Kitabı oku: «The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation»
OPHELIA FIELD
The Kit-Cat Club
To Paul, and the other members of the Second Hungarian Literary Society
All the good talk over the pies and wine, Congreve's wit, Wharton's fascinating impudence, and Addison's quiet humour, is lost forever without record. The Kit-Cat had no Boswell.
G. M. TREVELYAN, The Times, 10 March 1945
Persons in great Station have seldom their true Characters drawn till several Years after their Deaths. Their personal Friendships and Enmities must cease, and the Parties they were engaged in be at an end…[I]f an English Man considers the great Ferment into which our Political World is thrown at present, and how intensively it is heated in all its parts, he cannot suppose that it will cool again in less than three hundred Years.
JOSEPH ADDISON, The Spectator, no. 101, 25 June 1711
Remember that a free State is only a more numerous and more powerful Club…
SIR WILLIAM JONES, The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Scholar and a Peasant, 1783
Table of Contents
Epigraph
Preface
Prologue - Dryden's Funeral, May 1700
Chapter I - Self-Made Men
Chapter II - Friendships Formed
Chapter III - The Scent of the Pie-Oven
Chapter IV - The Toast of the Town: A Kit-Cat Meeting, 1697
Chapter V - Culture Wars
Chapter VI - The Europeans
Chapter VII - The Whigs Go to War
Chapter VIII - Kit-Cat Connoisseurs
Chapter IX - By Several Hands
Chapter X - The Comeback Kits
Chapter XI - Uneasy Unions: 1707
Chapter XII - Beset
Chapter XIII - Ireland: Kit-Cat Colony
Chapter XIV - The Monopoly Broken: Whig Downfall
Chapter XV - In Their Own Image
Chapter XVI - The Crisis
Chapter XVII - Big Whigs: The First Georgians
Chapter XVIII - Paradise Lost
Chapter XIX - The End of the Club
Chapter XX - Later Clubs and Kit-Cats
Epilogue - Legacies
Notes
Bibliography
List of Members
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
From the reviews of The Kit-Cat Club
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
A detailed chronology and other additional material may be found at www.opheliafield.com
PREFACE
THE KIT-CAT CLUB existed at a pivotal point in British history, and its members participated prominently in the cultural, constitutional and social revolutions of their times. The Kit-Cat Club's story can therefore be read as a study of how the political stability Britain experienced after 1720 was constructed and defended from the 1690s onwards. For over twenty years—from the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution in 1688, through two long and expensive wars against Catholic France, into the reign of George I after 1714—nearly all roads in British politics and culture led through the Kit-Cat Club, or took their direction in opposition to it.
That is the most objective explanation of why I wanted to write the first full biography of the Kit-Cat Club, but there were other reasons. This is, above all, a book about friendship. Having previously written on a female friendship in the early eighteenth century—the relationship between Queen Anne and her favourite, Sarah Churchill—I wanted to examine the more reticent but equally powerful male friendships of the same period. I was also interested in universal questions of how much we should be in business for ourselves, or how far we should be prepared to broker favours for friends, and nothing could better dramatize these dilemmas than the Kit-Cats' relationships with one another.
Of the fifty-odd Kit-Cat members, I have concentrated on a dozen, and within that dozen, on a literary quintet who are relatively well known today: Joseph Addison, William Congreve, Richard Steele, John Vanbrugh and the publisher Jacob Tonson. This is therefore also a book about being a writer. Those who look back to some hypothetical golden age, before commercialism corrupted the arts, will be consoled by how similar the anxieties of the Kit-Cat authors were to those of many authors today. The Kit-Cat Club existed at the threshold between aristocratic and professional writing, and so developed a form of collective patronage for literary production that was suited to both. I was first drawn to the Kit-Cat authors by the fact that theirs were hardworking writing lives, supplemented by day-jobs and by a sense of wider public duty. I was curious to examine creative lives unprejudiced by the later Romantic cult of the artist, which still has us largely in its thrall.
Richard Steele once called for readers of his paper, The Spectator, to send in descriptions of their working lives, to ‘give a lively Image of the Chain and mutual Dependence of Human Society’. This book traces the chain of dependency that connected the Club's writers and patrons; at times, researching it felt like drawing one of those diagrams in magazines showing how everyone successful in British culture is privately linked to everyone else. As an exposé of such connections, this is also a book about class in Britain. As an immigrant to Britain myself, I share the Kit-Cats' interest in the nature of ‘Englishness’, particularly the origins of the London elite that defines itself by education and cultural appreciation, while my own lack of strong national identity means that those who hold strong communitarian values, whether in relation to a club or a country, always intrigue me.
To write a book about the Kit-Cat Club is to describe a fabulous conversation extending over two decades, not one word of which is reliably recorded. Many of Jacob Tonson's papers were pulped by the 1940s. Addison asked that most of his personal letters be destroyed, and his correspondence with Steele seems to have suffered this fate. Robert Walpole destroyed many of his personal papers and ordered the confiscation and destruction of many left by other Kit-Cat politicians. William Pulteney destroyed papers that might have shed light on the Club's final days. There is, moreover, no surviving rule or minute book for the Kit-Cat Club. Not one regular diarist has emerged from among its members. The Club's authors seldom wrote autobiographically, and when they did, they rarely described interior worlds or private feelings. In this sense, however, a group biography is an apt form for a book about the Kit-Cats: they believed creative forces came from the ‘commerce’ or ‘intercourse’ between men's minds, as opposed to later beliefs in subconscious, individual sources of creativity. They believed that their Club was more, in other words, than the sum of its parts.
Viewing each life through the lens of the Kit-Cat Club is necessarily selective, as every man had many personal and professional relationships, and intellectual influences, unconnected with the Club. While I have occasionally mentioned the most important non-members so as not to skew the historical record, it has been impossible to give every non-Kit-Cat patron, relation, colleague and friend his or her full biographical due. I hope the champions of these figures will forgive me.
Note on Dates, Money, Spelling and Punctuation
Before the English calendar changed in 1752, New Year's Day was 25 March. To avoid confusion for modern readers, all dates in this book, unless indicated, take 1 January as the beginning of the new year, such that a date which would have been ‘5 February 1699’, for example, is given here as ‘5 February 1700’. In addition, the ‘Old Style’ (Julian) calendar was ten or eleven days behind the ‘New Style’ (Gregorian) calendar used on the Continent. Unless otherwise stated, all dates are Old Style.
I have often followed an original value in pounds, shillings and pence (or guineas) with an approximation of its relative purchasing power today, though such calculations are notoriously problematic.
I have followed modern usage with respect to spelling and punctuation, but—to keep a dash of original flavour—not always with respect to capitalization. Abbreviated words have been expanded in all instances except titles of printed works, or where poetic metre demands.
I have also, for the sake of efficiency, used a number of modern words that did not exist in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, such as ‘journalist’, ‘scientist’ or ‘publisher’ (Addison was the first to use the word ‘editor’ in its modern sense in 1712).
PROLOGUE DRYDEN'S FUNERAL, MAY 1700
Thy Wars brought nothing about;
Thy Lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an Old Age is out,
And time to begin a New.
