The Copyright Act passed through the Lords on the third attempt,39recognizing and protecting authors' rights for the first time in English history. The law had significant impact in other, unforeseen ways: it made authorship seem a more respectable profession and reduced authors' dependence on aristocratic patrons like those of the Kit-cat Club. The Act also inadvertently increased the importance of the author as individual originator, rather than anonymous collaborator.40 If Tonson, Addison and Steele could have looked into the future, they would have seen how copyright contributed to the decline of the Kit-Cat Club's idiosyncratic methods of literary subsidy.
In the short term, the new Act protected Tonson's rights to his unrivalled backlist of English classics, including Shakespeare's plays, though the penalties for piracy were not effectively applied until after Tonson's lifetime. It was no coincidence that the Act was introduced in the same year as Tonson published the first critical edition of Shakespeare, edited by the dramatist Nicholas Rowe—a volume reprinted frequently until Tonson's copyright ran out in 1731, and which was largely responsible for repopularizing Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. Tonson also promptly registered his ownership of all Congreve's dramatic works and brought them out in collected form, authorized and edited by the playwright himself. Both English literature's Renaissance and more recent past were being fixed as objects of veneration for a new generation of self-confident Britons.
The Copyright Act was one of the last pieces of legislation passed by the Whigs before the Tories made their push for power in the summer of 1710. ‘[I]n England, a man is less safe as to politics than he is in a bark upon the coast, in regard to the change of wind and the danger of shipwreck,’41 wrote Prior, whose long-leaking ship was finally about to come into port.
In June 1710, Sunderland—the strident Whig whom Anne had appointed as Secretary of State against her own inclinations—was dismissed and replaced by a Tory. It was the first sure sign that the Whigs and Marlboroughs were about to fall. In August, Godolphin was dismissed as Lord Treasurer, and was replaced by Harley. Kit-cat Jack Smith, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a heartbroken witness to this unceremonious dismissal, resigning in protest. An anonymous Tory published some verses on Godolphin's fall:
Behold the Man who bore the powerful Wand Ensign of Treasure and supreme Command Reduced by an offended Monarch's Wrath To bowl [i.e. booze] with Hopkins and be praised by Garth.42
Dr Garth published a broadside eulogy to Godolphin, regretting the ‘star sinister’ that threw the Treasurer from office.43 Steele and Hopkins (dismissed as Under-Secretary of State for the South when Sunderland was dismissed as Secretary) went to pay their respects to the former Treasurer at Putney shortly afterwards. Though Marlborough remained in command of the army, the writing was on the wall for him too. Congreve was shocked: ‘No man that I know (without exception of any) is able to make any conjecture of what is intended by the proceedings at Court.’44
On 19 September, a group of Kit-Cat ministers—Somers, Devonshire, Boyle—resigned in protest at the prospect of serving under Harley. Two days later, Anne dissolved Parliament and called a general election, without consulting the Privy Council. Wharton and the last leading Whigs were removed on the 26th. Walpole was told he would be replaced as Secretary-at-War, but survived Tory corruption charges and became leader of the Whig opposition in the Commons. He began to host dinners for the deposed Whigs, supplementing those of the Kit-Cat Club, at his London home in winter and in Chelsea during the summer. With these ministerial changes, the Queen's wishes were signalled to every electoral patron across the country.
The calling of the 1710 election marked the outbreak of the ‘paper war’ between the Whigs and Tories. Before The Tatler, the only regular paper aside from the government Gazette had been Daniel Defoe's Review. By the end of 1711, some 200,000 copies of newspapers and periodicals were in circulation every week. Godolphin's government had ‘ever despised the Press, and never could think a nation capable of being influenced’ by its productions,45 but the Kit-Cat Club patrons felt otherwise. Maynwaring took orders through the Kit-Cat Club to marshal the Whig writers, including Benjamin Hoadly. Harley, meanwhile, paid liberally for the production of numerous anti-Junto newspapers, satires and pamphlets.
One anonymous anti-Whig ballad was titled ‘A Song at the Kit-cat Club’ and anticipated the Beggar's Opera's analogy between petty and political crime:
What signifies a Whore or two,
To Bridewell sent and whipped,
Whilst the great Rogues unpunished go
And all the Kingdom's stripped?
