Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  Pro-Marlborough Whigs like those in the Kit-Cat Club regarded these open negotiations with impotent horror, as a betrayal of British interests and as leaving France's expansionist ambitions insufficiently checked. Steele called Oxford's government ‘the French Administration’ in sarcastic honour of its collaboration with the enemy.14

  Prior and others in the Brothers Club encouraged Swift to produce a political tract that would discredit the war and demolish Marlborough's reputation, thereby preparing Parliament's conscience to accept both the peace terms and Marlborough's dismissal. This Swift did in spectacular fashion, producing The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry (1711). The Conduct sold thousands within days, and was reprinted six times. ‘I lay it down for a Maxim,’ Swift declared in its opening passage, ‘that no reasonable Man whether Whig or Tory (since it is necessary to use those foolish Terms) can be of the Opinion for continuing the War upon the Foot it now is, unless he be a Gainer by it.’15 The pamphlet's success in achieving its aims was an astonishing feat, given the extent of the CommanderGeneral's popularity. Steele's Englishman's Thanks to the Duke of Marlborough (1711) was a weak riposte.

  The Kit-Cats began to feel it was time to lay down their quills and take more direct action. Their sense of urgency was prompted not only by the peace negotiations but also by Queen Anne's declining health, with the fear that the French and Jacobites would seize upon her incapacity or death to venture another armed invasion. The Kit-cats planned a pre-emptive show of strength: a procession through London, in which effigies of the Devil, Pope and Pretender were to be set alight. It was to take place on 17 November 1711, the anniversary of Elizabeth I's accession and a key date in the Protestant patriotic calendar. They laid out £1,000 ‘by contribution’ to fund the demonstration,16 and Steele and the Duke of Montagu were tipped to lead it. When the Kit-Cat Club dined the preceding Thursday, probably in a private ‘Velvet room’ at the Queen's Arms,17 they discussed these plans, as well as other grants and subsidies to keep the wheels of their influence oiled while in opposition.

  Though such 17 November processions were traditional—the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury's Whig club had financed those of 1679 and 1680, for example—Lord Oxford worried that 1711's would turn into an anti-government riot since it would coincide with Marlborough's return to London. At midnight on 16 November, therefore, the Queen's Footguards were sent to a house in Drury Lane to confiscate the Devil, Pope and Pretender effigies, Wharton later laughing that ‘Their Disciples came by night and stole them away.’18 The Whig journalist Abel Boyer claimed the banning of the procession, and the ‘Trained Bands’ of soldiers patrolling London for three days afterwards, were intended to inflame public paranoia about the Whigs as republican revolutionaries.19

  Though Maynwaring did publish new lyrics to the 1688 anthem of ‘Lillibullero’, the Kit-Cats were not so naïve as to believe they could spark a full-scale revolution. They merely wanted to appeal to the disenfranchised, illiterate, yet influential London mob, much as Sacheverell had done, and hoped that Marlborough's personal magnetism, if he were to appear on the shoulders of such a procession, could rally such support.

  An anonymous government author published a poem, The Kit-cat Clubs Lamentation for the loss of the Pope, the Devil and the Pretender, that were taken into custody on Saturday last by the Secretary of State. Written by Jacob Door-holder to that Society (1711). The poem sneered at how the Club's leaders, once ‘looked upon as Sages / Fit to be Canonised by future Ages’, were now reduced to sedition and ‘abortive insolence’. The poet accused them of Devil-worship and, bizarrely, of covert Jacobitism. Oxford also ordered a paper called The Postboy to insert a paragraph in its 22 November issue, explicitly accusing the Kit-Cat Club of

  a conspiracy to raise a mob, to confront the best of queens and Her ministry, pull down the houses of several honest and true worthy English gentlemen, having had money distributed to them some time before for that purpose by…the insatiable Junto cum multis aliis, who made the subscription, and gave out the Queen was very ill, if not dead, in order to have their treason with greater freedom.20

