Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  68 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 82, Monday, 4 June 1711, by Steele.

  69 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1781), ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905 edn), vol. 2, entry on Addison.

  70 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 3, no. 284, Friday, 25 January 1712, by Steele.

  XIII IRELAND: KIT-CAT COLONY

  1 Archbishop King said the Irish Protestants were ‘almost frightened out of their wits with the fear of an invasion’ by The Pretender, even before the 1708 invasion attempt in Scotland. King to Southwell, March 1707, TCD MSS.

  2 John Oldmixon, Memoirs of the Life of the Most Noble Thomas, Late Marquess of Wharton; with his Speeches in Parliament both in England and Ireland. To which is added His Lordship's Character by Sir Richard Steele (1715).

  3 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 5, ‘To Thomas Earl of Wharton’ (1713).

  4 John Oldmixon, Memoirs of the Life of the Most Noble Thomas, Late Marquess of Wharton; with his Speeches in Parliament both in England and Ireland. To which is added His Lordship's Character by Sir Richard Steele (1715).

  5 Ibid.

  6 Christopher Robbins, ‘“The Most Universal Villain I Ever Knew”: Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Wharton’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 18 (Dublin, 2003).

  7 Jonathan Swift to Col. Hunter, quoted in Herbert Wood, ‘Addison's Connexion with Ireland’, Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland Journal, 5th series, 14 (1904), pp. 133–58.

  8 Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 2nd edn 1968), p. 152.

  9 Ibid., p. 143. Swift was then pursuing business on behalf of the Irish Church, lobbying Addison and Steele as government employees, while they in turn saw him as a potential pen for hire.

  10 Ibid., p. 153.

  11 Two-thirds figure given for 1732: Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants 1649–1770 (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2003), p. 2; Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2006), p. 22—Protestants of the Established Church (10 per cent of the population) were the only ones granted full rights at the Restoration of 1660. About 75 per cent of the population were Catholic and the remaining 15 per cent were Dissenters. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (eds), A New History of Ireland, vol. 4: Eighteenth Century Ireland 1691–1800 (Oxford, 1986), p. xlix, state that the Irish Catholic population was more than four times as large as the Protestant.

  12 The Flying Post or, The Post-Master, Monday, 14 March 1709.

  13 Jonathan Swift, The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Temple Scott (London, 1897 edn), vol. 2, p. 120.

  14 Jonathan Swift, The Sixth Drapier's Letter, in Herbert Davis (ed.), The Drapier's Letters to the People of Ireland… (Oxford, 1965 edn), p. 123.

  15 The Theatre, no. 5, Saturday, 16 January 1720, in John Loftis (ed.), Richard Steele's ‘The Theatre’ (Oxford, 1962).

  16 Walter Graham (ed.), The Letters of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1941), no. 191, Addison to Sidney Earl of Godolphin, 30 June 1709.

  17 Pat Gorden, Geography Anatomiz'd or, The Geographical Grammar (1708).

  18 Herbert Wood, ‘Addison's Connexion with Ireland’, Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland Journal, 5th series, 14 (1904), pp. 133–58. His lodgings consisted of two painted rooms and a drawing room hung with fabric; his menial servants slept on a ‘settle-bed’ in the loft above the stables. Next door lived Captain Pratt, the Castle's Constable, who became Addison's friend.

  19 Claret being sold at 14 shillings (some £67 today) per dozen bottles, for example, in an alley off Dames Street. ‘I wish you could contrive any way to send me over a Hogshead of Irish wine,’ Addison once wrote to Dawson from London. ‘Might not it be done in Boxes and connived at by the Commissioners of the Revenue?’ See Herbert Wood, ‘Addison's Connexion with Ireland’, Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland Journal, 5th series, 14 (1904), pp. 133–58.

  20 BL Add MS 7,121, Letters to Lord Halifax (1706ff.), Addison to Halifax, 7 May 1709: ‘I have the Happiness every day to drink your Lordship's health in very good wine and with very honest gentlemen.’

  21 John C. Hodges, William Congreve the Man: A Biography from New Sources (London, 1941), p. 83.

  22 The Dublin Gazette, no. 422.

  23 BL Add MS 7,121, Letters to Lord Halifax (1706ff.), Addison to Halifax, 7 May 1709.

  24 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 23 May 1709.

