Vanbrugh purchased some land on Greenwich Hill before his marriage, and there built a country house known locally as ‘Vanbrugh Castle’, which still stands today. In March 1720, he and Henrietta Maria moved there. When Vanbrugh told Tonson, several years into his marriage, that his wife gave him ‘a quiet house’,56 this was the house to which he referred. Though Greenwich was hardly out of London, Vanbrugh treated it as a rural retreat and tried to convince himself it brought him greater pleasure than drunken dinner parties in his prelapsarian, Kit-Cat years. He told Carlisle in June 1721 that, compared to such a peaceful retirement, ‘All other delights are but like debauches in Wine, which give three days’ pain for three hours' pleasure.'57
If Vanbrugh hoped Greenwich would place him a short waterferry from Tonson in Barn Elms, he was to be disappointed. That same year, 1720, Tonson bought an estate named The Hazels in Ledbury, under Herefordshire's Malvern Hills, to which he moved permanently in 1722. Tonson thought about moving the Kit-Cat portraits with him, but told Jacob Junior, ‘since I find their remaining with you is so much to your satisfaction, I will never desire or think of their being removed’—especially since Tonson's eyesight was growing too weak to appreciate them, and his country neighbours would ‘like a signpost as well as Van Dyke, & any sad poem with Rhyme as well as Paradise Lost‘.58
As a farewell to London, Tonson ‘gave a splendid entertainment at Barn Elms to the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, Lord Lansdowne and other persons of distinction’ in July 1720.59 Steele was spending the summer in Scotland, where he still had duties as a Commissioner of the Forfeited Estates, and though he was in close contact with Jacob Junior at this date, he was probably glad to be spared an awkward encounter with Newcastle, following their Drury Lane dispute.
Tonson could afford to retire and live the life of a Herefordshire squire not only because of his Mississippi Scheme and South Sea Company profits, but also thanks to his firm receiving a forty-year patent as the official government stationers. This was Tonson's final Kit-Cat pay-off.
For a tradesman to buy an estate like The Hazels was exceptional, even in that upwardly mobile era. It was as though Tonson were living out the fictional fate of the Spectator Club's Sir Andrew Freeport, who in old age moved his money from stocks into land, became a benefactor to the rural poor, modernized his estates, concentrated on preparing his soul for death, and kept his house and garden generously open to any old Club friends who happened to drop by. With the possible exception of worrying about the state of his soul (reading in his private library was his equivalent), this was what Tonson did. Referring to Tonson's great wealth, Dr Arbuthnot had observed that ‘riches will make people forget their trade as well as themselves’.60 He never married, though Vanbrugh teased him: ‘Have a Care of this retired Country Life; we shall hear of some Herefordshire Nymph in your Solitary Walks bounce out upon your heart, from Under an Apple Tree, and make you one of us.’61
Tonson's retirement to Herefordshire marked the true end of the Kit-Cat Club in 1720–2. Though some historians have assumed the Newcastle-hosted meeting of March 1717 was the final gathering, Steele's report on the meeting does not say so, and several satires in early 1718 imply the Club was still in existence.62 As late as January 1719, a private letter suggests the Kit-Cat continued as an informal editor ial board for the Tonsons' firm, though the sender may have been misinformed.63 After the 1717 Whig schism, the Kit-Cat Club reverted to a focus on literary patronage under Newcastle's tutelage, but it is unlikely, given the personal heat of debates in the Commons, that members of the opposition faction, like Walpole, Pulteney and Devonshire, continued to attend. At the time of the King's reconciliation with the Prince's Party there must have been some hope of Kit-Cat reunification, but Tonson's withdrawal to Herefordshire ended such hopes.