  The Kit-Cats also rallied direct parliamentary opposition to the Tories' peace terms, and their spirits were raised briefly when they succeeded in securing the defection of the High Church Tory Lord Nottingham. Nottingham agreed to oppose the peace in the House of Lords in exchange for the Junto's agreement to vote through a new Occasional Conformity Bill, barring Dissenters from public office. Wharton was persuaded to accept this horse-trading on the basis that nothing was more important than preventing a bad peace with France. Even the less politically active Kit-Cats were mobilized to persuade the Whig rank and file to accept this surprising, apparently hypocritical tactic: Vanbrugh advised one doubting young MP ‘the matter was neither a point of honour nor Conscience, but purely political and discretional’.21

  Kit-Cat Robert Walpole also introduced a motion in December 1711 against making any peace that would leave the Spanish throne in Bourbon hands. Walpole was backed by City men like Furnese who viewed money loaned to fund the war as investment in Britain's future trade with the Spanish Empire and did not intend to give up their investment without a fight. By focusing on trade, and by selling the Dissenters up the river, the Whigs increasingly appeared to oppose the peace for reasons of private profit. Charges of peculation were published against Marlborough before the Christmas parliamentary recess and, on 31 December 1711, the long-expected blow fell: Oxford dismissed Marlborough from all his posts, including supreme command of the Allied armies. Anne created twelve new Tory peers, the so-called ‘Tory Dozen’, in order to construct the narrow Tory majority in the Lords needed to vote through the peace terms. The Whigs' last power base was undermined by this action, which they viewed as unconstitutional and absolutist.

  Addison's Spectator essay of 29 January, in this context, quivered with patriotism, saying if he could choose to live anywhere in the world, it would be in Britain: ‘a Prejudice that arises from Love of my Country, and therefore such a one as I will always indulge’.22

  Being a Whig, he said, arose naturally from being proud of the 1689 constitutional balance, which Addison praised in answer to the creation of the ‘Tory Dozen’ and in defiance of the Tory preachers who were sure to denounce the Whigs as crypto-republicans on the following day's anniversary of Charles I's execution.23

  In March 1712, a Tory faction with an even more anti-Court agenda than the October Club founded the ‘March Club’. It started with thirty-five members, and soon rose to around fifty. This in turn prompted the Junto Whigs to inaugurate the ‘Hanover Club’ (or ‘Hanover Society’) later that year. This Club is best characterized as ‘an adjunct to’,24 or satellite of, the Kit-Cat Club, with overlapping but not identical memberships and goals. Halifax and Walpole, for example, did not join the Hanover Club, and, though the Hanover Club toasted Whig ladies,25 it never concerned itself with the Kit-cat Club's broader cultural agenda. Instead, the thirty-plus Hanover Club members, who met weekly near Charing Cross and occasionally in Hampstead, focused on taking practical steps to secure the Hanoverian succession. They pledged, for example, to implement a tactic called ‘close marking’ whereby each parliamentary member was allotted a specific Tory to tackle during debates.26 The contemporary historian Oldmixon remembered that the Hanover Club was ‘very instrumental in keeping up the Whig Spirit in London and Westminster and consequently throughout the whole Kingdom’.27Whigs in other large cities formed clubs along similar lines.

  Ambrose Philips, a protégé of Addison, was Secretary of the Hanover Club, and linked it directly to another new circle that, in 1712, began to supplement the Kit-Cat's role as a meeting place for London's writers: this was the circle of Button's Coffee House, located in Covent Garden, opposite Will's. There, in an inner room with a coffee pot kept constantly on the open fire, Addison began to hold court in Drydenesque style among his young literary apostles, including Addison's pudgy, doggedly loyal cousin and personal assistant, Eustac
e Budgell, and Thomas Tickell, a Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. Addison's forms of patronage were more modest than the Kit-Cat patrons': he invited Budgell and Philips to share his lodgings, and published the work of several ‘Buttonians’, including Tickell, in The Spectator.

  Playing oracle to an adoring coterie of lesser talents did Addison's character no favours. He set himself up as a big fish in a small pond, and even Macaulay admitted that Addison grew somewhat ‘full of himself’ (a phrase Addison coined28) as a result. Steele, Kneller and Garth occasionally joined the discussions at Button's, but Steele was suspicious of these new-found friends, especially Tickell, who was more moderate Tory than committed Whig and more Oxford don than town wit. Though Button's should have provided greater intellectual stimulation than the Kit-Cat Club, since it excluded those whose only qualifications for critical literary discussion were aristocratic title or electoral influence, Addison's domination had a deadening effect. None of the young Buttonians produced any literary work highly rated by posterity.

