Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  Following Addison's return to London, he rented a garret on the street today known as the Haymarket (thanks to then being the location of one of London's largest stables and hay markets). It neighboured Dr Garth's handsome, fully staffed townhouse on the street's eastern side. Addison's despondency and anxiety about his career and income at this date were understandable. He had given up a safe path in the Church for the ambition of becoming a government servant and writer, but neither of his recent prose publications on Italian tourism or Roman medals was attracting much interest beyond his friends. Somers, Halifax and Manchester remained Addison's nominal patrons, having invested in his European education, but there was no fresh idea of how to employ him since he had blown his chance with Somerset. Addison lived off his small inheritance, conscious of being the eldest yet least settled of his siblings, at 32 the walking embodiment of unfulfilled intellectual potential.

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (who had high standards) declared Addison the best company in the world, and Steele, always Addison's biggest fan, asked Congreve to agree that an evening alone with Addison was like ‘the Pleasure of conversing with an intimate Acquaintance of Terence and Catullus, who had all their Wit and Nature heightened with Humour, more exquisite and delightful than any other Man ever possessed’.26 Yet Addison had a natural aversion to large gatherings, saying there was ‘no such thing as real conversation between more than two persons’.27 It was less a matter of principle than personality. He described himself, using a metaphor from Congreve's Double Dealer, as a man who could draw a bill for a thousand pounds but had not one guinea in his pocket, meaning that he could express himself with perfect fluency on paper but then grew tight-lipped and tongue-tied in public. He felt this was a disability partly because he shared the widespread belief that a writer would produce better work if part of a stimulating literary circle—that dinner parties and drinking friendships were essential ingredients in highbrow creativity, as for the Roman Augustans.28 Addison saw the Kit-Cat Club as a place where writers' ‘Conversation fed their mutual Flame’29 and so, against the grain of his own personality, he forced himself to join the Club, to which so many of his friends and patrons had long belonged, in 1704.

  Ironically, the practical result of Addison's reticence when at a Kit-cat Club dinner was that he had to get quickly drunk to relax. Addison was especially fond of Canary wine and ‘Barbadoes water’ (an alcoholic cordial flavoured with citrus),30 and Steele was almost certainly thinking of Addison when he described a friend whom you could seldom get into a tavern, but ‘once he is arrived to his pint and begins to look about and like his company, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay buried’.31

  The amount usually drunk at the Kit-Cat Club is disputed. One contemporary said they ‘refresh themselves with a glass of wine, but with great moderation’.32 Individual members' household alcohol bills, however, suggest that they were often well soaked,33 and a Tory poet described the Club as inspired by intoxication: ‘Oft do they in high Flights and Raptures swell, / Drunk with the Waters of our Jacob's Well.’34

  Vanbrugh's personal punch recipe also suggests that there were some lethally strong cocktails besides the wine on offer at the Club: ‘water or small beer; mead, port—two glasses each; rum, saffron—a very little of each; nutmeg, poker [i.e. warmed by inserting a hot poker], orange or lemon peel in winter; balm etc in summer’.35

  Addison's travel book on Italy had reviewed the wine in every place he visited, and this wine connoisseurship was something he shared with other Kit-Cat members. In 1704, when Congreve noted ‘Good wine scarcer than ever’,36 Addison joined the Kit-Cat Club partly because it was one of the few places where one would have been served the finest, lighter French wines. Imports of French wine were heavily taxed during the war, and though the Kit-Cat lords and MPs supported this protectionism in Parliament, they privately made full use of the privilege allowed to the Privy Counsellors among them to import large quantities of duty-free wine. In 1706, Congreve complained London ‘affords not one drop of wine out of a private house’.37 His distinction between what they were drinking in public and private is telling.

  Since the Methuen Treaty of 1703, Portuguese wine could be imported at a third less duty than French. Port was ‘patriotic and Whig and woollen; claret was Francophile and Jacobite’.38 Kit-Cat Anthony Henley quipped that the Tories were unpatriotic because ‘they are for bringing in French claret and will not sup-Port’.39 Among the Whigs, champagne and claret became truly guilty pleasures, and much black-market French wine was labelled as port to get it through customs. Between 1705 and 1714, Congreve was one of five Commissioners for licensing wine, which, combined with his job at the Customs House, placed him perfectly—alongside Maynwaring—to assist his patrons with defrauding the system.

