31 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler (Oxford, 1987), no. 252, 18 November 1710.
32 HMC, Rutland MSS, vol. 2, appendix V, p. 177, John Charlton to Lady Granby, Totteridge, 11 November 1703.
33 Lord Carlisle's shopping bill for January 1704, for example, included five quarts of brandy and a hogshead of a sweet wine known as ‘canary’. A month later, he bought another hogshead of the wine, though it is unclear how many people in Yorkshire and London this may have supplied. Dorset stocked his cellar at Knole for a six-month period with an incredible inventory of booze: 425 gallons of red port, 85 gallons of sherry, 72 gallons of canary, 63 gallons of white port and a quart of hock (a dry white wine).
34 Tom Browne, A Description of Mr D__n's Funeral (1700).
35 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966 edn), no. 484, quoting Alexander Pope in May 1730, Recipe for a jug of punch called ‘Sir John Vanbrugh's Cup’.
36 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 20 June 1704.
37 Ibid., Congreve to Joe Keally, 30 April 1706.
38 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, p. 578 n. 3, quoting G. M. Trevelyan.
39 Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and D. W. Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715 (Cambridge, 2002), vol. 4, entry on Anthony Henley.
40 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 4, no. 569, Monday, 19 July 1714, by Addison.
41 Ibid., vol. 2, no. 195, Saturday, 13 October 1711, by Addison.
42 Ibid., vol. 2, no. 205, Thursday, 25 October 1711, by Addison.
43 Ned Ward suggested there was some link between the Kit-Cat and another Whig dining club founded sometime before 1705 named the ‘Beefsteak Club’ (not to be confused with the ‘Sublime Society of the Beef Steaks’ founded in 1735).
44 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 22 March 1711.
45 According to a nineteenth-century, possibly apocryphal, anecdote, ‘Darty’ was once out walking when he overtook a fishmonger's boy carrying home a fine turbot. The boy was amusing himself with striking the turbot against every post he met. To Darty, this was a crime not to be overlooked or forgiven. He followed the boy to the house where he was going and described what he had seen, insisting on the boy being severely punished. Another unsourced anecdote recounts how Darty was once engaged to dine with a fellow gourmand, expressly to eat one of two plums that were the only produce of a particular tree, remarkable for the richness and delicacy of its fruit. The men were to proceed after dinner to the garden and each gather and eat his plum straight from the tree. Before the dinner was over, however, Darty made some excuse to retire for a few minutes, whereupon he scurried into the garden and devoured both plums without, he said, the slightest guilt. Quoted in The Gentleman's Magazine 77 (July–December 1807), p. 738.
46 Alexander Pope, ‘1st Satire of the 2nd Book of Horace, Imitated’ (1733).
47 Lord Lyttleton also wrote a ‘dialogue in the shades’ between Darteneuf and Apicius on the subject of fine dining. See The Gentleman's Magazine 77 (July–December 1807), p. 738.
48 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 3, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 15 July 1703.
49 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford 1965), vol. 4, no. 477, Saturday, 6 September 1712, by Addison (though in the form of a reader's letter).
50 Henri Misson quoted in Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London, 1989), p. 274.
51 Charles Saumarez Smith, The Building of Castle Howard (London, 1990), p. 80.
52 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 4, no. 538, Monday, 17 November 1712, by Addison.
53 A 1704 satire,'The Seven Wise Men' (January–March 1704), refers to the ‘Kitkat Bowl’ and a 4.5lb silver salver with a Kit-Cat coat of arms in the centre, mentioning the Haymarket theatre, was allegedly sighted some twenty years ago. George de Forest Lord et al (eds), Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse 1660–1714, 7 vols (New Haven, Conn., 1963–75), vol. 6, p. 622.
54 Edmond Malone (ed.), Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (London, 1800), p. 533, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 29 November 1719; Wycherley, The Country Wife, Act 1, Scene 2.
55 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 3, no. 409, Thursday, 19 June 1712, by Addison.
