Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  The Spectator's role in advocating national unity and moderation depended largely on Addison's personality. Though Addison had a strong sense of life's hardship, in Spectator no. 26 he admitted (as Mr Spectator) having no personal experience of true depression or melancholy. Therefore, when Addison admired the poise of the British constitution as though it were a gentleman's well-balanced character, he did so in a spirit of personal as well as patriotic vanity. Addison's greatest fault was pride: in The Spectator issue where Addison declares his ambition to bring philosophy out of ‘Closets and Libraries’, it is less often noted that the author describes himself in the preceding sentence as Socrates reincarnated.79 One could say that the new national character Addison and the other Kit-Cats promoted also suffered from this fault—the fault that would lead Britain into the chauvinism and atrocities of empire.

  When Dr Johnson reached middle age in the 1760s, he took Addison as his personal model—to the extent of finding his Steele in the young James Boswell. Boswell said he would prefer to imitate a composite of Addison's wisdom and Steele's gaiety—the composite character of Mr Spectator, in other words. It was a nice irony of The Spectator's anonymous authorship that the public criticized Steele for not living up to all the paper's strictures—on frugal spending, for example—when so many of those strictures came from Addison's pen. Steele was expected, in other words, to embody the virtues of his more sensible, cautious friend. Yet Dr Johnson, for all his reverence of Addison's genius, concluded: ‘Of this memorable friendship, the greater praise must be given to Steele. It is not hard to love those from whom nothing can be feared, and Addison never considered Steele as a rival.’80

  What Addison most needed from Steele was Steele's inexhaustible optimism about their collaborative projects, and the permanent pose Steele struck as Addison's greatest fan—an ever-attentive listener. ‘Good Breeding,’ Steele wrote in October 1712, ‘obliges a Man to maintain the Figure of the keenest Attention, the true Posture of which…I take to consist in leaning over a Table, with the Edge of it pressing hard upon your Stomach.’81 In The Christian Hero, Steele had said conscience was the ballast ‘in the Voyage of Life’, as ambition was ‘our Sail’, and he quoted himself again on this in his forties.82 He was still living at full tilt, like a boat with a sail puffed full of ambition, always in danger of collapse.

  This difference in Addison's and Steele's characters is discernible even in the portraits of each man painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller: Steele seems to be leaning slightly forward, towards the viewer, while Addison leans slightly back. These paintings were part of Kneller's famous series depicting the Kit-Cat Club's members, painted at irregular intervals between roughly 1702 and 1721.83 Steele's was painted in 1711, around the time he was launching The Spectator.

  Steele sat for his Kit-Cat picture at the studio in Kneller's townhouse in Great Queen Street, near Lincoln's Inn Fields. Sunlight shone through a window to Steele's left, which overlooked Kneller's fine garden and that of his neighbour Dr Ratcliffe, whose servants sometimes crept through an adjoining gate to pick Kneller's flowers, much to the painter's annoyance. The house was quiet as Kneller worked—he had no children by his wife Susannah, though he kept an illegitimate daughter from an earlier lover at another address. As Kneller sketched out Steele's face, giving it what Steele later described as a ‘resolute’84 expression, the artist said he regretted that Annibale Carracci, the great sixteenth-century painter and draughtsman, was no longer alive to do it justice. This was Kneller teasing Steele's vanity with a hidden barb in the compliment, as Carracci was as famous for his cartoons of grotesques as for his serious portraits. Steele's account of the sitting, written many years later, suggests he was sharp enough to appreciate the ambiguity. The remark may, however, have led to a more serious conversation about what Kneller saw as a dearth of talented English portraitists at this date. Steele wrote an essay about painting (‘a Poetry which would be understood with much less Capacity and less Expense of Time’) being a neglected art in England—yet another art form to be added to the Kit-Cat Club's to-do list of national reform. The nineteenth-century critic William Hazlitt singled this out as the best critical piece in the whole Spectator.85