JOHN DRYDEN, Secular Masque (1700)
ON A WARM London afternoon, 13 May 1700, a crowd of mourners assembled beneath the turret and weathercock of the Royal College of Physicians, then a handsome brick building on the west side of Warwick Lane, near Newgate Prison. They were attending the funeral of former Poet Laureate, John Dryden. Among the writers, actors, musicians, patrons, politicians and publishers gathering to pay tribute to the man generally acknowledged as the greatest writer and critic of his generation were over a dozen members of a controversial dining society known as the Kit-Cat Club.
One of Dryden's patrons, Kit-Cat member Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, had earlier arranged for Dryden's embalmed body to be exhumed from the local churchyard of St Anne's in Soho, so that it could be reburied, with due pomp and ceremony, in Westminster Abbey. The Kit-Cat Club financed this second funeral at the suggestion of Dr Samuel Garth, another of the Club's members, who was both Dryden's personal physician and one of his literary disciples. Any of the aristocratic Kit-Cats with good credit could have single-handedly paid the funeral's bill, totalling only £45. 17s. (or around £5,500 today), but by transforming the occasion into a communal gesture the Club was demonstrating its generosity and good literary taste to Londoners. Though both Whigs and Tories attended the funeral, no public occasion could take place in the 1700s without one of these two political parties attempting to dominate it, and in this case the Tories resentfully acknowledged that the Kit-Cats were posthumously appropriating Dryden to their distinctively Whig narrative of English literature.
At four o'clock, Dr Garth and the other Fellows descended from the oak-panelled Censors' room on the Royal College's first floor to host a drinks reception, with music and ‘funeral baked meats’,1 for the assembled mourners. Garth, who wore a distinctive red cloak, delivered a Latin oration that offended several attendees for being addressed to the ‘great god Apollo’.2 Such an unchristian oration cleverly avoided the issue that the man whom the Kit-Cats were about to bury in an Anglican abbey had died a Catholic. One of Garth's literary enemies claimed the physician delivered the oration standing on a rotten beer barrel that collapsed halfway through. This slap-stick moment was probably a fabrication, however, since another anti-Kit-Cat observer, who said Garth ‘threw away some words and a great deal of false Latin’, fails to mention it.3
At five o'clock, the coffin—containing the body wrapped in a flannel shift, tied at the feet like a fishtail and packed in bundles of rosemary—was loaded into a horse-drawn hearse adorned with black feathers. Eight musicians in mourning scarves led the procession playing crape-covered oboes and trumpets. At the head of the cortège walked the College beadles, carrying staves. There were three other funeral coaches, one carrying Dryden's widow and son. Over fifty private coaches followed behind.
Departing the Royal College's forecourt, they processed down Warwick Lane and Ludgate Hill, passing the Fleet, a former tributary of the Thames that had dried into a fetid ditch. The carriages following the hearse became entangled with several ‘moveable Bawdy-houses’ (prostitutes in hackney coaches) as they passed Chancery Lane,4 the passengers bracing themselves as horses reared and carriages lurched against one another on the cobbles. The jam then cleared as they slowly proceeded west along the Strand, where gaps between the buildings offered glimpses of the equally traffic-clogged Thames below. At the hour Dryden's cortège passed, the Thames would have been at low tide, revealing the large mud-brown beach onto which shoeless children and scrap collectors were able to wander unimpeded, no embankments yet having been built. The procession finally turned down Whitehall, past the higgledy-piggledy buildings of Old Westminster Palace, towards the Abbey. In the surrounding streets, crowds gathered to watch the strange spectacle of England's nobility, dressed in unseasonably heavy wool mourning suits, paying their humble respects to a near-bankrupt author.
What really bothered several contemporary observers about this Whig-dominated event was the promiscuous mingling of England's social classes. As government ministers, dukes, earls and knights abandoned their carriages and liveried footmen in the Abbey's yard, they found themselves literally on an equal footing with tradesmen, actresses and lowly born ‘Playhouse Sparks’. Tom Browne, a satirist, mocked the impropriety of the motley congregation as ‘A Crowd so nauseous, so profusely lewd, / With all the Vices of the Times endued…’5
The procession was led through the Abbey by a figure whose runtish stature was undisguised by his high-crowned periwig and high-heeled shoes. This was Charles Montagu, King William III's former First Lord of the Treasury and another key Kit-Cat member. Tom Browne considered Montagu the epitome of what was loathsome about the new, affluent class of Whig politicians: ‘grown sleek and fat’, proud, corrupt and pretentious, flattering himself as the ‘Chief of Wits’.6 That Browne was able to publish such insults with impunity indicated, however, the reality of Montagu's situation in May 1700: he had fallen far enough from the King's favour that he would be openly attacked in the next parliamentary session. Montagu's Kit-Cat colleagues, who knew his virtues of generosity, loyalty and intelligence, probably granted him pride of place in the procession to demonstrate their support for him during this difficult time.
Hobbling behind Montagu, leading a ‘Troop of Stationers’, came Dryden's half-crippled publisher and the Kit-Cat Club's founding father, Jacob Tonson. Tonson was grieving for the loss of his most lucrative and prestigious author, whose poem Absalom and Achitophel had launched Tonson's publishing career two decades earlier. Dryden had recognized Tonson as a cut above the Grub Street printers who seemed to ‘live by selling titles, not books’,7 telling Tonson: ‘I find all of your trade are Sharpers & you not more than others; therefore I have not wholly left you,’ and signing a letter ‘not your Enemy & maybe your friend, John Dryden’.8 The longevity of the two men's collaboration, on numerous publications and as co-editors on a series of best-selling poetic Miscellanies, suggested an intellectual empathy greater than they had ever openly acknowledged to one another.
Next came Dryden's fellow authors, not yet recognized as a professional category and considered by many onlookers as even lower than the tradesmen: ‘such as under Mercury are born, / As Poets, Fiddlers, Cut-purses and Whores’.9 Pre-eminent among these was Kit-Cat playwright and poet, William Congreve. Congreve was an insouciant, cynical young Irishman, armoured by quiet confidence in his own talent. He had known Dryden since at least 1692, by which date Congreve had assisted the older poet with various Latin and Greek translations. Dryden quickly felt that in Congreve he had found a worthy literary heir, and, in begging Congreve to be ‘kind to my Remains’,10 Dryden had effectively designated the young man his literary executor.
After Congreve, Dr Garth was considered next in line to inherit Dryden's poetic mantle, having published The Dispensary the previous year: a much-applauded mock-epic poem about Garth's battle to persuade the Royal College to dispense free medicine to paupers. Congreve and Garth had been among Dryden's circle at Will's Coffee House, the social centre of London's literati before the Kit-Cat Club. The death of Dryden, ‘To whom the tribe of circling Wits, / As to an oracle submits’,11 was a blow from which Will's Coffee House's ‘Witty Club’ would never recover, clearing the way for the rise of the Kit-Cat Club.