  25 The story about Addison stammering in Parliament probably first appeared in the 1820 edition of Spence's Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (Oxford, 1966 edn, vol. 2, p. 626), and was then repeated in Louis Gabriel Michaud, Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1843), vol. 1, p. 164. See also The Irish Book Lover 11 (August–September 1919), pp. 9–10.

  26 See Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 4, no. 556, Friday, 18 June 1714, by Addison; vol. 2, no. 231, Saturday, 24 November 1711, by Addison; vol. 3, no. 407, Tuesday, 17 June 1712, by Addison.

  27 Ibid., vol. 4, no. 484, Monday, 15 September 1712, by Steele.

  28 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 38, 13 April 1711, by Steele.

  29 The Dublin Intelligence, no. 572, 21 May 1709.

  30 Christopher Robbins, ‘“The Most Universal Villain I Ever Knew”: Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Wharton’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 18 (Dublin, 2003), p. 32.

  31 The Dublin Gazette, no. 456, 27 August 1709.

  32 Edmund Burke quoted in L. Dralle, ‘Kingdom in Reversion: The Irish Viceroyalty of the Earl of Wharton 1708–10’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 15 (1951–2), p. 399.

  33 John Dunton, The Dublin Scuffle (1699), ed. Andrew Carpenter (Dublin, 2000).

  34 1707 Act of the Irish Parliament concerning transportation of Catholics.

  35 Walter Graham (ed.), The Letters of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1941), no. 185, Addison to Sidney Earl of Godolphin, 18 June 1709.

  36 Ibid., no. 183, Addison to John Somers, 14 June 1709.

  37 Jonathan Swift, A Short Character of His Excellency Thomas Earl of Wharton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1710).

  38 John Oldmixon, Memoirs of the Life of the Most Noble Thomas, Late Marquess of Wharton; with his Speeches in Parliament both in England and Ireland. To which is added His Lordship's Character by Sir Richard Steele (1715).

  39 Jonathan Swift, A Short Character of His Excellency Thomas Earl of Wharton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1710).

  40 R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb (eds), Trinity College Dublin 1592–1952 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 34.

  41 John Oldmixon, Memoirs of the Life of the Most Noble Thomas, Late Marquess of Wharton; with his Speeches in Parliament both in England and Ireland. To which is added His Lordship's Character by Sir Richard Steele (1715).

  42 BL Add MS 21,094, poems said to have been collected c. 1710 by the Earl of Denbigh, f.184, ‘The Earl of Godolphin to Dr Garth: Honest Daughters Running Away’.

  43 John T. Gilbert (ed.), Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin (Dublin, 1896), vol. 4.

  44 John Oldmixon, Memoirs of the Life of the Most Noble Thomas, Late Marquess of Wharton; with his Speeches in Parliament both in England and Ireland. To which is added His Lordship's Character by Sir Richard Steele (1715).

  45 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 23 May 1709.

  46 Walter Graham (ed.), The Letters of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1941), no. 121, Addison to Lord Manchester, 20 April 1708.

  47 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), no. 239, Tuesday, 4 December 1711, by Addison.

  48 John Oldmixon, Memoirs of the Life of the Most Noble Thomas, Late Marquess of Wharton; with his Speeches in Parliament both in England and Ireland. To which is added His Lordship's Character by Sir Richard Steele (1715).

  49 Robbins, Christopher, ‘“The Most Universal Villain I Ever Knew”: Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Wh
arton’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 18 (Dublin, 2003), p. 32.

  50 The Dublin Intelligence, no. 601, 30 August 1709, Address from the Knights, Citizens and Burgesses in Parliament.

  51 Jonathan Swift, Remarks on the Characters of the Court of Queen Anne from ‘Memoirs of the Secret Services of John Macky Esq.’ (1733).

  52 BL Add MS 7,121, Letters to Lord Halifax (1706ff.), f.73, Jonathan Swift to Halifax from Dublin, 13 November 1709.

  53 Quoted in Christopher Robbins, ‘“The Most Universal Villain I Ever Knew”: Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Wharton’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 18 (Dublin, 2003), p. 29.

  54 Jonathan Swift, ‘Memoirs, Relating to That Change Which Happened in the Queen's Ministry in the Year 1710’, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis and Irvin Ehrenpreis, vol. 8 (Oxford, 1953), p. 121.

  55 Jonathan Swift, A Short Character of His Excellency Thomas Earl of Wharton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1710).