  In the early 1700s, when heavy drinking had not yet exploded into the epidemic depicted in Hogarth's ‘Gin Lane’ but rather remained the preserve of the upper classes (as in the phrase ‘drunk as a lord’), alcoholism was not regarded as a serious issue. Even the Collierites and Societies for the Reformation of Manners never focused on temperance. However, Addison, self-critical of what he must have known was a personal weakness, lectured young men never to boast of drunkenness, since it distorts the intelligence and ‘displays every little Spot of the Soul in its utmost Deformity’.40 He published an essay advising his readers to drink as follows: ‘the first Glass for myself, the second for my Friends, the third for good Humour and the fourth for mine Enemies’.41 One reader, possibly a teasing friend, commented that ‘there was certainly an Error in the Print, and that the Word Glass should be Bottle‘.42

  Addison was far more abstemious about food than alcohol, having too delicate a digestion for the richer dishes at the Kit-Cat feasts. The Kit-Cat Club remained a dining club, even as it assumed its range of other identities as cultural institution, literary clique and political think-tank. It was imitated as a dining and toasting club by the ‘Beefsteak Club’, another Whig club that started sometime before 1705.43 But, though many Kit-Cats were dedicated food lovers, only one member's admission rested primarily on his reputation as a gourmand. Charles Dartiquenave (or ‘Dartineuf’), known to his friends as ‘Darty’, was a member when Addison joined. Darty was rumoured to be a bastard son of Charles II, but in fact his father was a Huguenot refugee. Darty had written a volume of poems in Greek and Latin while a boy, and as an adult became known as a great punster. He was appointed an Agent of Taxes in 1706 and later Paymaster of the Royal Works, being described by one contemporary as ‘the man that knows everything and that everybody knows’.44 Anecdotes about Darty, however, focused on only one thing: his obsessive love of food.45 Pope wrote an epigram: ‘Each mortal has his pleasure: none deny / Scarsdale his bottle, Darty his Ham Pie.’46

  It is unsurprising that a man who became known as ‘a most celebrated sensualist and glutton’47 should have sought admission to a club founded upon pie-eating.

  Addison's indifference to good food was shown by Edward Wortley Montagu's explicit refusal to share lodgings with Addison unless he hired a better cook. In a famous essay on the ‘Gluttony of a modern Meal’, Addison imagined each rich dish on the table as a dish of gout, dropsy or fever. Addison said his prescriptive diet would be one dish per meal, with simple sauces—closer to our modern norm. He recommended that if one must eat a large dinner, one should balance it with some days of abstinence.

  Addison's arrival coincided with the Kit-Cat Club's move after 1704 to Barn Elms, where there was fresher produce to enjoy besides the stodgy pies. Following a summer visit to the property, Vanbrugh told Tonson there were a ‘hundred thousand apricocks [sic]’ in the orchards, along with strawberries, redcurrants ‘red as blood’, gooseberries, peaches, pears, apples and plums sufficient ‘to gripe the guts of a nation’.48 Addison would later take great pride in his own kitchen garden, full of cabbages, ‘coleworts’ (half-grown cabbages) and herbs,49 so he would have taken a keen interest in Tonson's kitchen garden and orchards
at Barn Elms, but more as a gardener than gourmand.

  A Swiss visitor in 1719 observed many people in England ‘never eat any bread, and universally they eat very little: they nibble a few crumbs, while they chew the meat by whole mouthfuls’.50 Meat was a status food and a taste for it (in pies or as roasts) was considered manly, but people also ate more fruit and vegetables than is sometimes supposed. The Kit-Cats would have disdained Italian cookery for its relative scarcity of meat, though Carlisle—with a taste for Continental imports in food as in architecture—once ordered, from an Italian warehouse on London's Suffolk Street, ‘some choice figs’, parmesan cheese and four or five pounds of ‘French raisins’.51 The Kit-Cat diet was, in other words, not as unvaried as one might think. Addison described a dinner conversation about gastronomic antipathies like eels and parsnips, which proceeded ‘till we had worked up ourselves to such a Pitch of Complaisance that when the Dinner was to come in, we enquired the Name of every Dish and hoped it would be no Offence to any in Company’.52