Rather than Dryden's favourites, Congreve or Garth, however, another Kit-Cat author, John Vanbrugh—36 years old and with four plays under his belt—had been the one to offer practical assistance when Dryden lay dying. Vanbrugh organized a benefit performance, knowing Dryden would otherwise have little to leave his wife and children. Dryden's last dramatic work, his Secular Masque (1700), took new beginnings as its theme and was intended to be performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 25 March 1700: that is, on New Year's Day according to the Old English calendar—the first day of the new century. The production was not ready for this historic opening night, however, and the masque was probably not performed until after Dryden's death, when the third-night profits, which traditionally went to a play's author, would have been donated directly to Dryden's widow.
A number of other Kit-Cat members—including Members of Parliament, army officers and diplomats—accompanied Dorset, Montagu, Tonson, Garth, Vanbrugh and Congreve as they paced through the dimly lit Abbey to the solemn knelling of bells. When the mourners were all assembled under the Abbey's vast transept, a prebend began to read the service, and the choir sang an epicedium.
Several Tory eyewitnesses started the story, later repeated by Dr Johnson, that the funeral descended from a Christian solemnity into a kind of raucous party,12 the playwright George Farquhar concluding with a sigh: ‘And so much for Mr Dryden; whose burial was the same as his life: variety and not of a piece—the quality and mob, farce and heroics, the sublime and ridicule mixed in a piece—great Cleopatra in a hackney coach.’13 Whether touching or absurd, sublime or ridiculous, Dryden's funeral served several purposes for the Kit-Cat Club: it raised the Club's profile with the man in the street; it claimed a Whig share in Dryden's reputation; and it expressed gratitude to a man who had mentored many of those present. The event further demonstrated that the Club was not cowed by the religious censors who had recently attacked the morality of Dryden's plays in the same breath as Congreve's and Vanbrugh's.
One of the mourners, frail old Samuel Pepys, would surely have thought back to another Westminster Abbey funeral he had attended in the company of the 27-year-old Dryden in 1658: that of Oliver Cromwell. Since then, England had seen a royal restoration and a revolution, but the turmoil and bloodshed of the Civil War still felt like recent history. Families and communities torn apart by the previous century's conflicts were still healing these divisions. With the new century only a couple of months old by the terms of their calendar, a sense of excitement hung in the air that spring, but the nation still lacked confidence, and feared the possibility of slipping back into barbarity.
Dryden's death proved a turning point for the Kit-Cat Club, after which it self-consciously set about trying to direct the course of English civilization in the new century, particularly the course of the two arts most beloved of Dryden: literature and music. None of Dryden's admirers, or ‘Apollo's sons’,14 not even Congreve, felt up to carrying this torch alone, but together—through subscriptions and collaborations—the Kit-Cats assumed what they considered their patriotic duty: to guide and nurture native talent. No grouping before or since has worked towards such an ambitious vision of national reform, encompassing every high art form and seeking to dominate every aspect of Britain's social and intellectual life.
By compensating for the especially sizeable gaps in royal patronage of English poetry, theatre and music, the Club would contribute to a shift in authority from the Court to private citizens. More than their monarchs, they would fulfil the country's need for new role models, in fashions, manners and morals. This helped turn the Court into ‘the highly symbolic, sober, secluded, and slightly strange institution it has since become’,15 while at the same time laying the foundations for the exponential growth of cultural consumption that would occur in the later eighteenth century. The Kit-Cat founders were born into an age of plague, fire and civil strife; the younger members would live to see the self-consciously ‘civilized’ age of Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Robert Adam.
Similarly, when the Kit-Cat founders were born, most Britons would have said their monarch ruled them, but by the time the youngest members died, the majority would have said they were governed by an elected House of Commons. The Club was to be both a cause and a symptom of this shift in the political culture, from individual to collective accountability, and its leading members would also be closely involved in turning Britain from a ‘ramshackle federal state’16 to something significantly closer to a modern ‘nation state’. The political stability of Britain after 1720 owed much to a sense of common purpose and values among those who wielded power, and the Kit-Cat Club was the prime example of a political grouping formed and sustained around shared ideological and cultural values, ‘Alike in Morals, and alike in Mind’,17 rather than around bonds of kinship. Its members would pursue an ultra-Whig political agenda for over twenty years, such that an opponent could plausibly describe the Kit-Cat in 1704 as a ‘Club that gave Direction to the State’,18 and such that its final generation of members, most notably Robert Walpole, came to dominate the first half-century of Georgian politics.
The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote in 1690 that, alongside Divine Law and Civil Law, the third type of law was ‘the law of opinion…praise or blame, which, by secret and tacit consent, establishes itself in the several societies, tribes and clubs of men in the world’.19 The Kit-Cat Club continued this seventeenth-century tradition of ‘clubs of men’ carving out negative freedoms from the state, not least of which was the right to hold meetings and discuss their opinions freely. Kit-Cat members would help shape the nation's taste, character and international image in the coming decades, planting a particular idea of ‘Englishness’ in the popular imagination and contributing to the building of a more prosperous, polite and self-confident society.
On this evening in 1700, however, the Kit-Cats were first and foremost a remarkable group of friends, several of whom had known each other since childhood. Self-identification by their Kit-Cat name, and demonstrations of unity such as the funding of this ceremony, were now public vows confirming the men's personal and professional commitment to each other—nuptials of Whig fraternity. Dryden's death, several years after the Kit-Cat Club's foundation, marked the Club's coming of age.
I SELF-MADE MEN
You will make Jacob's ladder raise you to immortality.
WILLIAM WYCHERLEY, addressing a poet
soon to be published by Jacob Tonson1
ON ANY DAY but the Sabbath in 1690s London, ships from around the world disgorged Chinese tea, Indian sugar cane, Japanese porcelain, South American medicines and Persian silk at the eastern docks. Many of these cargoes were then carried by barge and cart to the Royal Exchange, ‘a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth’, built a couple of decades earlier between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street.2 Entering the Exchange from the south, the visitor faced an elegant chessboard courtyard surrounded by two-storeyed arcades, containing over two hundred stalls, with the Mediterranean merchants to the right and American plantation traders to the left. At ‘high exchange’ (that is, in the early morning) the courtyard thronged with brokers, salesmen and ‘stock-jobbers’ trading in both tangible products and grand ideas. Upstairs, young girls sold ribbons and other ‘toys’ for ladies' dresses, while downstairs old beggar women sold the morning shoppers warm bags of walnuts, their shells littering the floor. Beadles patrolled, on the look out for trouble from the ‘mumpers’ (beggars) or the crowds of haggling Armenian, Jewish and Dutch merchants. For those unthreatened by London's role as a leading global centre of trade and commerce, in these years before there was a British Empire, the Exchange was a place to throw oneself into the urban melting pot.
