Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

117 Richard Steele, The Lover, Written in Imitation of the Tatler, by Marmaduke Myrtle, Gent. (1714), ‘Dedication to Garth’; no. 1, Thursday, 25 February 1714; no. 27, Tuesday, 27 April 1714.

  118 BL Add MS 5,145C, Steele to Mrs Steele, 30 March 1714 (Blanchard no. 452).

  119 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 4, no. 556, Friday, 18 June 1714, by Addison.

  120 Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and D. W. Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715 (Cambridge, 2002), vol. 1, entry on James Stanhope; Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Englishman: A Political Journal by Richard Steele (Oxford, 1955), ‘Dedication to General [James] Stanhope’.

  121 Abel Boyer, History of the Life and Reign of Queen Anne (1722).

  122 Bothmar to George I, quoted in William L. Sachse, Lord Somers: A Political Portrait (Manchester, 1975), p. 313.

  XVII BIG WHIGS: THE FIRST GEORGIANS

  1 Thomas Bruce, 2nd Earl of Ailesbury, Memoirs (London, 1890 edn), vol. 1.

  2 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Congreve to Joe Keally, 29 October 1712.

  3 Matthew Prior, ‘For My Own Monument’ (c. 1714).

  4 Jonathan Swift, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, p. 101 and p. 112.

  5 Sarah Churchill, Characters of Her Contemporaries, by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, ed. Nathaniel Hooke (London, 1930), p. 260, notes on Burnet's History of his Own Time.

  6 Alexander Pope, quoted in Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966 edn), no. 204.

  7 BL Add MS 7,121, Letters to Lord Halifax (1706ff.), f.11, Joseph Addison to Halifax, 17 October 1714.

  8 Ibid., f.15, Joseph Addison to Halifax, 30 September 1714.

  9 Calhoun Winton, Captain Steele: The Early Career of Richard Steele (Baltimore, Md., 1964), p. 212.

  10 Frank McCormick, Sir John Vanbrugh: The Playwright as Architect (Philadelphia, Pa., 1991), p. 19.

  11 As Comptroller, Vanbrugh worked with his Kit-Cat friend, Dartiquenave, Paymaster on the Board of Works.

  12 Stanyan was also made a Lord of the Admiralty, and his younger brother became one of two Under-Secretaries in the Northern Department. Cornwallis was appointed joint-holder of the lucrative post of Postmaster General.

  13 Somerset joined Halifax in feeling underappreciated. He was admitted to the Privy Council but only wearing the courtier's hat of Master of the Horse. Dunch was reappointed to his old Court place as Master of the Household, while Lincoln was appointed the Prince of Wales' Master of the Horse, then the Prince's Lord of the Bedchamber.

  14 NPG, Tonson Papers, Philip Lempriere to William Baker, 13 February 1777.

  15 Edmond Malone (ed.), Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (London, 1800), vol. 1, part 1, p. 525 n. 6.

  16 Lord Hervey quoted in Brian Masters, The Dukes (London, 2001), p. 300.

  17 Ray A. Kelch, Newcastle, a Duke without Money: Thomas Pelham-Holles 1693–1768 (London, 1974), p. 51.

  18 BL Add MS 32,685, Letters to the Duke of Newcastle.

  19 Ibid.

  20 The State of the Case between the Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household and the Governor of the Royal Company of Comedians (1720), in Rae Blanchard (ed.), Tracts and Pamphlets by Richard Steele (Baltimore, Md., 1944), p. 591.

  21 Calhoun Winton, Sir Richard Steele MP (Baltimore, Md., 1970), p. 17.

  22 Eustace Budgell, Memoirs of the Life and Character of the Earl of Orrery and of the Family of the Boyles (1732), p. 258.

  23 This ‘conversation piece’ could not have been completed before March 1721, when Lincoln was given the Order of the Garter, which he wears. NPG, 479 Tonson Papers, Philip Lempriere to William Baker, 13 February 1777, states that the double portrait of Newcastle and Lincoln was not by Kneller.

  24 James Caulfield, Memoirs of the Celebrated Persons Composing the Kit-Cat Club; with a prefatory account of the origin of the association, illustrated with fortyeight portraits from the original paintings by Sir Godfrey Kneller (London, 1849), p. 84.