Another anonymous ballad, likely commissioned by Harley, described the Kit-Cats as ‘Hard-mouthed Sots’ advancing ‘their Canting State’ by any Machiavellian means.46 A third, authored anonymously by Swift, ridiculed the Junto's political impotence by analogy with the ageing Kit-Cats' collective sexual impotence. This was a poem claiming to have been found in the cabinet of one Mrs Anne Long, a former Kit-Cat toast, entitled ‘An Essay to Restore the Kit-Cat Members to their lost Abilities, for the sake of the LADIES who admire 'em’:
Are these Men for Their Business fit?
Shall one of these Men think to come,
With Claret reeking, reeling home,
To do a longing Lady Right,
That has expected him all Night?47
Such verses appealed beyond the educated elite, while Whig propaganda was usually limited to prose works addressed to local office-holders and landowners. Whig writers usually only penned ad hominem attacks on the Tory hacks in Grub Street, but Tory journalists attacked Whig leaders directly. Like government ministers who spoke with pride of ignoring public opinion, the Whig writers could not let go of Drydenesque snobbery about writing for the un educated. Only Maynwaring was happy slinging mud to popular tunes, composing an updated 1710 sequel to his lively anti-Harley hit of 1708, ‘A New Ballad: To The Tune of Fair Rosamund’.48 Two countrydances, entitled ‘The Kit Cat Club (1 and 2)’ and first printed in the 1710 edition Playford's Dancing Master may also have been part of the Whig election campaign.
Harley hired literary henchmen (and women) able to match or better those of the Kit-Cat Club. Defoe, who had done the odd writing job for Kit-Cat patrons whenever he felt their commission was in keeping ‘with my Reason, my Principle, my Inclination and the Duty every man owes to his country and his posterity’,49 now turned his Review into a mouthpiece of the Harleyite Whigs. Mrs Manley also wrote for Harley as a Tory and settled an old personal score by portraying Steele as ‘Monsieur le Ingrate’ in a bestselling satirical romance.50
Harley also recruited former Lord Dorset's Boy and Kit-Cat, Matthew Prior. In September 1710, between Godolphin's dismissal and the 1710 elections, Prior wrote in The Examiner, a new Tory journal he helped found, criticizing the Kit-Cats as monopolizers of literary fame. Prior referred to his own expulsion from the Club (which still rankled), and mocked Furnese's literary pretensions in gaining admission. Prior went on to ridicule Garth's eulogy to Godolphin. As recompense for The Examiner, Harley paid Prior enough to buy a modest house in Essex—a richer reward than any diplomatic posting or salary advance Prior had ever received from Dorset or Halifax.
Addison accepted Maynwaring's invitation to write for the Whig cause after his return from Ireland in August 1710. When Prior's Examiner piece appeared, Addison answered with a new paper called The Whig Examiner. Published weekly until early October 1710, Addison wrote three issues before the elections and two while they were in progress. Defending the Junto ministry, The Whig Examiner also defended Garth's poetry. On politics, it preached to the coverted, with elegantly expressed but rather stale arguments. As Swift remarked, the Whigs' problem was that they wrote propaganda ‘[n]ot with a View of convincing their Adversaries, but to raise the Spirits of their Friends’.51 Addison's ethics were also a hindrance: ‘[I]t shows a good Mind to forbear answering Calumnies and Reproaches in the same Spirit of Bitterness with which they are offered,’ he said.52 Addison was, m
oreover, too willing to admit both parties exaggerated their cases: ‘How many Persons of undoubted Probity and exemplary Virtue, on either side, are blackened and defamed?’53
Maynwaring closed the toothless Whig Examiner after its fifth issue, and tried replacing it with another paper called The Medley. Whether or not the Kit-Cat Club's dinners were used to plan press strategy, the paper war more closely united the Kit-Cats in friendship and partisan solidarity. Garth was asked to edit The Medley, but limited himself to becoming a contributor, alongside Addison, Steele, and Anthony Henley, who wrote pieces in the personae of tradesmen, peasants or servants.54 The Tatler also continued to serve the Whig Junto's cause, making Harley's government determined to close it down, despite its popularity. On the eve of the election, the Tory Moderator reported, menacingly, the imminent death of Isaac Bickerstaff, which would be ‘much lamented by the Gentlemen of the Kit-Kat-Club and all true Republican Spirits’.55
When the country went to the polls in October 1710, the Tories won by a landslide, gaining a majority of nearly 200 MPs, around fifty of whom openly expressed Jacobite sympathies. Since the Commons was the engine of Whig power, this meant total defeat for the party. Exactly two years earlier, Swift had called the Whig takeover a ‘new world’; now he used the same phrase to describe another, in reverse.56