Around 500,000 people lived in London at the end of the seventeenth century, out of five to six million in England as a whole. The city's population was densely packed into a small area of low buildings with only a few high steeples rising clear of the rooftops. One particularly large windmill sat on the south bank of the river close to the site of today's London Eye. Brick buildings were replacing wood after the Great Fire, and the West End was just beginning to emerge from open countryside. The Thames' northern bank was the southern perimeter of the city proper, with the old borough of Southwark south of the river, filled with prisons, shipyards, seedy inns and brothels, stinking tanneries and breweries. The other perimeters of London were the several royal palaces of St James's to the west, Old Street and Holborn to the north, King's (later Soho) Square to the northwest, and Whitechapel to the east. It was a time of thriving property developers: ‘New squares and new streets [are] rising up every day to such a prodigy of buildings that nothing in the world does, or ever did, equal it,’ Daniel Defoe declared.3
The Glorious Revolution of 1688—the armed invasion that deposed the Catholic James II and installed a Protestant Dutchman, William of Orange, and his wife (James's daughter), Mary, on the English throne—had had social repercussions as profound as its constitutional consequences. Ordinary people began to re-examine and loosen the bonds that had tied them to their homes and class. For thousands of ambitious younger sons and rural labourers in search of trades or professions, this meant migrating to London, where everything seemed up for grabs—and within reach. Records for 1690 show three-quarters of London apprentices were born outside the city. London was also simmering with energy thanks to an influx of skilled Huguenot refugees and Dutch immigrants, as well as soldiers and sailors on their way to or from William's current war against France, the War of the League of Augsburg, then being fought in Flanders and Ireland. Army and navy commissions were briskly traded, allowing many men to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Financing the war, meanwhile, required landowners elected to Parliament to start coming into the capital every winter (rather than merely every few years, as during previous reigns) to vote through the army supplies. These landowners were building townhouses and inventing new urban pastimes to amuse themselves through the long, cold parliamentary season.
William's government, as an institution, was itself a social parvenu, and the image of William as a foreign occupier, rather than rightful king, still flashed dangerously in the corner of the English people's collective vision. What mattered was that educated Englishmen should not question the legitimacy of the new regime, nor view the post-Revolutionary constitutional balance, with its greater emphasis on the House of Commons, as too nouveau or alien. Everything had to be overhauled, and new authorities made palatable. Adherents of the Whig party, on the whole more ideologically comfortable than the Tories with the Revolution and the post-Revolutionary social mobility, put their shoulders to this wheel.
Two such self-made Whigs were John Somers, one of the King's leading ministers, and Jacob Tonson, London's most prestigious publisher. Both were flourishing and fattening into comfortable middle age in the 1690s. Their characters were perfectly suited to the times—ambitious and ingenious, yet fundamentally pragmatic—and each was willing to play his part in the national effort of self-reinvention.
Tonson had grown up in central London. A 5-year-old in 1660, the year of Charles II's Restoration, Tonson's father was a barber-surgeon, a freeman of the City of London and a constable of High Holborn, while his mother's family were booksellers with successful shops at the gates of Gray's Inn. At 15, Jacob was apprenticed to the stationer Thomas Basset, where he laboured for the next eight years, elbow-deep in printer's ink and bookbinding resin from morning to night. Tonson read the books in Basset's shop voraciously, acquiring a love of literature, a dose of Latin and a practical understanding of the book trade. The world of books absorbed and comforted Tonson because he was lame in one leg and less physically able than other young men his age. That his nickname ‘left-legged Jacob’4 signified more than mere clumsiness is confirmed by a physician's reference to Tonson's conscience being ‘more paralytic and lost to all Sense of Feeling than his Legs’.5 Tonson was also teased throughout his life for his ginger hair and wide, freckled face ‘With Frowsy Pores that taint the ambient Air’.6
After completing his apprenticeship, Tonson immediately established his own firm, with premises at the Judge's Head in Chancery Lane. Kit-Cat authors later feared sending their manuscripts to this chaotic office in case they were lost amid all the ‘lumber’.7 Tonson was determined from an early age to buy rights to the work of major authors, living and dead, and so establish his reputation as a professional—some say the first professional—English publisher.
Tonson was the first to commission critical editions of Milton's poetry, notably Paradise Lost, and to make substantial profit from a literary backlist. He also had a nose for new talent. Alexander Pope later wrote of ‘genial Jacob’ bringing forth poems and plays from ‘the Chaos dark and deep, / Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep’.8 This idea of a publisher bringing forth creativity—rather than being merely a mechanical maker of books—was unprecedented. That the same publisher should be trusted to make critical amendments to manuscripts was even more unheard of. While Victorian antiquarians would snobbishly try to portray Tonson as merely a grubbing tradesman, there is clear evidence he was a man of great intellect and wit: Tonson later boasted, for example, that in the 1680s he had written various commendatory verses for new editions and passed these off as the work of his star authors, John Dryden and Edmund Waller. (This is also evidence, of course, that the publisher was not above corrupting the corpus of his authors' works in order to boost sales.)
Being published by Tonson was soon seen as an author's shortcut to the richest, most powerful readers, thanks to the publisher's gift for networking. Tonson aspired to be considered a gentleman, on a level with his clients and authors, and so would have felt insulted when called the ‘chief merchant to the muses’9 or a great ‘wit-jobber’ (that is to say, no better than a City ‘stock-jobber’).10 He wished to set himself apart from other publishers and booksellers who were increasingly sullied by association with the hack writers of ‘any mean production’ in Grub Street.11
Though one contemporary bitingly remarked that Tonson ‘looked but like a bookseller seated among lords, yet, vice versa, he behaved himself like a lord when he came among booksellers’,12 Tonson, in fact, succeeded in his social climbing: his correspondence shows that his authors accorded him the same terms of politeness that they employed to address their aristocratic patrons.13 He was treated as their friend, not their servant. There is some disagreement as to how Tonson won this respect—one fairly impartial contemporary called Tonson a man who would ‘Flatter no Body’,14 while another described him as shamelessly obsequious whenever there was a profit to be gained.15 Certainly, from early in his career, Tonson made extravagant but well-calculated gestures of hospitality to both social inferiors and superiors. A bill survives for a 1689 dinner at a French-run ‘ordinary’ (a restaurant, usually run by Huguenot refugees) at which Tonson helped pay for a ‘great table’ of food, along with 20 gallons of claret, 6 of ‘Canary’, 4 of white wine, unspecified quantities of ‘Rhenish’ and champagne, 42 bottles of ale, musicians, servants, a constant fire, candles, pipes and tobacco, as well as a hired coach to pick up and deposit the guests—which, when added to compensation for ‘glasses broke’, came to £31. 8s. 6d. (around £4,000 today).16
John Somers was one of those invited to Tonson's parties before the Revolution17—one of the ‘gentlemen of genius and quality’ Dryden complimented Tonson on cultivating so assiduously.18 Born in 1651 to the son of a Worcestershire attorney, Somers had quickly established a reputation as a brilliant legal mind while studying at Middle Temple—an Inn of Court that the sons of professionals ‘ambitious of rule and government’19 were attending in increasing numbers. Somers' father had stood on the Parliamentary side during the Civil War, and, in the same spirit, Somers fell into the Whig party's political camp. The Whigs opposed James II's moves towards Catholic emancipation during the 1680s, and so, in June 1688, Somers acted as counsel for seven bishops who signed a petition against James's order for a pro-Catholic Declaration to be read from pulpits. Somers distrusted this Declaration because it was brought in by royal prerogative rather than parliamentary statute, and because of his deeply ingrained prejudice that the Catholic Church—with its centraliz ation to Rome and absolutist principles—was intrinsically ‘unenlightened’. The invitation to William of Orange to invade was carried from a set of Protestant English nobles on the very day that the seven bishops' acquittal was celebrated in the streets by ordinary Londoners.