  25 Ibid., p. 145.

  26 William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford (London, 1798), vol. 1, p. 761.

  27 Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), no. 102, Steele to Pelham-Holles, 18 December 1714.

  28 Ibid., no. 473, Steele to Mrs Steele, 27 January 1715.

  29 Ibid., no. 106, Steele to Charles Wilkinson, 7 May 1715.

  30 Ibid., p. 497, Dedication to Thomas Pelham-Holles, Earl of Clare, 2 June 1715—originally published in The Political Writings of Sir Richard Steele (1715).

  31 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Works of John Vanbrugh, 4 vols (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 49, Vanbrugh to the Duchess of Marlborough, 16 January 1715.

  32 Henry Horwitz (ed.), London Politics 1713–17: Minutes of a Whig Club 1714–17 (London, 1981), vol. 17, pp. 1–2 and 9. H. T. Dickinson, ‘The Precursors of Political Radicalism in Augustan Britain’, in Clyve Jones (ed.), Britain in the First Age of Party, 1660–1750 (London and Ronceverte, W. Va., 1987), p. 78.

  33 BL Add MS 33,064, Newcastle Papers, f.44, Vanbrugh to the Earl of Clare, 5 February 1715.

  34 Bishop Potter of Oxford quoted in Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy (London, 1982), p. 180.

  35 HMC, Bath MSS, vol. 3, Halifax to Prior, 23 December 1713.

  36 PRO, State Papers, France 105/29, f.232, Prior to Halifax, from Fontainebleau, 1 October 1714 and f.246, Prior to Halifax, from Paris, 12 October 1714.

  37 Ibid., f.246, Prior to Halifax, from Paris, 12 October 1714.

  38 Longleat Papers, vol. 3, 445, Halifax to Prior, 4 November 1714.

  39 Robert Anderson, The Poets of Great Britain (London, 1792–3), vol. 6, p. 761; Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and D. W. Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715 (Cambridge, 2002), vol. 4, entry on Charles Montagu, Baron Halifax, p. 875.

  40 Anon., The Lord Whiglove's Elegy, to which is added a Pious Epitaph upon the Late Bishop of Addlebury (1715).

  41 By spring 1713, Steele was already redecorating the leased room, including painting its 21-foot walls with allegories of Truth and Eloquence. Inspecting the preparations at York Buildings, Steele is said to have asked one of the head carpenters to shout something from the stage to test the acoustics. The workman shouted that his men had been working for three months without pay, at which Steele answered, laughing: ‘I am in raptures with the eloquence, but by no means admire the subject!’ Sir Richard Phillips, Addisoniana (London, 1803), vol. 2, p. 25.

  42 The punning ambiguity of the two spellings was apt and intentional—like a club, both inclusive and exclusive—both censorious (judgemental) and sensuous (receptive). See BL Add MS 61,688, f.21–2, definition of ‘Sensorium’; Town-Talk, in a letter to a Lady in the Country, no. 4, 6 January 1716; no. 7, 27/8 January 1716; The Spectator, vol. 4, no. 565, 9 July 1714.

  43 Town-Talk, in a letter to a Lady in the Country, no. 4, 6 January 1716.

  44 Ibid., no. 7, 27/8 January 1716.

  45 Ibid., no. 4, 6 January 1716.

  46 Ibid., no. 7, 27/8 January 1716.

  47 Ibid., Prologue to the Sensorium.

  48 The ophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1753).

  49 Winton discounts this anecdote: Calhoun Winton, Sir Richard Steele MP (Baltimore, Md., 1970), p. 118.

  50 Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), no. 107, Steele to Lord Clare, 25 May 1715.

  51 H. Bunker Wright, ‘Matthew Prior's Cloe and Lisetta’, Modern Philology 36, 1 (August 1938), pp. 16–18.

  52 Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), no. 110, Steele to Lord Clare, 19 July 1715.

  53 Wilfrid Prest, Albion Ascendant: English History 1660–1815 (Oxford, 1998), p. 121; John Dunton, Royal Gratitude…To which is added…A Trip to the Loyal Mug-House at N
ight, to Drink a Health to King George and the Royal Family (1696).

  54 BL Add MS 32,685, Letters to the Duke of Newcastle.

  55 Steele quoted in Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets (1781), ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905 edn), entry on Addison.