The Kit-Cat MPs fared better than other Whig candidates, since their Club patrons allocated some of the safest seats to them. Since early September, the Junto had been conferring about who to put forward as candidates where, and in the end only five Kit-Cat MPs were not returned.57 The most surprising and significant unseating was that of Stanhope. He had returned to Spain by the time of the election, but none of the Kit-Cats worried much when a Tory brewer challenged him in his Westminster seat. Stanhope's status as a war hero made him seem a racing certainty against a lowly tradesman. Addison published an essay in which a Stanhope-like character declares, ‘Let it not avail my competitor that he has been tapping his Liquors while I have been spilling my Blood…!’58 But Tory satires published before the election undermined Stanhope's claim to heroic masculinity, accusing him of sodomy (an accusation made seven years' previously in another Tory satire, over which Stanhope ignored Stepney's advice to sue59). The satirists focused Londoners' anti-war feelings against the Commander, and the brewer won the seat by a landslide. Walpole urged Stanhope to return from Spain as soon as possible after the results came in: ‘Dear Stanhope, God prosper you and pray make haste to us that you may see what you would not believe.’60
While Wharton lost many seats previously under his control, he at least managed to see Addison returned, uncontested, in Malmesbury. Swift nonetheless attributed the victory to Addison's personal qualities, remarking that if Addison ‘had a mind to be chosen king, he would hardly be refused’.61 Addison was, at this moment, in Swift's favour thanks to various flattering letters Addison had sent Swift in an effort to woo the satirist away from Harley's patronage. Three days after Addison's victory, he dined with Swift and Garth at the Devil tavern on Fleet Street, but it was clear that Harley was winning the contest for Swift's allegiance, flattering him with one-to-one meetings and sensitive information of the kind that the Junto had always refused him.
Harley never intended to lead a purely Tory administration. He had hoped for a more evenly split Parliament that would allow him to rule as an unfettered power broker, above a coalition of Tories and anti-war Whigs. He was therefore almost as alarmed as the Whigs by the Tory landslide, forcing him to serve a single party. At first, Harley and his closest colleague, Henry St John, tried to retain a few junior Kit-Cats in the administration, but one by one their loyalty to their Whig patrons made their positions untenable. Nor did Harley have any great wish to purge Congreve, who had always maintained personal friendships with Tories as well as Whigs, from his ‘little Office’ for licensing wines. When Halifax asked Harley to leave Congreve alone, Harley readily assented, quoting from the Aeneid: ‘We Tyrians are not so devoid of sense / Nor so remote from Phoebus’ influence'.62
Swift therefore had little grounds to boast, as he did, of having saved Congreve's job. Swift's lobbying for Congreve was not evidence of their friendship, in fact, so much as evidence of how much Swift enjoyed playing patron to a man he had envied since they were boys in Kilkenny. Swift's Schadenfreude seeps through his descriptions of how physically incapacitated Congreve had grown by the age of 40, describing him as gout-ridden and ‘almost blind with cataracts’.63 As Swift catalogues long hours spent at Congreve's lodgings during this period, one reads between the lines that the invalid host could not risk offending Swift by asking him to leave.64
The reluctance of Addison, who despite his own eye troubles remained far more robust and self-sufficient than Congreve, to accept Swift's help as an intermediary with Harley is clear from one of Swift's journal entries that October;
I was this morning with Mr Lewis, the Under-Secretary to Lord Dartmouth, two hours, talking politics, and contriving to keep Steele in his office of Stamp-paper…in the evening, [I] went to sit with Mr Addison and offer the matter at distance to him, as the discreeter person, but found party had so possessed him that he talked as if he suspected me, and would not fall in with anything I said. So I stopped short in my overture and we parted very dryly; and I shall say nothing to Steele and let them do as they will.65
As Swift sought out Addison that autumn, both men appear to have been under similar instructions from their respective superiors to cultivate one another's company and report back any intelligence gained. Swift dined with Addison and Garth again on 27 October, and with Addison and Vanbrugh on 8 November, just six days after Swift's first anonymous attack on Marlborough appeared in The Examiner.