Following the Revolution, Somers' Whig credentials and intellectual reputation ensured his rapid promotion in government. He chaired the committee that drafted the Bill of Rights, the cornerstone of the new constitutional monarchy, and guided William towards accepting its limitations on royal prerogatives. Somers helped mount a retroactive public relations campaign, portraying the change of monarch as the triumph of ‘Reason’—a simple expression of John Locke's ‘contract theory’, whereby unworthy rulers deserved to be deposed. In reward, Somers was appointed Solicitor General and then, in 1692, Attorney General, the latter a profitable office with extensive scope for patronage. Less than a year later, Somers was made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, in charge of the Court of Chancery, and Speaker in the House of Lords, though he himself did not yet have a peerage. By 1695, Somers was one of four men who formed the ‘Junto’ of leading Whigs—the Cabinet within the Cabinet when in the King's favour, and when out of it, a kind of unofficial opposition or ‘shadow’ Cabinet. The Junto's power came from its ability to form block votes in the Commons and to raise from the City of London the extra funds necessary to supply William's costly war.20 Somers was a particularly talented fundraiser, having no prejudice against the City's ‘money men’. He was appointed one of the Lord Justices or regents entrusted with the administration of the kingdom whenever the King was on the Continent running the war.
At home, Somers was an incurable bibliophile. His library in Powys House, the impressive brick residence the King had granted him in Lincoln's Inn, was dominated by the legal texts in which the Tonson family firm specialized. Like Tonson, Somers' claim to gentility depended on his display of learning, and this library was the most tangible proof of that education. Tonson was careful not to lose touch with his increasingly powerful friend. He kept Somers' shelves well stocked and met him regularly to ‘unbend’ over an after-work drink in a tavern near Temple Bar, where the commerce of the City intersected with the politics and law of Westminster.
Tonson also flattered Somers' learning by offering the statesman opportunities for dispensing patronage to various authors in Tonson's publishing fold. Being unmarried and without significant extended family to support, Somers was free to put his patronage to such use. His beneficiaries included Dryden, though Somers allegedly authored an anonymous poem critical of Dryden's Catholicism and regretting, ‘The knot of friendship is but loosely tied / Twixt those that heavenly concerns divide.’21 Dryden in turn introduced younger authors to Tonson and hence to Somers' purse. Two such authors who arrived in London during these exciting post-Revolutionary years would quickly become the leading playwrights of their generation: William Congreve and John Vanbrugh.
Congreve had been 4 years old when his father, an English army officer, was posted to Ireland in 1674. A perk for those, like Congreve's father, in nominal service to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was free education for their sons at the best Irish grammar school, Kilkenny. Some sixty pupils were enrolled at the school in the early 1680s and Jonathan Swift was enrolled two years behind Congreve. Congreve went on to Trinity College Dublin at age 16 in 1686, with Swift following a few years later; these two talented young men lived together in the small community of students for several years without leaving any surviving trace of a particular attachment to one another.
Beyond Trinity's Elizabethan red brick walls, Dublin remained something of a frontier town, a place of opportunity for entrepreneurs and rough justice for criminals, including pirates, smugglers, deserters and horse-thieves; a place where disgraced Englishmen bought cheap land and acquired new identities. The Glorious Revolution was neither quick nor bloodless in Ireland. Instead, it haemorrhaged into the War of the Two Kings (between William III and James II, or ‘Liam’ and ‘Seamus’), with violence that pushed out large numbers of Anglo-Irish refugees. When Trinity College closed in 1689 because of the upheavals, Swift fled to England, where he found his first job as secretary to a retired diplomat. That spring, as the deposed King James tried to retake Ireland with the aid of French troops, 19-year-old Congreve likewise fled to England where his family had well-off relatives happy to put them up. Congreve lodged first with his grandfather in Staffordshire, where, recuperating from an illness, he picked up a pen and began to compose his first play.
Two years later, Congreve arrived in London, a fresh-faced 21-year-old looking for an edgier and more fashionable existence than that on offer in Staffordshire. He was admitted to study law at Middle Temple in March 1691, but was described by a friend as having ‘a wit of too fine a turn to be long pleased with that crabbed, unpalatable study’.22 Middle Temple was not overly concerned if he neglected his legal studies to pursue a ‘coffee house education’ instead, since for many so-called ‘amateur’ students the Inns of Court were merely gentlemen's finishing schools, providing congenial central London lodgings.23 Congreve himself described the education of Middle Temple as being more social than professional—‘Inns o’ Court breeding', he said, was mainly about learning to snub one's country relations when they came to town.24
Congreve's wit quickly made him many friends among his fellow students—several of whom would end up as his fellow Kit-Cats in the years ahead. He went drinking with them in the self-consciously literary taverns and coffee houses of Covent Garden, northwest of the Temple. In that neighbourhood, according to one Kit-Cat poet, lawyers traded their robes for the lace coats of dandies, country girls lost their noses to syphilis, ‘Poets canvass the Affairs of State’, and all classes ‘blend and jostle into Harmony’.25
In the centre of Covent Garden was Will's Coffee House, where Dryden held court among literati of all political shades. Congreve was probably introduced to this circle by one of the other ageing Restoration dramatists of London: Thomas Southerne or William Wycherley, whom Congreve knew through some cousins. Dryden's court at Will's was imperious: those allowed to take a pinch from his snuffbox comprised his inner circle, while his special chair had a prescribed place by the fire in winter and on the balcony in summer, which he called ‘his winter and his summer seat’.26 Yet, at the same time, Dryden carried himself with a charming humility that impressed Congreve deeply: Dryden was, Congreve remembered, ‘of all the Men that ever I knew, one of the most Modest’.27 The next generation of writers would say much the same of Congreve.
Dryden soon declared ‘entire affection’ for Congreve: ‘So much the sweetness of your manners move / We cannot envy you, because we love,’ he wrote.28 Congreve, in return, said he was ‘as intimately acquainted with Mr Dryden as the great Disproportion in our Years could allow’, concluding quite simply that he ‘loved’ the old man.29 Congreve showed his Staffordshire manuscript to Dryden, who declared he had never seen ‘such a first play in his life’, but added that ‘it would be a pity to have it miscarry for want of a little assistance’. What the comedy, entitled The Old Batchelor, needed, Dryden declared, was only ‘the fashionable cut of the town’.30 Though ostensibly a plot of romantic intrigues, the real seduction of the play lies in the enviably quick wit exchanged between its male characters—it is a love letter to the urbane world Congreve must have imagined in his teens and in which he was now becoming accepted. Taking Dryden's suggestions on board, Congreve spent summer 1692 in Derbyshire reworking the text. By Michaelmas, thanks to Dryden's endorsements, Congreve was directing rehearsals of The Old Batchelor at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane.