56 Richard Blackmore, The Kit-Cats, A Poem (1708).
57 T. B. Macaulay, ‘Life and Writings of Addison’ (review of Lucy Aikin's 1843 biography), Edinburgh Review 78 (July 1843), p. 214.
58 Joseph Addison, The Freeholder, no. 5, Friday, 6 January 1716.
59 Joseph Addison, The Campaign (1704).
60 Richard Steele, The Diverting Post, no. 2, 28 October–4 November 1704.
61 Anon., A Kit-Cat C—b Describ'd (1705), original at Harvard.
62 C. E. Doble et al. (eds), Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1885–1921), diary entry for 11 December 1705; Arthur L. Cooke, ‘Addison's Aristocratic Wife’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) 72, 1 (June 1957), pp. 379–80.
63 By 1706, however, Addison recommended a petition to Halifax on the basis that it was a personal favour to Lady Warwick, without any obvious awkwardness.
64 Daniel Defoe, The Double Welcome (1705).
IX BY SEVERAL HANDS
1 Henley was said to have ‘presided at the Opera’, contributing songs to a play called Pausanias the Betrayer of His Country (1696) by Richard Norton. Norton was a close Oxford friend of Henley's, said to preside as a critic at the playhouse as Henley did at the opera. Mark Noble, A Biographical History of England from the Revolution to the End of George I's Reign; being a continuation of the Rev. J. Granger's work (London, 1806), vol. 1, p. 209.
2 William Drogo Montagu, 7th Duke of Manchester, Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne (London, 1864), vol. 2, p. 287.
3 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905 edn), vol. 2, entry on Matthew Prior.
4 Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber (1740), ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1968).
5 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 4, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 13 July 1703.
6 Ibid., no. 3, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 15 June 1703.
7 HMC, Rutland MSS, vol. 2, appendix V, p. 177, John Charlton to Lady Granby, Totteridge, 11 November 1703.
8 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 5, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 30 July 1703.
9 Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and D. W. Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715 (Cambridge, 2002), vol. 4, entry on Charles Montagu, Baron Halifax.
10 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 30 November 1703.
11 Jeremy Collier, Mr Collier's Dissuasive from the Play-house (1703).
12 Madeleine Bingham, Masks and Façades: Sir John Vanbrugh, the Man and his Setting (London, 1974), p. 86.
13 Also, in March 1702, a Kit-Cat document records that Lords Somerset and Manchester were suspending ‘the inscription of Music till May Fair’, implying that they had previously held regular subscription-concerts at their London homes, probably showcasing imported Italian musicians. BL Add MS 40,060.
14 John Hughes poem quoted in Eric Walter White, The Rise of English Opera (London, 1951), p. 139.
15 NPG, Tonson Papers, undated.
16 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 20 May 1704.
17 Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber (1740), ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1968), p. 192.
18 HMC, Portland MSS, vol. 2, p. 185. One Kit-Cat subscription recei
pt survives, dated 8 May 1704: ‘Agreement to allow the Duke of Newcastle, in consideration of the payment by him of one hundred guineas, free entrance to the theatre intended to be built in the Haymarket, and certain other privileges, Signet. Witnessed by William Congreve and another.’
19 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 12 February 1704.
20 Add MSS 40,060 f.89:
The Kit Cats and the Toasters
Did never care a fig
For any other Beauty
Besides the little Whig.
And see Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. (Oxford, 1937–83), vol. 34, p. 262: text of A Ballad on Mrs Strawbridge (unknown date) alleged to be by George Bubb Dodington (1690/1–1762).
21 A contemporary Tory journalist reported it was laid ‘with great Solemnity by a Noble Babe of Grace’ (Marlborough's daughter, Anne) and ‘over or under the Foundation Stone is a Plate of Silver, on which is Graven Kit Cat on the one side, and Little Whig on the other.’ Charles Leslie, Rehearsal of Observator, no. 41, 5–12 May 1705, in Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (eds), A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737 (Carbondale, Ill., 1991), document 1808. A nineteenth-century report, however, states that ‘on March 19th, 1825, removing some portion of the walls of the Italian Opera House, the workmen discovered the first stone of the old building, with some coins and an inscription: “April 18th, 1704. This corner-stone of the Queen's Theatre was laid by his Grace Charles Duke of Somerset.”’ Percy Fitzgerald, A New History of the English Stage (London, 1882). The latter might seem incontrovertible evidence were it not that two aged stones of unknown provenance today stand outside a law office in Bedford Row, one of which is inscribed ‘Kitt-Catt’ and the other ‘Little Whigg’. They look very much like two sides of the same stone, split in half.