  56 Jonathan Swift, Remarks on the Characters of the Court of Queen Anne from ‘Memoirs of the Secret Services of John Macky Esq.’ (1733).

  57 Jonathan Swift, A Short Character of His Excellency Thomas Earl of Wharton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1710).

  XIV THE MONOPOLY BROKEN: WHIG DOWNFALL

  1 Matthew Prior, Dialogues of the Dead, And other works in prose and verse (Cambridge, 1907), p. 201.

  2 Mary Astell, Bart'lemy Fair (1709).

  3 BL Add MS 9,118, f.150. Note that this letter is misdated as 1708 by William Coxe and this error is repeated in its printed form: Sarah Churchill, The Private Correspondence of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough (London, 1838), vol. 1, pp. 159–60.

  4 HMC, Portland MSS, vol. 2 (1893), p. 209, the Earl of Derwentwater to the Duke of Newcastle, at Welbeck, 10 December 1709; Add MS 70,502, f.112.

  5 TheseCaesar's Commentaries were a new Latin edition by Dr Samuel Clarke, for the lavish publication of which Tonson had been collecting subscriptions since as early as 1703. By the time the Commentaries were finally published in 1712, Marlborough would truly need such support.

  6 Sarah Churchill, The Private Correspondence of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough (London, 1838), vol. 1, p. 272, Arthur Maynwaring to the Duchess of Marlborough, Saturday morning (probably 19 November 1709—Coxe's memorandum).

  7 HMC, Downshire MSS, vol. 1, part 2, pp. 885–6, John Bridges to Sir William Trumbull, 20 December 1709.

  8 Sarah Churchill, Characters of Her Contemporaries, by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, ed. Nathaniel Hooke (London, 1930), p. 260. This was very unlikely therefore to have been a Kit-Cat meeting, though see Lady Hyde's bitchy remark that Sarah would have to ‘forget all the joys of the Kit-Cat’ after the Whigs fell from power. This could mean, however, a number of things—Maynwaring, for example, once referred to some venison she sent to the Club from Windsor Lodge. BL Add 61,461, f.63, Letters of Arthur Maynwaring c. 1710, Maynwaring to Sarah Churchill, 22 June 1710.

  9 The issue was never raised in any of the Queen's formal Cabinet meetings, since such an impeachment should have been solely within the House of Commons' competence. This explains the informal and secretive meetings throughout early December 1709.

  10 Alexander Cunningham, The History of Great Britain from the Revolution in 1688 to the Accession of George I (London, 1787 edn), vol. 2, pp. 276–8. Sarah Churchill, Characters of Her Contemporaries, by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, ed. Nathaniel Hooke (London, 1930), p. 260.

  11 Anon., The Tryal of Dr Henry Sacheverell before the House of Peers for High Crimes and Misdemeanours (1710), p. 61.

  12 Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and D. W. Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715 (Cambridge, 2002), vol. 5, entry on John Smith.

  13 Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Dr Sacheverell (London, 1973), p. 51.

  14 Abel Boyer, History of the Life and Reign of Queen Anne (1722), p. 429.

  15 Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and D. W. Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715 (Cambridge, 2002), vol. 5, entry on John Smith.

  16 Henry L. Snyder (ed.), The Marlborough–Godolphin Correspondence (Oxford, 1975), vol. 2, p. 1150, November 1708.

  17 H. T. Dickinson (ed.), The Correspondence of Sir James Clavering (Gateshead, 1967), p. 76, Anne (James's sister) to James Clavering, 1 April 1710: ‘I suppose you've heard how our neighbour of Hedley-fell has carried himself. The Duke of Rich[mond], I hear, plays him a good trick. He's to summon the Kitt-Katt to meet, to make inquiry after one of the society who has made an elopement with Robin the Trickster. A very good whim I think.’

  18 John Macky, Memoirs of the Secret Services of John Macky, ed. A. R. (1733).

  19 BL Add 61,461, f.63, Letters of Arthur Maynwaring c. 1710, Maynwaring to Sarah Churchill, Thursday afternoon, 22 June 1710.

  20 Stowe MS 57, ii, 204, James Brydges to General Cadogan, 7 April 1710, quoted in Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville, Tenn., 1971), p. 59.

  21 Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 2nd edn 1968), p. 193.

  22 Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, Characters of Lord Chesterfield (London, 1778), character of Lord Scarbrough, pp. 41–4.