It was likely during these rehearsals that Congreve fell in love with the woman who would become his muse throughout the next decade: the actress Anne Bracegirdle, or ‘Bracey’. Since adolescence, Bracey had acted under the tutelage of Mr and Mrs Betterton, two experienced members of the United Company, the theatre company based at the Theatre Royal. A brunette with dark sparkling eyes, a blushing complexion and a miraculously perfect set of even white teeth, it was said of Bracey that ‘few Spectators that were not past it could behold her without Desire’.31 Congreve met her when she was ‘blooming to her Maturity’32 and already a star.
It was more respectable to claim infatuation with Bracey than with most actresses, since she was reputed to be as chaste as the virgins she played. She lived with her mother in rented lodgings on Howard Street, where Congreve paid drawing-room visits. If their Northamptonshire family was related to the Staffordshire Bracegirdles, they may even have been distantly related to Congreve. But away from the decorum of Howard Street, backstage at the theatre, Congreve pursued Bracey with fervour, writing her a love poem that lamented her chastity:
Would I were free from this Restraint,
Or else had hopes to win her;
Would she could make of me a Saint,
Or I of her a Sinner.33
The Old Batchelor opened in March 1693 to a ‘Torrent of Applause’ that would have fulfilled any young writer's most immodest fantasies.34 The debut was such a success that ‘many persons of Quality cannot have a Seat, all the places having been bespoken many days since’.35 Jacob Tonson needed no further persuasion to become Congreve's publisher. Tonson printed, then quickly reprinted, the text of The Old Batchelor; he would thereafter hold exclusive rights to all Congreve's plays.
Around Michaelmas 1693, Tonson moved from above his shop in Chancery Lane to a house at the south side of Fleet Street, near the gate of Inner Temple. Soon after, according to poll tax records, Congreve moved out of Crane Court and became Tonson's lodger at this Fleet Street house. The two men, publisher and author, lived together, along with their several domestic servants, for seven years, until 1700. A later imaginary dialogue, written by a mutual friend of theirs, has Tonson exclaiming to Congreve that during these Fleet Street days, ‘While I partook your wine, your wit and mirth, / I was the happiest creature on God's earth!’36
As Congreve's Old Batchelor had its debut on the London stage, 29-year-old John Vanbrugh arrived in the city, in circumstances unlike those of most other ambitious young newcomers. His boat had come from France, where since 1688 Vanbrugh had spent the best part of his twenties, detained without trial and on charges that had been forgotten almost as soon as the key turned in his cell door. The French had arrested Vanbrugh because they had miscalculated the status of his family, believing he would make a valuable bargaining chip to trade for a high-profile French prisoner. Though Vanbrugh's mother did have various noble relations, his late father had been a merchant in Chester, trading in property, lead, grain and Caribbean sugar, and his grandfather was a penniless Flemish refugee. When Vanbrugh's father died soon after the Revolution, Vanbrugh had inherited only a small sum and the burden of responsibility for his numerous siblings.
Some of Vanbrugh's captivity was spent in the Bastille, where his health suffered. Now, in 1693, having been traded for an insignificant Frenchman thanks to his mother's tireless lobbying, he returned to England a free man and, to use his own phrase, as ‘sound as a roach’.37 Imprisonment was a formative experience for Vanbrugh: it gave him a real appreciation of what arbitrary government could mean, and a violent aversion to boredom. He was determined not to waste another minute of his life.
After his return from France, Vanbrugh stayed in London for only a year before leaving ‘that uneasy theatre of noise’38 to join a marine regiment. Purchasing an officer's commission both advanced his social position and promised a secure income. In wartime, however, it was also an act of patriotism: Captain Vanbrugh saw action at a disastrous naval battle and was lucky not to be recaptured by the French. He borrowed some money from a fellow army officer, which he repaid when back in London by writing a play for the Theatre Royal, where his creditor was a patentee. The Relapse opened there in November 1696 and proved an overnight sensation, reviving the sinking fortunes of the United Company and more than repaying Vanbrugh's debt. Its success inevitably introduced Vanbrugh to Tonson and the coveted cultural patrons—like Somers—for whom Tonson acted as gatekeeper and broker. Congreve and Vanbrugh therefore started climbing ‘Jacob's ladder’ to fame and fortune as undeclared rivals, with only three years between their brilliant entrances into the London theatre world and Jacob Tonson's circle of highbrow friends. Soon, however, Tonson would find a solution to make the way less steep for them both: he and his patrons would found the Kit-Cat Club—an institution which would support the two authors throughout the rest of their lives.
II FRIENDSHIPS FORMED
[W]e very often contract such Friendships at School as are of Service to us all the following Part of our Lives.
The Spectator no. 313, 28 February 17121
THE SENSE of unbounded possibility felt by many individual Englishmen in the 1690s owed much to what one historian has dubbed the ‘educational revolution’ of the earlier seventeenth century.2 A surprisingly high proportion of England's sons (though none of its daughters) attended grammar schools, dissenting academies or the liberally endowed foundation or charity schools, so that teaching was no longer the preserve of the clergy and private tutors in noble households. For the generations of boys who enjoyed this expansion in primary and higher education, there were lifelong side effects: the formation of friendships that felt as important to them as family bonds, and a lasting enthusiasm for all-male camaraderie that would express itself subsequently in all-male clubbing.
Westminster School, refounded by Elizabeth I, was a private London school that was now expanding its intake and supplying a new breed of gentleman to government offices and the professions. Jacob Tonson once explained that whereas Eton was ‘very much filled by the Sons of Quality & who are not to be much pressed to study’, Westminster produced ‘manly Orators, & the very air of London brings on the Improvement of Youth for any business of the world…’3 There, in around 1680–2, a gang of three schoolboys, known among themselves as ‘Matt’ (Matthew Prior), ‘Chamont’ (Charles Montagu) and ‘Cat’ (George Stepney), formed a bond of friendship that would not weaken for a full two decades, until the day when one of them dramatically betrayed another.
The three boys slept in a dilapidated former granary next to Westminster Abbey, where, in fireless rooms reeking of damp wool socks and cheap candles, they spent their evenings translating and memorizing passages from classical authors, preparing to be tested at six the next morning. Amid mild malnutrition, older boys could receive extra food from the table of the headmaster, Dr Busby, if they composed particularly well-turned Latin epigrams. The template was set: food in exchange for wit. ‘Chamont’ shared the scraps of meat his epigrams won with his two younger friends, and with his earnest little brother ‘Jemmy’, also at the school.