22 Walter Graham (ed.), The Letters of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1941), no. 18, Addison to Abraham Stanyan, May 1700.
23 It was the same argument made by a protégé of Collier who published a tract warning against opera's licentiousness and arguing for a revival of sacred works such as those by William Byrd and Thomas Tallis.
24 Daniel Defoe, Review of the Affairs of France, 3 May 1705.
25 Dr Samuel Garth, Prologue to The Conquest of Granada, quoted in Robert Anderson, The Works of the British Poets (London, 1795), p. 10.
26 Michael Foss, The Age of Patronage: The Arts in England 1660–1750 (Ithaca, NY, 1972), p. 148.
27 John Dennis, The Diverting Post, 28 October 1704.
28 BL Lansdowne MS 1,024; reprinted in The London Gazette on Christmas Day (no. 4082).
29 Anon., A Letter from Several Members of the Society for Reformation of Manners to the Most Revered Father in God Thomas Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, 10 December 1704.
30 British Library shelfmark 816.m.19, f.35.
31 Mary Astell, Bart'lemy Fair (1709).
32 William Shippen, Faction Display'd (1704). See also the allegation that the Kit-Cat Club despised revealed religion as much as the earlier, regicide Calves Head Club: The Observator, Saturday, 1 May 1708, issue 23.
33 Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber (1740), ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1968).
34 Ibid., pp. 173–4.
35 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 3 February 1705.
36 Robert Anderson, The Works of the British Poets (London, 1795).
37 BL Add MS 61,451.
38 ‘Lady H. Godolphin’ (by Maynwaring, according to the 1716 Miscellany).
39 BL Add MS 61,464, Sarah Churchill to Francis Hare, October 1726.
40 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 8 June 1706.
41 Shrimpton would be made the Governor of Gibraltar in 1705, after defending that town through its siege. Sir Richard Temple was fighting with Marlborough in the Netherlands, and would be promoted to Major-General in 1706 for the leadership he showed during the Allied siege of Lille.
42 John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (1708).
43 Ibid.
44 BL Add MS 21,094, f.152–4; Anon. [Benjamin Bragg], ‘The Opening Prologue Paraphras'd in a Familiar Stile, for the better Conception of the True Meaning, and for the Particular Use of Mr. Jer. Collier’; Thomas McGreary, ‘A Satire on the Opening of the Haymarket Theatre’, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 15 (Winter 2000), pp. 18–32.
45 Charles Leslie, Rehearsal of Observator, no. 41, 5–12 May 1705, in Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (eds), A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737 (Carbondale, Ill., 1991), document 1808.
46 Congreve promoted Susanna Centlivre's work, as well as that of Mary Pix and Catharine Trotter (later Mrs Cockburn). In 1698, when a male actor plagiarized a play by Pix, Congreve helped ensure the stolen production's failure. Congreve assisted Trotter editorially on one play, The Fatal Friendship (1697), and helped both Trotter and Pix get their plays staged by Betterton's company. In the Dedication to The Unhappy Penitent (1701), Trotter reminded Halifax of his nurturing generosity to Congreve and hinted that Halifax should become her patron too.
X THE COMEBACK KITS
1 Owen Sweeney, The Quacks, or, Love's the Physician (29 March 1705), ‘As it was Acted after being twice forbid at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane’, in Thomas McGreary, ‘A Satire on the Opening of the Haymarket Theatre’, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 15 (Winter 2000), pp. 18–32.