  56 The Tonson firm became the Board of Trade's official stationer.

  57 Calhoun Winton, Sir Richard Steele MP (Baltimore, Md., 1970), pp. 104–5.

  58 Joseph Addison, The Freeholder, no. 39, Friday, 4 May 1716.

  59 Horace Walpole, A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England (Edinburgh, 1796 edn), p. 245.

  60 William L. Sachse, Lord Somers: A Political Portrait (Manchester, 1975), p. 321.

  61 A descendant of Townshend's claims that Townshend visited Somers as Somers lay dying and that Somers told him he supported the Septennial Act and disowned the 1694 Triennial Act: William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole (London, 1800), vol. 1, p. 130.

  XVIII PARADISE LOST

  1 Quoted in Calhoun Winton, Captain Steele: The Early Career of Richard Steele (Baltimore, Md., 1964), p. 97.

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

  3 Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1968 edn), p. 159.

  4 Pope and Tonson quoted in Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966 edn), no. 184.

  5 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 106, Monday, 2 July 1711, by Addison.

  6 Ibid., vol. 2, no. 261, Saturday, 29 December 1711, by Addison.

  7 Ibid., vol. 4, no. 561, Wednesday, 30 June 1714, by Addison.

  8 Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), p. 118.

  9 BL Add MS 5,145C, To Lady Steele, 29 November 1716 (Blanchard no. 490); Steele to Lady Steele, 26 March 1717 (Blanchard no. 524).

  10 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, mid-February 1717? (Blanchard no. 510).

  11 Ibid., Lady Steele to Steele, 18 February 1717? (Blanchard no. 513).

  12 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, mid-February 1717? (Blanchard no. 510).

  13 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 25 February 1717 (Blanchard no. 515); To Lady Steele, March 1717 (Blanchard no. 518).

  14 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 16 February 1717 (Blanchard no. 512).

  15 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, March 1717 (Blanchard no. 518).

  16 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, March 1717 (Blanchard no. 510).

  17 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 26 April 1717 (Blanchard no. 538).

  18 Joseph Addison, The Freeholder, no. 29, Friday, 30 March 1716.

  19 William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford (London, 1798), vol. 2, pp. 143–6.

  20 W. A. Speck, ‘The Whig Schism under George I’, Huntington Library Quarterly 40, 2 (February 1977), p. 171, Charles Cathcart to Lord Loudoun, 17 December 1716 [Loudoun MSS, LO 7949].

  21 BL Add MS 35,584, f.163, Philip Yorke, 22 December 1716.

  22 Philip Dormer Stanhope, Characters by Lord Chesterfield (London, 1778), p. 49.

  23 Steele told Prue his letter had missed an earlier post because of ‘my attendance on the Duke of Newcastle who was in the Chair of the Kitt-Katt’. BL Add MS 5,145C, Steele to Lady Steele in South Wales, 30 March 1717 (Blanchard no. 525). The fact that Steele did not remark on the Club ending, while he does name the chairman, suggests it was not consciously their last meeting.

  24 Alexander Pope, ‘Sandys’ Ghost' (1717), referring to George Sandys, the Elizabethan translator of Ovid.

  25 Pope and Tonson quoted in Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966 edn), no. 184.

  26 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Pope, quoted in Arthur L. Cooke, ‘Addison's Aristocratic Wife’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) 72, 1 (June 1957), p. 373.

  27 BL Add MS 5,145C, Steele to Lady Steele, 30 March 1717 (Blanchard no. 525).

  28 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 10 April 1717 (Blanchard no. 528).

  29 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 13 April 1717 (Blanchard no. 530).

  30 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 16 April 1717.

  31 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 1 May 1717 (Blanchard no. 539).

  32 John Nichols, The Lover and the Reader… (1789).

  33 BL Add MS 5,145C, Steele to Lady Steele, 22 April 1717 (Blanchard no. 534).

  34 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 23 or 24 August 1717 (Blanchard no. 572).

  35 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 1 May 1717 (Blanchard no. 539).

  36 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 29 July 1717 (Blanchard no. 566).

  37 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, May? 1717 (Blanchard no. 542).

  38 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, October? 1717 (Blanchard no. 593).

  39 Ibid., Steele to Lady Steele, 15 November 1717.

  40 James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, quoted in Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000), p. 401.

  41 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), Epistolary dedication by Congreve to the Duke of Newcastle, 27 January 1718.