Enduring the hardships of Westminster's regime not only formed firm bonds of male friendship but also made the three boys mistake themselves for social equals, despite widely varying family backgrounds. Matt Prior had by far the humblest origins and was only at the school thanks to a fairytale stroke of good luck. One day in the 1680s, he had been working at the Rhenish Wine House, a fashionable Whitehall tavern owned by his vintner uncle, when the ageing Restoration rake, Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, came in with some friends and noticed that Matt was working behind the bar with a copy of Horace in his hand. To test whether the boy understood what he read, the noblemen asked him to translate one of Horace's odes into English, and they were impressed when he quickly returned with a translation in metric verse. No matter how many times they repeated the test, Matt delivered. Dorset learned that Matt's joiner father had sent him to Westminster School some years earlier, where he had been taught Latin, but then, when his father died, his uncle had withdrawn him ‘in the middle of the third form’ to work at the Rhenish.4 Dorset remedied this situation by asking the Dean of Westminster to readmit Matt to the school at the Earl's personal expense, thereby becoming Prior's first patron.
At the other extreme, Charles Montagu was the grandson of the 1st Earl of Manchester, whose London residence, Manchester House, stood imposingly across from the Rhenish Wine House. Despite his venerable family name, however, Montagu was a younger son of a younger son and knew his future would depend largely upon his own efforts. George Stepney (nicknamed ‘Cat’ because he always seemed to land on his feet) similarly had no expectation of a significant inheritance, while being acutely aware of his own intelligence. Stepney's father, though briefly a Groom of Charles II's Privy Chamber, had essentially been a grocer and died in debt. His widowed mother survived by renting out properties in Scotland Yard. Stepney's rank therefore fitted roughly equidistant between Prior's near-total obscurity and the ancient lineage of the Montagus.5
Montagu, Prior and Stepney resolved to stay together at university. As Westminster's top scholar, Stepney could afford to turn down a place at Christ Church, Oxford, to join Montagu at Trinity College, Cambridge, to which Montagu had been elected some years earlier. In 1683, Prior joined them in Cambridge, attending St John's, where he was able to gain a scholarship and so save Lord Dorset considerable expense. Matt's background would have been less unusual at Cambridge than at Westminster since the majority of Cambridge students were non-gentry by this date. Prior had several advantages over most of his ambitious fellow students: Dorset's vested interest in his future, a naturally magnetic wit, and epicene good looks, with bright blue eyes under a mop of dark hair.
While he was at Cambridge, Prior maintained his connection with Dorset, sending an epistolary poem comparing the poor mutton at St John's with the ‘kindest entertainment’ he had enjoyed at his patron's table.6 Then, in February 1685, Montagu, Prior and Stepney decided to build on Lord Dorset's interest in Prior and bring themselves collectively to the Earl's notice. It was a good moment to apply to Dorset as he had recently inherited his family seat at Knole in Kent, and expected further enrichment through his second marriage to a 17-year-old heiress. Prior, Stepney and Montagu therefore each wrote Dorset a poem on the death of Charles II, criticizing the accession of his crypto-Catholic brother James. These poetic offerings led Dorset to invite Prior's two chums to London to receive the benefit of some high society introductions. Montagu accepted Dorset's invitation, but Stepney believed he could not afford to enter London society without an income. Montagu therefore used his family contacts to help Stepney find a diplomatic posting in Hamburg, to which he travelled directly from Cambridge. The pretence of the boys' social equality was already beginning to wear thin.
In 1687, Montagu and Prior sat over a bottle in the Middle Temple rooms of Montagu's brother Jemmy and composed a parody of a recent Dryden poem about the Catholic and Anglican churches. They correctly guessed that the Whiggish Lord Dorset would be pleased by such a parody, which they entitled The Hind and the Panther Transvers'd To the Story of The Country-Mouse and the City-Mouse. Dorset circulated the poem widely among his political allies who opposed James II's religious policies during the tense year preceding the Revolution. Prior later claimed he did nothing more than take dictation from Montagu when they collaborated on the Mouse poem, but it is hard to know whether this was just Prior's way of flattering his friend after the latter became a rich and powerful man. If true, it would be less unjust that Dorset's recompense for the poem was to promote Montagu but not the more needy Prior, prompting the wry observation that ‘one Mouse ran away with all the Bacon, whilst the other got Nothing but the empty Cupboard’.7 When William arrived in England the following year, the Dutchman already knew of the poem; Dorset introduced the impish 27-year-old Montagu as its author, ‘Mouse Montagu’, and the soon-to-be-crowned King gave ‘the Mouse’ £500 ‘to make a man of him’.8
From this point on, Montagu determined to follow Dorset's example and be more statesman than struggling poet.9 Montagu left a frank explanation of this choice, in which he is likeably without illusions:
I less affect to fiddle than to dance.
Business and Poetry do ill agree,
As the World says, and that's enough for me;
For some may laugh and swagger if they please,
But we must all conform that Love our Ease.10
Montagu also made an advantageous match in 1688 to a rich sexagenarian widow whose first marriage (six years before Montagu's birth) had been to his relation, the 3rd Earl of Manchester. When Prior heard the news, he composed a poem about how ‘Chamont’ would be elevated above his reach by the marriage, comparing the wedding to an apotheosis: ‘Pleased that the Friend was in the God improved.’11 Montagu, however, sent his old school friends assurances that the married state would not lessen his desire for ‘a constant friendship and correspondence’ with them.12
In reward for having escorted James II's younger daughter, Princess Anne, in her midnight escape to join the rebel forces in 1688, Dorset was appointed King William's Lord Chamberlain, the Court's chief functionary. Montagu, Prior and Stepney became popularly known as ‘Lord Dorset's Boys’, though Stepney at first received favours and ‘protection’ from Dorset only indirectly, and may not have met the Earl in person until a visit home from the German states in 1693. Prior remembered ‘Sneaking…among the Crew’ of ‘Crowding Folks with strange ill Faces’ who came to beg favours from Dorset after his appointment.13
While Prior was ‘sneaking’, Montagu's career advanced at speed, thanks to brilliant performances in the Commons. By 1692, Montagu was a Privy Counsellor, alongside Somers and Dorset, a Lord of the Treasury, and the youngest addition to the Whig Junto. Montagu won the King's particular favour by loyally supporting the army supply Bills and promoting a Treasury plan to raise a million-pound loan for the government—a loan identified by the nineteenth-century historian Macaulay as the ‘origin’ of England's national debt, and still admired by recent historians, such as D. W. Jones, for its ingenuity.14 Montagu thereafter became a dispenser of patronage in his own right—someone to whom Prior addressed epistolary poems, seeking patronage, much as Montagu had addressed Dorset only a few years earlier.
Montagu was also responsible for shepherding through Parliament the Act founding the Bank of England in 1694, in return for which he would gain the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Montagu personally pledged £2,000 (equivalent to some £235,000 today) to the Bank's first subscription, and was joined by many friends. Tonson, probably at the encouragement of Somers, subscribed £500. The new institution was closely tied to the interests of the Whig party, and to financing the Anglo-Dutch alliance. The Tories were less invested (literally and metaphorically) in finance capital. They felt increasingly insecure in the midst of this 1690s financial revolution, and Montagu was an easy figurehead for them to attack. His Tory enemies said Montagu was ‘a party-coloured, shallow, maggot-headed statesman’15 who caressed those who approached him with projects until he had all the details then mysteriously cooled towards them before stealing their ideas. Montagu thought of it merely as keeping an open door to proposals that might benefit the new nation.