  Today there are forty-three surviving Kneller Kit-Cat paintings showing forty-four portraits (one being a double), but there are also said to be four ‘missing’ portraits, which may or may not have existed, as well as a significant number of known members who were never painted for the series. Each picture in the Kit-Cat series measures thirtysix by twenty-eight inches. Like a close-up photograph, these portraits create a strikingly new sense of intimacy and informality. In contrast to Van Dyck portraits, for example, Kneller's Kit-Cats put themselves on the viewer's level, showing each man down to his waist and half turning towards the viewer. Seven of the portraits show the sitters wearing loose Indian shirts, and most of the other sitters are also informally dressed, with open collars, in relaxed poses. Lord Mohun, painted in 1707, is the essence of expensive informality in his blue velvet coat, gold brocade waistcoat and open shirt collar. He holds a snuffbox with an indistinguishable miniature in the open lid—the only woman to sneak into the Kit-Cat series. The majority of the Kit-Cats wear fullflowing wigs, but five sport turbans, making them more individualized to modern eyes. This naturalism, of course, involved theatrical artistry, rather like the banter in a Congreve play. Addison praised such informality in contrast to French portraiture, which he denounced as affected, with too much bright, fussy finery and ‘a certain smirking Air’.86

  Modern art critics have seen ‘a certain smirking Air’ on the faces of the Kit-Cats themselves—‘an image of the ruling oligarchy, cheerful and self-satisfied, with a little coarseness in the lips and insensitivity behind the eyes’.87 They do seem a self-satisfied group, but this overlooks the fact that many of the paintings were completed at a time, between 1710 and 1714, when the Kit-Cats' political and personal fortunes were in ruins. Steele's portrait is a case in point. Here was a man who, in 1711, could hardly afford to replace the clothes on his back, borrowing money from Furnese, clinging on to his only regular income by his fingernails, and hounded by the Queen's chief minister and government-sponsored press for his political opinions. The pose of self-assurance was, in other words, even more artificial than the pose of informality.

  The remarkable similarity of the portraits expressed the Kit-Cat Club's egalitarian spirit; the classical ideal of friendship among equals. That some of England's highest ranking peers were presented in the same style as Mr Edmund Dunch or Mr Jacob Tonson, the old aristocracy beside a new meritocracy, was shocking to viewers at the time. The Kit-Cat Club as a society of equals had always been, of course, an ‘idealization’,88 ignoring its members' widely varying circumstances, and the portraits are the most obvious sign of that idealization—equality being easier to achieve on canvas than in life.

  Why Kneller ever started to paint such a large series is uncertain. One of the Club's members was said to have suggested giving Tonson ‘some considerable token of our remembrance’, and Tonson asked that this ‘token’ be their portraits.89 Tradition has it that Somerset first presented his portrait to Tonson as a gift, then the others followed suit. In the absence of original bills or receipts, it is unclear whether the Club paid for the series by subscription or individually.90 John Faber Junior, who made engravings of the paintings, confirmed they were donated to Tonson, and dedicated his book of engravings to Somerset as the first donor. The set, after 1704, was certainly hung, as each was completed, at Tonson's Barn Elms house:91 a 1705 satire told readers that if they wanted to discover a certain Kit-Cat member's identity, they should ask Tonson to ‘show you his Picture with the Rest that belong to the Club’.92 Tonson's private collection was ahead of its time, prefiguring the later eighteenth-century craze for portraiture and home galleries.

  We are lucky there is a Kit-Cat portrait of Congreve.93 Not long before he sat for it in 1708, Congreve remarked that ‘sitting for my picture is not a thing very agr
eeable to me’94—self-consciousness that explains why there are relatively few images of the famous writer. Congreve thought Kneller's image made him look ‘too chuffy [chubby]’, though elsewhere he admitted to having grown so fat he was ‘puzzled to buckle my shoe’.95 The Kit-Cats as a whole were large men—literally fat cats. Mohun was politely described as ‘inclining to fat’,96 and most of the Kneller portraits show heavy jowls and double chins, with Charles, 4th Baron Cornwallis the most morbidly obese. When Steele asked Congreve's friend Joe Keally to send him a cheap tailored suit from Dublin, Steele instructed that it be ‘every way too big for yourself’, which, since Congreve teased Keally for being overweight, implies Steele was even larger.97 In October 1709, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu laughed to describe a 200-yard running race down the Mall in St James's, featuring as contestants two of the fattest men in London, both Kit-Cats: Garth and Grafton. Grafton grew so fat and alcoholic as he aged that Lord Hervey would nickname him ‘booby Grafton’, whose body was ‘as impotent now as his mind’,98 and Swift dismissed him as ‘almost a slobberer’.99 Similarly, when the Duchess of Marlborough witnessed her friend Dr Garth's spherical form trying to dance a minuet, she muttered: ‘I can't help thinking that he may sometimes be in the wrong.’100