  23 G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage (London, 1936), on Scarbrough, p. 511.

  24 There are anecdotes of him surprising a poor family with the gift of an income for life, founding a hospital for cows and horses, showing great affection for a famously ugly pet dog, and putting itching powder into houseguests' beds. Though there is no evidence of patronage to English writers or musicians, which might have qualified this Duke for the Kit-Cat's cultural programme, he later conducted ‘experiments’ in educating slaves on his West Indies plantations. He sponsored one free black Jamaican to attend Cambridge University, helped free and repatriate Job Ben Solomon, an Islamic scholar, and encouraged a slave who worked at a house in Greenwich to read and educate himself. This last, Ignatius Sancho, became (besides a grocer and the first black man to vote in Britain) a composer and poet, painted by Hogarth and Gainsborough and admired by Dr Johnson.

  25 Story of Manchester, Lincoln, Dunch, and some non-Kit-Cats going to Greenwich and trying to drink ‘Confusion to Sacheverell’ and getting into a fight with the drawer of the tavern when he refused to pledge it. BL Add 61,461, f.63, Letters of Arthur Maynwaring c. 1710, Maynwaring to Sarah Churchill at Windsor Lodge, Thursday afternoon, 22 June 1710.

  26 The Dublin Gazette, no. 530; Steele's Tatler was reprinted by Cornelius Carter at Dublin's Old Post Office and sold at Tom's Coffee House near the Castle gate. In May 1710, a paper entitled The Dublin Spy by Tom Tatler was started in imitation of The Tatler and printed next door to the theatre in Smock Alley. Its author, Edward Waters, offered ‘remarks upon the different Humours, Passions, Inclinations, Principles and Practices of Men’ in Ireland.

  27 R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb (eds), Trinity College Dublin 1592–1952 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 414.

  28 The Dublin Gazette, no. 542, 26 June 1710; L. Dralle, ‘Kingdom in Reversion: The Irish Viceroyalty of the Earl of Wharton 1708–10’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 15 (1951–2), p. 421.

  29 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 4, no. 469, Thursday, 28 August 1712, by Addison.

  30 Addison's only profits above his salary were his Keepership and the emoluments from drawing up orders, making out warrants and issuing military commissions, all his by right. In private letters to Swift and Dawson, for example, he refused to free them from paying the two-guinea fee for accessing the Irish records of which he was Keeper, though they were both personal friends at the time.

  31 Richard Steele, The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq. (1710), vol. 1, ‘Dedication to Mr Maynwaring’.

  32 Alexander Pope to Spence, quoted in John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (London, 1908), p. 51.

  33 Donald F. Bond, The Tatler (Oxford, 1987), vol. 2, no. 130, Tuesday, 7 February 1710.

  34 Anon. [St John], Letter to the Examiner (1710).

  35 Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richar
d Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), no. 367, Steele to Mrs Steele, 7 April 1710.

  36 Swift's note to Stella on 14 December 1710 confirms that Steele had been ‘a little while in prison, or at least a sponging-house’ sometime before 7 September 1710. Pamphlets of September–October 1710 suggest that Steele was sleeping at night in a sponging-house called the Bull's Head in Clare Market, from which he sent his letters to Prue in August. Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), p. 265 n. 1.

  37 Donald F. Bond, The Tatler (Oxford, 1987), no. 202, Tuesday, 25 July 1710.

  38 Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 2nd edn 1968), p. 179.

  39 The Act provided that ‘the author of a book already printed, or the bookseller who had bought his copy, should have the sole liberty of printing it for the term of fourteen years from its publication, and no longer’. After these fourteen years, ‘the sole right of printing or disposing of copies shall return to the authors thereof, if they are living, for another term of fourteen years’. For books on publishers' backlists, twenty-one years of copyright would be conferred, from the day a title was registered. Fines would be imposed, in theory, on printers who breached these terms.

  40 Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, Md., 2005), p. 60.

  41 Matthew Prior quoted in Edmond Malone (ed.), Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (London, 1800), pp. 546–7.

  42 Anon., ‘On My Lord Godolphin’ (August 1710?). 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. 7, p. 453 n. 4.

  43 Ibid.

  44 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 10 August 1710.

  45 John Oldmixon, Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Maynwaring (1715), p. 158.

  46 Anon., The Loyal Calves-Head Club (1710).