Swift complained the Kit-Cats were ‘insufferably Peevish’ after their loss of power.66 He was as alienated by their reluctance to accept his help as he had been by the reluctance of Somers, Halifax and Wharton to grant him their patronage in earlier years. Addison's and Congreve's esteem for Swift has been consistently overestimated, most of the evidence of their ‘friendship and dearness’67 coming from Swift's diaries or from letters containing flattery clearly intended to prevent Swift from writing against them. In truth, the Kit-Cats were always wary of Swift, even when he seemed their ally, and Swift sensed this distrust. Swift always spoke of Addison and Steele as a pair, calling one ungrateful for favours done to the other, and his journal entries reek with envy of the two men's friendship. Now he found they liked him even less in the self-importance of his attentions from Harley. Tellingly, when Addison and Steele resisted Swift's offers to represent them, Swift described them as choosing instead to ‘club’ with one another.68
Despite resolving to wipe his hands of the Kit-Cats, Swift arranged two appointments for Steele to call on Harley in November 1710. Swift's assumption that Steele would plead to keep his position in the Stamp Office failed to take account of Steele's unbreakable Kit-Cat allegiances and genuine political convictions. Steele appears to have missed both appointments, in at least one case deliberately. Steele claimed he was actively choosing principles over profit: ‘I rejoice that I had spirit to refuse what had been lately offered Me.’69 This referred to a new carrot Harley's intermediaries had waved before his nose if he would break with the Junto: the job of managing the Drury Lane theatre.
Addison, as expected, lost his place as Irish Secretary when Wharton was replaced as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by a Tory, just days after their return from Dublin.70 Swift could not comprehend why Addison did not want to keep a post under a non-Whig ministry, ‘which by a little compliance he might have done’.71 Soon after, Wharton was threatened with impeachment for having pardoned the Presbyterian preacher in Drogheda and for removing an Irish officer solely so he could resell the commission for profit. Addison corresponded with friends in Dublin about the injustice of the charges against his patron, saying he felt ‘bound in Honour to do him what Right I can’.72 The proceedings were eventually dropped.
Addi
son also corresponded about a private business scheme by which he hoped to cushion the loss of his Irish income. He seems to have tried out a sideline as a shoe importer to Ireland, probably intending to sell them to army regiments, but in September 1710, he received ‘Ill news of my shoes being damaged’ at sea,73 and came to regard the venture as worthier of Steele than himself. Addison never risked anything similar again.
Swift dined with Addison and Steele yet again on 10 November 1710. They must have suspected that he was the anonymous author of the piece that had appeared in The Examiner the previous day: the beginning of a concerted press attack on Wharton. This attack was the start of Swift's revenge for all the snubs he had suffered while lobbying Wharton on behalf of the Irish Church. He wrote savagely of the Whigs in his journal: ‘Rot 'em for ungrateful dogs; I will make them repent their usage.’74 In December, Swift also published anonymously the piece of invective against Wharton he had had in hand on the yacht home from Dublin the previous summer. A Short Character of His Excellency Thomas Earl of Wharton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland sold 2,000 copies in two days75 and inflicted lasting damage on Wharton's reputation. It denounced him as ‘a public robber, an adulterer, a defiler of altars’. Swift wrote that no Irishman ‘now possesseth more than what the Governor's Lust and Avarice have overlooked; or what he was forced to neglect out of mere Weariness and Satiety of Oppression’,76 and indeed there is some contemporary evidence to support these charges that Wharton profited exorbitantly (a personal profit of at least £45,000, or around £4.8 million today) from his time as Irish Lord Lieutenant. Swift, behind the anonymous mask of The Examiner, wrote of ‘the wonderful Delight of libelling Men in power, and hugging yourself in a Corner with mighty Satisfaction for what you have done’.77 Smug with the power of his pen, Swift was possibly also the author of a verse satire in which the Kit-Cat members ask themselves with punning hindsight:
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