  Congreve's Kit-Cat portrait does not show him as the gouty invalid he was by 1708: it makes him look sun-kissed and full of energy. It contrasts with one painted by Richard van Bleek in 1715, when Congreve was 45, which captures Congreve's more contemplative, reclusive side as he sits reading a Vanbrugh play, surrounded by poignant allusions to time, lost sight and ageing.

  In Vanbrugh's Kit-Cat portrait, he holds a compass, the tool of his architectural draughtsmanship, and wears his badge as Clarenceux King of Arms, the heraldic appointment with which Carlisle paid him for Castle Howard.101 There is no emblem of Vanbrugh's earlier, theatrical career.

  In Tonson's portrait, painted late in the series, in 1717, the book he holds is not an emblem of friendship with one of his living authors, but a grateful acknowledgement of the work that first made him rich: Paradise Lost. Tonson's is one of the most pleasing portraits in the series. He sits alertly in the ‘elbow chair’ of the Kit-Cat Club, wearing a turban rather than hiding his jowls under a wig's thick side-curls.

  Sir Godfrey Kneller, born Gottfried, son of Zacharias Kniller, the Surveyor of Lübeck, emigrated to England in 1674. After early successes painting the Duke of Monmouth and Charles II, Kneller became a favoured Court artist, a Knight of the Realm and Justice of the Peace. Kneller was never a Kit-Cat himself, however, as some have claimed.102 The fact that a self-portrait by Kneller later hung in the same Barn Elms room as the Kit-Cats' has erroneously led to the painter's inclusion in the Club, while Kneller's paintings have confused the record of who was a member almost as much as they have clarified it. At most, Kneller was, like Marlborough, an honoured and exceptional guest.

  Kneller once remarked that history painters ‘do not begin to live themselves until they are dead’, whereas ‘I paint the living, and they make me live.’103 Some have interpreted this as an admission of unabashed commercialism, for which Kneller was as much criticized as Tonson, but Kneller more likely meant that painting the famous assisted his own fame. The statement proved truer than he realized: Kneller's name has lived on in posterity largely because of whom he painted rather than how he painted, and the Kit-Cats were, until as late as the 1950s, some of his most famous subjects. There was a wonderful quid pro quo in the end: the Club was immortalized by Kneller, and Kneller was immortalized by the Club.

  In so far as the Kit-Cat Club was about styling oneself by choice of friends, the pictures give the elusive art of friendship a monumental solidity. The fact that Tonson wanted to fill his house with portraits of his friends emphasizes how much the Club was about replacing social networks based on blood by those based on merit and mutual regard. Ironically, Kneller's style added a certain similarity to the men's physiognomies, as if they were all distant cousins. Perhaps it was merely the mimetic quality of friendship, which was then extended, through the paintings and publications like The Spectator, to a whole nation of Kit-Cat imitators.

  There is, sadly, no painting of the Club as a group, gathered around a table in animated conversation or mingling in their clubroom, as in Reynolds' Members of the Society of the Dilettanti, Zoffany's The Academicians of the Royal Society or Hogarth's Midnight Modern Conversation. Thus there is no painting to help us understand who was closest to whom, who was central and who was peripheral. It is as if the Kit-Cats chose to preserve themselves as a series of individual essays instead of a group biography.

  XVI

  THE CRISIS

  The KIT-CAT CLUB, generally mentioned as a set of Wits, were in reality the Patriots that saved Britain.