  Addison also raised his social standing considerably in the spring of 1712 by purchasing Bilton Hall, near Rugby in Warwickshire, at a cost of some £10,000 (over £1 million today). Some of the capital to buy Bilton would have come from his brother Gulston's Madras estate, which was gradually being liquidated, some from Addison's savings after decades of bachelordom and frugality, but part was probably also a gift or loan from Wharton or Halifax. There is no other explanation for this impressive purchase during Addison's time of unemployment and so soon after the self-pitying complaints about his ‘incredible losses’. The house was a status symbol, but also a retreat for a deeply Christian man who observed that ‘in Courts and Cities we are entertained with the Works of Men, in the Country with those of God’.29

  The Steeles were living at this time in a rented, low stone cottage on Haverstock Hill, north of London. This cottage was located near to where a pub stands today named The Sir Richard Steele. From the cottage's front gate, sheltered from the busy road up to Hampstead by a fine row of poplars, Steele had a clear view over central London's skyline, including St Paul's new dome. It was here that his son Eugene, named after Marlborough's great military ally, was born.

  Addison's and Steele's rural retreats symbolized their distance from the centre of power and what they Whiggishly viewed as the Queen's now corrupt Court. May 1712 saw the British army on the Continent under strict instructions only to engage the French defensively—the infamous ‘restraining orders’. On 28 May, Halifax led the Whig attack in the Lords against these orders, while fellow Kit-Cat William Pulteney led the same attack in the Commons, calling the ministry ‘weak and treacherous’.30 Not all of their followers could stomach it, however, an observer noting that when the peace terms were debated in the Lords ‘Several even of the Kit-Kat Whig Lords are so satisfied with the goodness of the terms…as to join with the Court on this occasion.’31

  The restraining orders' impact was soon evident: after the British troops were withdrawn from the equation, the Austro-Dutch army was soundly defeated at Denain in July 1712. This defeat was much lamented by the Kit-Cats, but was also evidence that Britain had become, in the course of the preceding decade, a first-rank military power whose presence or absence on the battlefield was decisive.

  While Pulteney defended Marlborough against corruption charges in the Commons, the literary Kit-Cats supported him through their publications. Tonson, as predicted, finally published his long-awaited edition of Caesar's Commentaries (1712) dedicated to the Duke. The Spectator advertised the book by saying England gained as much glory from its printing presses and scholars as from its military victories—encapsulating a core Kit-Cat belief. Tonson's publication was, Addison wrote, ‘a true Instance of the English Genius, which, though it does not come the first into any Art, generally carries it to greater heights than any other Country in the World’.32

  On 1 July 1712, Swift observed The Spectator had been ‘mighty impertinent’ recently.33 He saw it as his task to punish this ‘impertinence’ on the government's behalf. In A Letter of Thanks from My Lord W[harto]n, to the Lord Bishop of S. Asaph, in the Name of the Kit-Cat Club (1712), Swift satirized the Kit-Cats' religious laxity and venality. The narrator jokes that the Bishop's sermons enlist St Peter and St Paul so far to the side of the Whigs that they may soon ‘be enrolled Members of our Club’. Even as his Tory friends held the upper hand in London and Dublin, Swift could not forgive Wharton or the Kit-Cat Club for having once made it clear he would never be one of them.

  Swift also predicted Mr Spectator's recent ‘impertinence’ might mean, finally, Steele losing his Stamp Office job. Steele could ill afford to lose this last source of income. Borrowing heavily, he moved his family to a new townhouse ‘handsome and neatly furnished’ on the east side of Bloomsbury Square, where a visitor noted their ‘table, servants, coach and everything is very genteel, and in appearance above his fortune’.34 The new house was Steele's bid to silence his wife's constant ‘dunning’ for money,35 and to fool his dying motherin-law into thinking she could trust her money to him. Steele's wife had complained to her mother about Steele's mismanagement of their finances for years, and though he admitted to ‘vast sums of money I have let slip through my hands’, Steele now needed the old woman to think he had changed his ways.36 By leasing the house in Bloomsbury Square, he succeeded in convincing her that he and Prue were living ‘in the handsomest manner, supported only by my Industry’37 and so was relieved to receive her fortune when she died soon after.

