the latter, was mirrored in the friendship between Vanbrugh and Tonson, which similarly outlasted their professional usefulness to one another. The four men—Congreve, Tonson, Vanbrugh and Cobham—all Kit-Cats from the Club's earliest days, regained a striking closeness in their autumnal years. They all retired to create beautiful gardens, from which they looked back wistfully to the paradise of lost youth amid the hubbub of London.