  HORACE WALPOLE, son of Kit-Cat Robert Walpole1

  BY SUMMER 1711, the Kit-Cat Club had become an informal shadow Cabinet, orchestrating Junto strategy in opposition and maintaining Whig morale in the political wilderness. As at the beginning of Anne's reign, such periods of political adversity provided opportunity for gauging clients' loyalty to their patrons. It must have been a constant question for the Kit-Cat aristocrats whether the authors they supported sincerely liked them, or whether they were valued only for the favours they dispensed. Ned Ward, with no patron to liberate him from Grub Street, had accused the Kit-Cats of being a bunch of ‘scabby friends’ who lived by ‘tickling each other with reciprocal flattery’.2 To Ward's eye, the trumpeted ‘new golden age’ was a façade, hiding corruption. By protesting their friendship in private letters and public dedications, the Kit-Cats were fending off such cynical readings of their fellowship. Their self-image demanded they should believe themselves ‘disinterested’, their Club founded on mutual affection and Whig ideals rather than material deals between craven clients and narcissistic patrons.

  Addison said he had suffered ‘incredible losses’ since losing his Irish post,3 and pressed Steele to repay an overdue loan. Addison worried he might also lose his pension as Keeper of the Records in Dublin. He asked an Irish Tory friend to help him keep it, but also to downplay his financial desperation, since ‘I know the most likely way to keep a place is to appear not to want it.’4 Partly with an eye to retaining the Keepership, and partly out of genuine concern at the impact of rampant partisanship on British society, Addison instigated a series of Spectator essays seeking a truce with the Tories. He mourned the ‘Malice of Parties…rend[ing] a Government into two distinct People and mak[ing] them greater Strangers and more averse to one another than if they were actually two different Nations’.5 This, Addison argued, gave the advantage to Britain's foreign enemies and distorted relations between private individuals, to the extent that he feared to ‘discover the Seeds of Civil War in these our Divisions’.6 Soon after, in late July 1711, Addison and Steele dined with Swift for the first time in several months, to ask whether Swift would intercede to help Tonson's firm keep the printing licence for The Gazette and, presumably, help Addison retain his Irish Keepership. Swift described feeling ‘as a twig’ grabbed by the Whigs ‘while they are drowning’.7

  Addison then departed to spend the rest of the summer in Bath, leaving Steele in the emptied city to write August's Spectators single-handedly. ‘Unbridled’ by his friend's absence, Steele almost immediately abandoned the pretence of party neutrality. He used a report about the exciting news of Marlborough breaking through the French (‘Ne Plus Ultra‘) lines as an excuse to attack Oxford's ministry, then suspected of cutting deals with France behind Marlborough's back. Several readers complained at this Whig tubthumping, but Steele ignored them, penning a tribute to an idealized commander who was unmistakably Marlborough.8

  ‘[N]ot a meeting of Friends, not a Visit, but like Jehu to Jezebel, Who is on my side? Who? Who is for Peace? Who is for carrying on the War?‘ wrote Daniel Defoe, his tone perfectly reflecting the high pitch of London politics in 1711 and the fact that war or peace was now the only question debated in the coffee hou
ses and Commons.9 Steele may have favoured at least one further military campaign, and believed that opening peace negotiations strengthened the resolve of the enemy, but he understood that the peace the Tories wanted would be hugely popular.

  Prior, now ‘a thin, hollow-looked man’,10 had been hired to open talks with the French, based on his personal acquaintance with the French minister, the Marquis de Torcy. Prior and a French cleric named Abbé Gaultier departed from London in July 1711, empowered to negotiate with Torcy at Fontainebleau. Neither Parliament nor British diplomats like Stanyan (still ambassador in Berlin, despite his friends' fall from power) were informed. When Prior returned to England from this first mission under a false name, a port official arrested him as a suspicious character. Thanks to this arrest and a leak from the Austrian Envoy, the negotiations became public knowledge by the end of August. Prior later recalled that Lionel, the young Lord Dorset, counselled him to ‘save his bacon’ by renouncing, even at this late stage, his work for the Tories.11

  Prior hosted the continuing negotiations with French officials at his own house on Duke Street, St James's, most importantly on the night of 20 September 1711. A week later, Oxford and Henry St John signed the peace preliminaries, and Prior, now officially the Queen's ambassador and plenipotentiary (despite Anne noting his ‘mean extraction’12), started commuting between London and Paris. St John instructed him in the following affectionate terms: ‘For God's sake, Matt, hide the nakedness of thy country, and give the best turn thy fertile brain will furnish thee with to the blunders of thy countrymen, who are not much better politicians than the French are poets.’13 Prior was obviously as loved and trusted by his Tory patrons as he had ever been by Dorset or Halifax.