Nonetheless, in 1725, when Vanbrugh, Cobham and Carlisle stayed together at Stowe for the summer, Vanbrugh told Tonson:
[O]ur former Kit-Cat days were remembered with pleasure. We were one night reckoning who was left, and both Lord Carlisle & Cobham expressed a great desire of having one meeting next Winter, if you come to Town, Not as a Club, but old Friends that have been of a Club, and the best Club that ever met.64
The last line suggests Tonson had previously rejected Vanbrugh's entreaties to revive the Club per se, but Tonson seems to have responded positively on this occasion and suggested various dates. In October 1725, Vanbrugh wrote again from Greenwich, to say he had shown Tonson's letter to Newcastle:
[H]e will cheerfully accept of the Club's Invitation, to dine with them one day, or one hundred, if so God pleases. I'm sorry a meeting could not be on the day and at the Place you mention; both I am sure would be highly agreeable to the Members of it. But they will not so soon be within Call: when they are, we'll try to find some other day of Happy Remembrance.65
It has been said the surviving Kit-Cats reunited sometime in November 1725, but it is unclear on what primary evidence (other than the above letters) this assertion may be based.66 A letter in the spidery hand of Tonson's old age refers to a party for Newcastle, which may relate to the party Tonson threw Newcastle in 1720 but more likely points to a later event after Tonson was in Herefordshire for some time, given Tonson's statement that, ‘Empowered by your Grace's Bounty’, he would ‘Launch out into the Oceans of Port, Claret and Champagne in which voyages I have for some years been a stranger’.67 On another occasion, Newcastle invited Tonson to Claremont: ‘Dear Jacob, you must not refuse me your good Company. Drink Water or Wine, ride or go in the Coach, Read or Laugh at Anything in the World.’68
Tonson and Congreve certainly met once more to take the waters in Bath in the late spring of 1728. Tonson was 72, and said he had no reason to complain of his health, especially compared to 58-year-old Congreve, who, lame and blind, required almost constant attention from his caregiver-lover Henrietta (Duchess of Marlborough since her father's death in 1722). When the publisher and author parted, they must have known they were saying their final goodbyes.
Across the expanses of the English countryside, the former Kit-cats continued to exchange gifts of food and drink as tokens of friendship. Tonson instructed Jacob Junior to send the best batch of Barn Elms cider up to Cobham at Stowe; another year Tonson sent cider to the Vanbrughs at Greenwich, and Tonson and Newcastle exchanged gifts of cider and perry well into the 1730s. Love of food continued to unite these men: Tonson's letters show him concerned to train his Hereford servants how to butcher an ox and mutton ‘the London way’,69 while a visitor to The Hazels described Tonson as an old man still excited over a breast of veal or ‘a Sweetbread God damn a foot Square’.70
Tonson also remained in contact with Pope, the two agreeing that the ‘most honest-hearted’ Kit-Cat authors were Congreve, Garth and Vanbrugh.71 When Pope and Swift together published a miscellany in 1727, their prefatory remarks repented their attacks on only two Whigs: Vanbrugh and Addison. ‘[W]e wish our Raillery, though ever so tender, or Resentment, though ever so just, had not been indulged.’72 It was one of the rare occasions where, as Whigs and Kit-Cat authors, Vanbrugh and Addison were bracketed together.
In 1725, Vanbrugh took Carlisle's daughters to see the completed Blenheim Palace—probably as much to satisfy his own curiosity as theirs—and faced the humiliation of being locked out of the grounds by that ‘BBBB Old B—the Duchess of Marlborough’.73 Vanbrugh told Tonson that the old Dowager Duchess was still, out of sheer malice, trying to destroy him through legal disputes over Blenheim's costs, so as ‘to throw me into an English Bastille to finish my days, as I begun them in a French one’.74 The 1725 tour party was therefore reduced to peeking over a fence to catch a distant glimpse of Vanbrugh's remarkable creation.
Finally, in August 1725, thanks to his Kit-Cat connection to Walpole (with whom the Dowager Duchess was having her own political feud), Vanbrugh was paid from the Treasury for his work on Blenheim. This £1,700 was gained, as he put it, ‘in Spite of the Hussy's teeth’,75 and meant Vanbrugh's family had somet
hing to live on when the architect died less than a year later, on 26 March 1726, from a ‘quinsy in his throat’76—possibly severe tonsillitis. The modest size of his estate (his property consisting mainly of the Greenwich house and the cellars under the Haymarket theatre) shows Vanbrugh's life story to have been that of a writer's and artist's struggle, even amid fame and patronage, to escape endless financial anxiety.
Steele's arguments with Newcastle, and Vanbrugh's professional rivalry with a friend of Steele's, the architect William Benson, led to an estrangement between Steele and Vanbrugh at the end of their lives. Steele's reinstatement at Drury Lane in 1721 energized him into writing a new play, The Conscious Lovers, which proved the surprise hit of 1722–3. Literary historians view this sentimental work as Steele finally succeeding in the ambition, held since the Collier culture wars of the 1690s, to write a morally upright, Christian comedy. But Steele's last surviving son, 11-year-old Eugene, died in 1723, dragging Steele's spirits low again. He became ‘paralytic’, which suggests another stroke,77 and when Vanbrugh saw him looking ‘in a declining way’ one day at Walpole's house, Vanbrugh immediately wrote to Newcastle, hoping to be awarded the Drury Lane patent should Steele die.78 With their friendship so cold, it is unlikely Steele shed tears when he heard of Vanbrugh's death.