  The balancing of the Club's meat with more fruit and vegetables in the summer paralleled, symbolically, a balancing of the Club's masculinity with more ‘polite’, feminine tastes. After the Barn Elms renovations were completed, Vanbrugh, Carlisle and Garth hosted a ‘Barns Expedition’ by barge to show the house off to a party consisting of Marlborough's wife Sarah and other noble Whig ladies. And it was after the Club settled at Barn Elms (and the Fountain tavern) that the Kit-Cats added a larger dash of delicacy to their meetings with bespoke drinking glasses and decorative silverware.53 Vanbrugh always referred to the Barn Elms house by the feminine pronoun and, in one letter to Tonson, personified it as Tonson's mistress. This was an allusion to a quip in Wycherley's play The Country Wife,54 but also a way of countering accusations that an interest in interior design was in any way effeminate.

  The metaphor of ‘appetite’ versus ‘taste’ was used in relation to all forms of connoisseurship, with the idea that ‘consumption’ should be refined and one's palate exercised: ‘Conversation with Men of a Polite Genius is another Method for improving our Natural Taste,’ Addison wrote.55 At the dinner table, the expectation of conversational pleasures to be served by one's fellow diners was equal to the expectation of good food. Every dinner party in London was said to need at least one Kit-Cat guest, or ‘Flat was the Wine and tasteless was the Cheer.’56

  Addison had joined the Club, however, not for its wine or conversation, but to remedy his unemployment. Resisting lethargy, he helped select the poems for another edition of Tonson's Miscellany, but this took only a little of his time and attention. Nothing could have come as more of a relief, in these circumstances, than an unexpected visitor bearing good news in the late summer. Harry Boyle, the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the stinking wigs, personally climbed the three flights of stairs to Addison's garret to deliver an important message directly from Lord Treasurer Godolphin. Boyle was possibly selected, or volunteered, as messenger because he was a Kit-Cat and this was a Kit-Cat-inspired business.

  Halifax had suggested to Godolphin that Addison be commissioned to write a poem for the government, in exchange for a post as Commissioner for Appeals and Regulating the Excise (a virtual sinecure, worth £200 a year or some £26,500 today). Godolphin himself was ‘not a reading man’,57 but the three Kit-Cat Junto leaders had persuaded him that the war effort needed a patriotic poem to celebrate Marlborough's great victory against Louis XIV and the Bavarians in August 1704 at the battle of Blenheim.

  The battle of Blenheim had saved Austria from French invasion, against all odds. Marlborough's troops had killed or captured threefifths of the Franco-Bavarian enemy. It was a victory that seemed beyond providential, almost miraculous, and which suddenly propelled England into being a front-rank military power. Many date the decline of French hegemony from this defeat, together with that at Schellenberg six weeks earlier. Though several Kit-Cats had been close to Marlborough beforehand, Blenheim marked the point at which support for the war became synonymous with support for Marlborough. Though Marlborough's inclinations may have been Tory, and his stance ostensibly non-partisan in 1704, the Junto Whigs were the ones keenest to celebrate his crushing defeat of the French.

  For Addison, patriotism was ‘the most sublime and extensive of all social virtues’.58 He shared the Kit-Cat belief that heroic verse befitted the heroic, post-Revolutionary times through which the Whigs felt they were living, or at least their faith that heroic verse might help create such a heroic age. Though his patrons were Whigs, Addison also shared with Godolphin and Marlborough a forlorn hope that Whig and Tory brands of patriotism might be harmonized, if only the words of his poem were chosen carefully enough. Valorization of Marlborough, whose deeds in Europe ‘proudly shine in their own native light’,59 was the perfect theme for such an anthem of national unity.

  Addison's ode to the victory of Blenheim, The Campaign, was circulated to the Kit-Cats in manuscript during the autumn of 1704, and published by Tonson in December. Steele wrote a poem of his own puffing The Campaign before its publication, suggesting the former schoolfellows were back in touch. Steele's theme is a selfdeprecating comparison between his own ‘slender stock of fame’ and that of his friend.60 Given that Steele had written a bestselling book and hit play by this date, while Addison had only studied and travelled, it is telling that Steele envied his friend as the more ‘famous’ of the two—the one whose poetry and intellect were admired by the critical elite. It was a symptom, too, of Steele's deeply ingrained assumption of inferiority to Addison.