  42 John Dryden, The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq. In Six Volumes (1725).

  43 Matthew Prior, Poems on Several Occasions (1718), Dedication.

  44 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 114, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 29 November 1719.

  45 Ibid.

  46 Edward (Ned) Ward, The Secret History of Clubs (1709).

  47 Lord Wharncliffe (ed.), The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London, 1861), vol. 1, p. 206, c. October–November 1713.

  48 BL Add MS 33,064, Newcastle Papers, Vanbrugh to the Duke of Newcastle, 25 December 1718.

  49 Ibid., f.181, 24 January 1719.

  50 Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville, Tenn., 1971), p. 154.

  51 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 114, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 29 November 1719. The mistaken report appeared in several London papers that Tonson had died from a fall from his horse in Paris (The Thursday's Journal, no. 11; The Weekly Packet, no. 380; The Original Weekly Journal, 17 October).

  52 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 114, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 29 November 1719; BL Add MS 33,064, Newcastle Papers, Letters seeking, via Stanhope, the Board of Works place.

  53 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 114, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 29 November 1719.

  54 Tonson to Vanbrugh, June 1722, quoted in Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville, Tenn., 1971), p. 165; original at Folger Shakespeare Library, Tonson MSS C.c.1 (74).

  55 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 139, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 18 June 1722.

  56 Ibid., no. 102, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 1 July 1719.

  57 Ibid.

  58 Including: Harry Boyle, Compton, Congreve, Maynwaring, Prior, Somers, Stanyan, Stepney, Tidcomb, Tonson and Walsh.

  59 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 4, no. 479, Tuesday, 9 September 1712, by Steele.

  60 Horace Walpole quoted in Stuart Handley, M. J. Rowe and W. H. McBryde, ‘William Pulteney’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, September 2004, online edn, October 2005).

  61 When Dunch died in 1719, his wife was said not to have seen him for years, yet would ‘have no peace’ until she had his Kit-Cat portrait from Tonson. (She is blamed for that painting's disappearance from the set.)

  62 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, no. 149, Tuesday, 21 August 1711, by Steele.

  63 Ibid., vol. 4, no. 52
0, Sunday, 27 October 1712, by Steele.

  64 The Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post, Saturday, 24 January 1719, in BL Add MS 47,128, V, 95.

  65 George Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London, 1956), vol. 4, pp. 56–7; Berkeley claimed to have the story direct from Addison.

  66 Egmont MSS, quoted in Richard I. Cook, Sir Samuel Garth (Boston, Mass., 1980), p. 142 n. 97.

  67 John Barber to Jonathan Swift, 22 April 1735 quoted in ibid., p. 37.

  XIX THE END OF THE CLUB

  1 BL Add MS 33,441, f.1, Addison fragment on friendship, found among his papers when he died.

  2 The Plebeian, no. 1, Saturday, 14 March 1719.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Robert Walpole, The Thoughts of a Member of the Lower House in relation to a Project for Restraining and Limiting the Power of the Crown in the Future Creation of Peers (1719), quoted in Horace Walpole, A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England (Edinburgh, 1796 edn), p. 265.

  5 The Old Whig, 1719.

  6 The Plebeian, no. 1, Saturday, 14 March 1719.

  7 T. B. Macaulay, ‘Life and Writings of Addison’, Edinburgh Review 78 (July 1843), p. 256.

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

  9 Richard Steele, The Crisis (1714).

  10 The Peerage Bill was reintroduced in the session of 1719–20. After a ten-hour Commons debate, in which former Kit-Cat MPs spoke according to their allegiances in the schism, and Walpole gave perhaps the most impressive speech of his career, it was once again defeated by ninety-two votes. The Prince of Wales threw a huge party afterwards, at which Steele was likely among the celebrants, but in his case guilt was mixed with the triumph. By this date, Addison had been dead for six months.

  11 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 3, no. 381, Saturday, 17 May 1712, by Addison.

  12 Ibid., vol. 4, no. 186, Wednesday, 3 October 1711, by Addison.

  13 Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759).

  14 Thomas Tickell, ‘To the Earl of Warwick, On the Death of Mr Addison’ (1721).

  15 Virginia Woolf, ‘Addison’, in The Common Reader (London, 2003 edn), vol. 1.