In 1724, Steele retired to one of his late wife's properties at TyGwyn in Llangunnor, Wales. There Steele lived in a modest farmhouse, nursed by his two young daughters, occasionally sending out place-hunting letters to Walpole and other London friends on behalf of local friends or distant relatives, but not receiving, it seems, any of the casks of cider or other compliments that circulated so readily between Tonson, Cobham, Newcastle, Vanbrugh and Congreve. When Steele died, aged 57, on 1 September 1729, he was interred in a local church in Carmarthen. There was no outpouring of literary elegies as at Addison's death, no stone monument in Westminster Abbey, and no devoted literary follower to edit a luxurious collection of his complete works. Happily, however, Steele succeeded in his greatest ambition at the last minute: paying off his major debts and providing a decent inheritance for his children. His will even included £100 (£12,000 today) for his illegitimate daughter, now Mrs Eliza Aynston.
It is unknown whether Steele, in his paralysis and Welsh seclusion, was informed of Congreve's death seven months earlier. Congreve had continued to reside primarily in London, so he could see Henrietta. It was partly his refusal to abandon London that ensured the world fully felt his loss.
Though he had written only lyric poetry and libretti since he was 30, Congreve's reputation as a literary genius remained undimmed. This was thanks partly to his friendships with the Scriblerians, who were coming into their own in terms of literary output during the 1720s. Pope dedicated the 1720 edition of his Iliad to Congreve—not a pointed refusal to dedicate his work to a nobleman, as some have argued, but a sincere tribute to the Kit-Cat who, after 1709, had effectively patronized Pope with the invaluable gifts of introductions and who shared Pope's love of Greek poetry.
In September 1722, Pope complained to John Gay that Congreve needed reminding there were ‘more Men and Women in the Universe’ than Gay and Henrietta.79 If Congreve suddenly became especially antisocial it must have been partly due to his health, which he was nursing in Bath, but also because he knew Henrietta had fallen pregnant with his child. When the baby, Mary, was born the following year, Congreve was 51 and Henrietta 42. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu gossiped that Henrietta was as ashamed of her ‘big belly’ as an unwed milkmaid.80
Injuries from a coach crash eventually killed Congreve. He was nursed after the crash by Henrietta—a talent, like her pride and temper, inherited from her mother Sarah—but, on 19 January 1729, Congreve died at home at Surrey Street. His corpse was taken to lie in state in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, and was carried to its burial ‘with great decency and solemnity’81 by six pallbearers, three of whom (Godolphin, Cobham and Compton) were former Kit-Cats. Henrietta, in the midst of almost deranged grief, arranged the funeral and invited these men, including her own husband, to carry her lover's casket.82
About a week after Congreve's funeral, Tonson urged his nephew to reissue Congreve's collected works to capitalize on the publicity surrounding his death: ‘Let a man's worth be never so great, after Death it gets strangely out of the minds of his Surviving Acquaintance,’ Tonson told him. This instruction reflected the old man's nose for a profit, but also a genuine concern that the version of his works edited by Congreve himself with a ‘great deal of care’, and copyrighted by the Tonsons, should hit the shelves before someone else produced an inferior, pirated edition.83
Congreve's will left almost everything to Henrietta, including his library, which Tonson, Congreve's primary bookseller since the early 1690s, advised his nephew to buy from her. The will also appointed Henrietta's husband Francis as Congreve's sole executor ‘in Trust for his said Wife’.84 Contemporaries and future generations marvelled that Congreve left his estate to a woman already so wealthy, but the explanation was their infant daughter, Mary. It was a way for Congreve to transmit his property to his only child, and Henrietta honoured this wish by buying a diamond necklace and earrings, with the initials ‘W.C.’ engraved on the back of each diamond,85 worth precisely the value of what Congreve left to her (£5,300 for the necklace and £2,000 for the earrings). She then left the necklace to Mary in her own will.86 Francis Godolphin did not interfere with this plan, which must have been discussed between the three of them before Congreve died, and Francis treated Mary as his own child, which allowed her to make a respectable marriage to the Duke of Leeds.