  Steele's financial anxieties were equalled by Vanbrugh's. Queen Anne's 1704 promise to pay for building Blenheim had never been put into writing, and Treasury payments had been in arrears since June 1706, when the Duchess of Marlborough first started alienating the Queen's affections. The Duchess refused on principle to pay from her family's pocket what had been promised as a gift from the Royal Works, with the result that Vanbrugh had been unpaid for several years. Vanbrugh said he regarded Blenheim ‘with the tenderness of a sort of Child of my Own’38 and blamed the Duchess, whose interference in the project seems to have offended him largely because she was a woman, for the threatened abortion of his ‘child’ when she refused to pay the workmen from her own funds in 1710. The Duchess in turn blamed Vanbrugh for the fact that the house had already cost twice his original estimate. In May 1711, Addison was invited to inspect the Blenheim works—finally seeing the reality of the image that had appeared on his 1707 Rosamund stage-set. Mr Spectator reviewed the architectural design with approval. In June 1711, Oxford's vendetta against the Marlboroughs halted all payments from the Treasury and Blenheim's construction indefinitely. By this time, payment of £45,000 (or over £5.3 million today) was outstanding, including Vanbrugh's salary and expenses. Vanbrugh had prepared himself for the works' closure, however, having secured an appointment on the commission to build fifty new churches in London.

  After closing down the leading Whig architectural project, Oxford sought to close down the Whig press. Failing to do so by legislation, Oxford tried undermining the Whig papers' economic viability: the Stamp Act came into effect in August 1712, levying new duties on all printed papers.39 These new duties meant The Spectator had to double its price to two pence. Addison appealed to readers to pay the higher price, joking he would not want to be thought unpatriotic by halting publication and denying the Treasury taxes from England's most successful paper. With uncharacteristic venom, Addison compared those who worked behind the scenes to silence Mr Spectator to ‘those Imperceptible Insects, which are discovered by the Microscope’.40 He also suggested poorer readers wait to buy the collected Spectator volumes: ‘My Speculations, when they are sold single, like Cherries upon the Stick, are Delights for the Rich and Wealthy; after some time they come to Market in greater Quantities and are every ordinary Man's Money.’41

  The Stamp Act at first halved The Spectator's sales, but Steele attracted additional advertising revenue from tradesmen, who rallied to support a paper that always spoke
to them as if they mattered and subtly raised their social status. ‘[T]here are not more useful Members in a Commonwealth than Merchants,’42 Addison declared. In August 1712, as if to thank the paper's saviours, Steele wrote an issue that was a hymn to English trade and the glories of London's Royal Exchange.43

  On Thursday, 17 September 1712, Steele joined what sounds like the first Kit-Cat dinner of the London season, sending a note to Prue: ‘The finest Women in nature should not detain Me an hour from You, but You must sometimes suffer the Rivalship of the Wisest Men. Lord Halifax and Somers leave this place after dinner.’44 The gallant tone disguised Steele's growing disillusion with his marriage: he reflected in The Spectator on the shock of discovering ‘the Creature we were enamoured of as subject to Dishumour, Age, Sickness, Impatience’45 and on men needing the patience of Socrates to deal with shrewish wives: ‘All who are married without…Relish of their Circumstance…live in the hourly Repetition of sharp Answers, eager Upbraidings, and distracting Reproaches. In a Word, the married State, with and without the Affection suitable to it, is the completest Image of Heaven and Hell.’46

  Prue, pregnant with their fourth child, commended her own forbearance ‘as a Christian as well as a Rational Creature in relation to you [Steele]’.47 When Steele refused to let Prue have £300 from her mother's inheritance, her forbearance ran out and Steele's conjugal rights were placed in jeopardy, Steele at one point asking to spend the night with Prue if she would ‘condescend to take me out of my Truckle-bed’.48 Prue refused to let Steele join her until his debts were cleared.

  In mid-November 1712, Addison and Steele met Jacob Junior at the Fountain tavern and, over a bottle, sold half the rights to the first four volumes of collected Spectators for £575 (some £70,000 today). The other half was sold to Sam Buckley for the same amount. It is unknown how Addison and Steele split the proceeds. While this sum evidenced a substantial rise in literary incomes since the 1690s, it did not solve Steele's financial problems. Only learning to live within his means would do that, and Steele seemed to find this impossible.