  In The Campaign, Addison apotheosized the newly created Duke of Marlborough as one who ‘rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm’, an image cleverly reminding readers of the previous autumn's Great Storm and suggesting Marlborough could face down such heavenly portents. That single image was applauded for a century afterwards as an early instance of the Sublime in English poetry. A few contemporary Tory critics smelled something fraudulent in the poem, jeering at the effeminacy of a Kit-Cat patron who would ‘much rather judge of Addison's Poetical History of the Battle of Blenheim than be in it, and is fitter to write the second part of The Campaign than to make One’.61 But for the most part, and with the readers who mattered, including Marlborough himself, the poem was a critical success.

  Godolphin rewarded Addison with the promised Excise post, while Halifax gave Addison another unpaid ‘job’ in the summer of 1704, asking him to supervise the tuition of the 7-year-old son of a lady whom Halifax was then courting: the Countess of Warwick, wealthy young widow of Mohun's rakish friend, the 6th Earl of Warwick. Addison was closer to the Countess' age than 43-year-old Halifax, however, and Addison's concern for her son's welfare appears to have had an aphrodisiac effect. By the end of 1705, after Addison received the secure salary of his Excise post, the diarist Thomas Hearne recorded ‘for certain’ that the Countess and Addison had married.62 They had not, but it was true that they were at the start of a protracted courtship, as Addison struggled to climb several more rungs of the social ladder and become a fit husband for a countess and step father for an earl. That such a report was circulating so soon after an identical rumour in August 1704 about an engagement between the Countess and Halifax suggests there must have been some interesting exchanges between Kit-Cat patron and client during the intervening eighteen months.63

  Daniel Defoe, at this time the ‘infinitely obliged humble servant’ of Robert Harley (who had freed him from Newgate Prison in 1703), was one contemporary who resented the unfair advantages and rewards of patronage he saw the Kit-Cat authors enjoying. Addison's high-profile poetic commission to write The Campaign was a prime example. Demurring from the general applause, Defoe accused Addison of being no better than a mercenary Grub Street hack, writing: ‘Maecenas [Halifax] has his modest fancy strung, / And fixed his pension first, or he had never sung.’64

  IX

  BY SEVERAL HANDS

  Music hath Charms to soothe the savage Breast, to soften Rocks, or bend a knotted O
ak.

  WILLIAM CONGREVE, The Mourning Bride (1697)

  WHILE EMPLOYED ON the Barn Elms and Castle Howard works in the summer of 1703, Vanbrugh commenced a third venture drawing on both his theatrical and architectural talents: the building of a new London theatre on the site of the stables neighbouring Dr Garth's house and Addison's garret lodgings. The idea had been prompted by Betterton's theatre company's need for a more permanent home than the old Lincoln's Inn tennis courts, but also by the lack of any London stage spacious enough for the performance of operas.

  Encouraging English music and opera was one of the Kit-Cat Club's clearest, but most consistently overlooked, goals. Posterity has agreed that England was, before Handel's arrival, in an age of (nonfolk) musical dullness; the Kit-Cats felt it their civic duty to address this. More self-interestedly, they knew music was the art form that the weak-sighted Queen most enjoyed, and they understood from the Hanoverian heirs, who regularly enjoyed operas in Herrenhausen and Venice, that the present dearth of good music in London would be a matter of future royal displeasure.

  In a period before being an opera or music aficionado was considered a requirement for a London gentleman, many Kit-Cats were both: Maynwaring was an accomplished singer and harpsichordist, and one of the first Englishmen to espouse Italian opera; Anthony Henley played several instruments well, composed songs for a play by fellow Kit-Cat Richard Norton, and was considered a leading music critic;1 Manchester, Stanyan, Prior and Stepney saw numerous operas while travelling across Europe—indeed a poem of thanks to ‘Co. Carlo di Mankester’ shows Manchester played patron to the Venetian opera while serving as English ambassador there.2 An anecdote about Prior at the Paris opera has him annoyed by a man next to him who unconsciously hummed and sang along. Prior started muttering insults about the singer on stage until his irritating neighbour overheard and argued in the star's defence. ‘I know all that,’ Prior replied, ‘but he sings so loudly I couldn't hear you!’3