Edmund Curll published Congreve's will the following year, to titillate the public not only with the playwright's generosity to his titled mistress but also with details such as Congreve's legacy of £200 to his previous love, Bracey. Mrs Bracegirdle lived long enough to see the start of David Garrick's career on the stage, but never married or found any other male companion after Congreve. In the same volume, Curll (under the pseudonym Charles Wilson) also published the first Kit-Cat biography: Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Amours of William Congreve Esq… (1730). News of the death brought Pope low for some time afterwards, just when he should have been enjoying the fame and fortune brought to him by publication of The Dunciad: ‘Every year carries away something dear with it, till we outlive all tenderness,’ he mourned.87
Four years later, in the unseasonably snowy spring of 1733, the Archdeacon of Salop, Dr Samuel Croxall, travelled into neighbouring Herefordshire to visit Tonson at The Hazels. Croxall had a thriving ecclesiastical career—within five years he would be Chancellor of Hereford—but he had once entertained ambitions to be counted among the London literati. In 1717, Garth and Tonson recruited Croxall to translate sections of Ovid's Metamorphoses, through which he may have met a number of Kit-Cats who were his fellow contributors. Croxall's most famous publication, however, was a children's book: a translation of The Fables of Aesop and Others (1722), which taught its young readers a distinctively Whig version of the fables.
Croxall was coming to see Tonson with a proposal: he wished to write the first history of the Kit-Cat Club. When Croxall arrived, 77-year-old Tonson gave him a tour of his house including a room he called his ‘museum’—a book-lined study with a roaring fire, beside which he sat and read. Tonson's eyesight had held out, but his hearing was gone, worsened on this particular occasion by a head cold. Tonson forced his guest to drink homemade sack, and they sat to talk not in any grand salon but in the kitchen, eating bread and sturgeon. Despite a healthy appetite, Tonson was ‘a good deal emaciated’.88 Pope had seen him two years earlier, and described Tonson as having become a shabby, smelly old man, wearing a thin cotton cap and a ‘poor old unwadded gown’, whose deafness made conversation hard going. Yet Tonson's mind was as sharp as ever: ‘so full of matter, secret history, and wit and spirit, at almost fourscore’.89
Croxall laid the idea before Tonson, and later reported to Jacob Junior (who would
obviously be the book's publisher and may even have been the proposal's instigator):
Though I roared like a Bull, I could hardly make him comprehend me; but when he did, he came into it at once, said nobody could tell better what to say of them than himself, for, to tell me the truth, he had been drunk with every one of them. He designs to be very exact in doing it, & will take some time for it.90
When Croxall asked Tonson for some ‘characters’ of the members to be sketched within a week, however, Tonson said that was impossible as it would take much more time for such men to be described.
Whether Tonson delivered any notes to Croxall, or whether Croxall ever began work on a manuscript, is unknown. A mostly blank, handmade notebook among Tonson's papers called ‘Account of the Kitt-Catt Club’ seems to have been started after Tonson's death and appears to be in Croxall's hand.91 Perhaps something more valuable may turn up one day, amid ecclesiastical papers in Hereford or in somebody's attic, and answer the remaining Kit-Cat mysteries.
Tonson, born before any of the Kit-Cat authors, died after them all, aged 80, on 17 March 1736. His beloved nephew and heir, Jacob Junior, predeceased him by four months, probably precipitating Tonson's own death. Tonson's body was carried from Herefordshire to his great-nephew's house in the Strand, and buried on 1 April at the church of St Mary Le Strand, in the centre of the London neighbourhood where his business and Club had thrived for decades. No solemn elegies were written for the publisher, though an anonymous wit penned the epitaph:
Death blotted out his line of life
And he who many a scribbling elf
Abridged, is now abridged himself.92
The Gentleman's Magazine carried a tiny notice, stating Tonson was ‘formerly secretary to the Kit-Kat Club worth 4,000£ per annum’.93 This was almost certainly a gross underestimate, though Tonson had already made most of his money over to his nephew and his nephew's heirs (Jacob Junior's will showed him to have been worth at least £100,000, or around £12.4 million today).94 It has been estimated Tonson was worth at least £80,000 when he died, and the publisher's dying words were maliciously reported to have been that he regretted not making twice as much.95
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