2 Anon., A Kit-Cat C—b Describ'd (1705), original at Harvard.
3 Anon., The Tackers Vindicated; or, an Answer to the Whigs New Black List (1705).
4 BL Add MS 21,094 f.140b, ‘New Ballad Writ by Jacob Tonson and Sung at the Kit-Kat Club…’
5 C. K. Eves, Matthew Prior, Poet and Diplomatist (New York, 1939), p. 184.
6 A Tory newspaper (The Examiner, no. 6), the anonymous author of which may have been Prior himself, referred in 1710 to his expulsion from the Kit-cat Club. Some have supposed this is reported as recent news, but Prior could have been referring to an expulsion of several years earlier that still rankled. Prior mocked the idea that losing his Club membership made him any less a poet, and towards the end of his life acknowledged that his closer Kit-Cat friends never imagined it did. Prior does not, for example, seem to have overlapped with the membership of Steele, who is mentioned rarely in Prior's correspondence as a distant acquaintance.
7 Anon., A Kit-Cat C—b Describ'd (London, 1705), original at Harvard.
8 Donald F. Bond, The Spectator (Oxford 1965), vol. 2, no. 155, Tuesday, 28 August 1711, by Steele.
9 Richard Steele, ‘To Joseph Addison’, Prologue to The Tender Husband, 9 May 1705, in Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn).
10 Calhoun Winton, Captain Steele: The Early Career of Richard Steele (Baltimore, Md., 1964), p. 76, Wellbore Ellis to his brother John Ellis, 1705.
11 William Congreve, Love for Love (1695), Act 3, Scene 1.
12 Richard Blackmore, The Kit-Cat Club, A Poem (1708).
13 Richard Steele, ‘To Sir Samuel Garth’, The Lover and The Reader, 1714, in Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn).
14 Ibid.
15 John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (London, 1908), p. 53.
16 Richard Steele, ‘To Sir Samuel Garth’, The Lover and The Reader, 1714, in Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn).
17 Richard Steele, ‘To John Lord Somers’, vol. 1 of the collected Spectator (1712) in Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn).
18 Ibid.
19 Richard Steele, ‘To Charles Montagu Baron Halifax’, vol. 2 of the collected Spectator (1712) in Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn).
20 Richard Steele quoted in Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier
Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984), p. 213.
21 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 4, no. 471, Saturday, 30 August 1712, by Addison.
22 Ibid., no. 458, Friday, 15 August 1712, by Addison.
23 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966 edn), no. 191.
24 BL Add MS 32,329, f.50.
25 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler (Oxford, 1987), no. 241, 24 October 1710.
26 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, no. 151, Thursday, 23 August 1711, by Steele.
27 Ibid.
28 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 8 June 1706.
29 This sinecure was worth some £200 a year (Congreve earned the modern equivalent of £222,000 in nine years of holding it). Voltaire, Goldsmith and Boswell later marvelled enviously and nostalgically at the way the Kit-Cat patrons had elevated authors like Congreve to lucrative government posts. In doing so, they saw only the high-minded reasons for these appointments, and an admirable alliance between learning and power; they ignored the way in which the arrangement was patronage on the cheap, at the taxpayer's expense.
30 William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford (London, 1798), vol. 1, p. 761.
31 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 15 December 1705.
32 Nicholas Rowe, The Reconcilement between Jacob Tonson and Mr Congreve… (1707).
33 James Brydges MP quoted in Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1967), p. 231.
34 Thomas Hopkins to Lord Wharton, 29 November 1705, in HMC, Report XIII: Appendix, part 7 (1893), Manuscripts of the Earl of Lonsdale, p. 118.
35 28 October 1703 letter from Stanhope to Walpole saying that he, Hartington, Halifax, Smith and Sunderland all wanted Walpole back in London, on both public and personal grounds. J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (Boston, Mass., 1961), p. 116. Walpole replied on 12 November that he would come as soon as possible: ‘[I]f public considerations were not enough, you may easily believe I want no inclinations to kiss your hand.’ Jeremy Black, Walpole in Power (London, 2001), p. 4.
Kit-Cat Club, The Page 49