While Montagu helped Stepney advance his diplomatic career, Dorset found a diplomatic posting for Prior in The Hague, the Anglo-Dutch allies' headquarters. Stepney often broke his journeys from Berlin back to England with a visit to Prior in The Hague, where the two would sit before ‘a good turf fire’,16 roasting chestnuts, getting drunk and offloading their professional and private problems. Prior's lover at the time, a cook-maid nicknamed ‘Flanders Jane’ whom Prior declared he loved ‘above Interest or lust’,17 would have refilled their glasses on these occasions. Stepney was meanwhile sowing his wild oats across central Europe during the early 1690s, writing frankly to a lady in Dresden who had romantic designs on him: ‘[T]o make love perfectly, methinks Body is as necessary an Ingredient as Brandy is in Punch. Your Wit and Friendship are very good sugar and nutmeg, but there must go something more to make the Dose complete.’18
At their sessions before the turf fire, Prior and Stepney also discussed the financial strain of living like gentleman-diplomats when they were entirely dependent upon the Treasury to reimburse their expenses. Both were aware that their humble births mattered more in Europe than at Westminster or Cambridge. Prior referred to himself as ‘Albion's meanest son’,19 while Stepney was hurt when someone told the Elector of Saxony he was not of noble birth, which prevented the Elector from inviting him to dine for a month. In answer, Montagu and Dorset had Stepney made a Gentleman of King William's Privy Chamber, and Montagu arranged an advance on Stepney's salary, for which Stepney thanked Montagu warmly, calling him his ‘good Angel at the Brink of the Pool’.20
On another occasion, Stepney told his mother he had declined a £1,000 personal loan from Montagu for reasons that show the men remained, in the early 1690s, more old school friends than patron and client: ‘[I]t is the last use any man should make of his friend, & which I should be sorry to be reduced to,’ Stepney declared.21 Prior had less scruple about begging for cash from his old friend: ‘If you can get me any ready money, it would be more charity than to give alms to the poorest dog that ever gave you a petition; if not, patience is a virtue, and a scrap or two of Horace must be my consolation.’22
Like Somers, Montagu believed in the Ciceronian ideal that literary endeavour was an essential qualification for being a great statesman, and if one was not writing oneself, then playing patron to poets was the next best thing. Montagu and Dorset therefore ensured that Tonson published the witty, self-mocking verses that both Prior and Stepney continued to write in between the ‘prose affairs’ of international diplomacy.23 Pursuing identical courses, and consulting one another on their poems in manuscript, they would not have guessed that Stepney would be remembered as one of England's first modern diplomats, while Prior would be remembered primarily as a poet.
Montagu, Prior and Stepney all wrote elegies on the occasion of Queen Mary's death in December 1694, to demonstrate their loyalty to the widowed King. The Tories had always felt more at ease with Mary, as a Stuart daughter, than with her husband's largely parliamentary claim to the throne, and Mary's death now meant William had to renew his bid for popular support. William's childlessness also placed increased importance on Mary's sister Anne, now William's heir apparent, and on Anne's choice of friends. From The Hague, Prior observed the political upheavals consequent upon Mary's death in a letter to Montagu:
These matters will be decided before the King's coming over, so we must have a vigilant eye. I call it ‘we’, for you, Sir, have always regarded my interest as if it were your own; and when I consider that you have taken your poor neighbour and made a friend of him, and solicited for that friend as if he had been your brother, I doubt not but you will have the reward you deserve (though a good while hence) in the Court of Heaven; and I the credentials I do not deserve to some Court or Republic a little nearer.24
Another writer to produce an elegy on Mary's death, published by Tonson, was a young Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, named Joseph Addison. Addison was, like Prior and Stepney, a product of the late seventeenth century's widening access to education. He had attended Charterhouse, a charitable school and hospital then located near to today's Barbican Centre that was considered one of the best grammar schools in England. It took in forty nominated scholars for free, alongside sixty fee-paying non-boarders or ‘town boys’.25
Like Westminster, Charterhouse ran a long, spartan day from six in the morning to six in the evening in summer, with an hour's later start in winter, and taught the classics (mainly Cicero and Horace) with a heavier dose of stick than carrot.
Entering as a scholarship boy in 1686, the 14-year-old Addison formed a close friendship with another scholar the same age, who would become his lifelong companion and collaborator. This boy, Richard (or ‘Dick’) Steele, had already been at the school for two years when Addison arrived.
Steele's father, an Anglo-Irish gentleman from Dublin, died in his early childhood, a fact Steele believed left him calamitously hypersensitive forever after. Steele dramatized the event in a later essay:
I remember I went into the Room where his Body lay, and my Mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my Battledore [a toy] in my Hand, and fell a-beating the Coffin, and calling Papa; for I know not how I had some slight Idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her Arms, and transported beyond all Patience of the silent Grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her Embrace, and told me in a Flood of Tears, Papa could not hear me and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under Ground, when he could never come to us again.26
Steele's mother—whom he remembered as ‘a very beautiful Woman, of a Noble Spirit’27—sent him away from Ireland, to live with his wealthier, childless aunt and uncle in England, and it was they who entered him at Charterhouse in 1684. His mother died that same year, orphaning him fully.
Steele's uncle was private secretary to the 1st Duke of Ormonde, the same Lord Lieutenant of Ireland served by Congreve's father, and it was Ormonde who, as a governor of Charterhouse, arranged for Steele's admittance. One letter from the schoolboy Steele to his patroness-aunt survives. It includes a formal apology for not writing more often, mixed with a pained awareness of his dependency, expressed with less than complete humility: ‘Madam, should I express my gratitude for every benefit I receive at Your Ladyship's and my good Uncle, I should never sit down to meat but I must write a letter when I rise from table.’28 Steele addressed successive patrons with similarly mixed feelings throughout his life.
Their intellects, and the loss of their mothers when they were 12, were what Addison and Steele had in common; the rest was all contrast. Steele was short and square-bodied, with a ‘dusky’ complexion that, combined with his fading Irish accent, would have been interpreted by contemporaries as indicating lowly birth;29
Addison was tall for his age, with pale blue eyes and the pallor of a bookworm. Soon the advantage of Steele's previous years at the school was erased as he came to idolize his new friend.
Addison invited Steele home for the holidays. Addison's father was Dean of Lichfield, having settled there after an exotic life as chaplain to the British garrisons at Dunkirk and Tangier. Addison had immense respect for his father, who imbued him with a profound belief in selfcontrol. In 1686, the Dean was raising four children alone—three boys and a girl, of whom Joseph was the oldest. Steele admired how the Dean taught his sons to vie for his favour and called it ‘an unspeakable Pleasure to visit or sit at a Meal in that Family’.30 Steele was warmly welcomed into the Lichfield deanery that school holiday, and recalled how Addison's father ‘loved me like one of them’.31
Addison only stayed at Charterhouse for a year before being elected to his father's former Oxford college, Queen's, at the age of 15. This confirmed Steele's belief in Addison's superiority; Steele remained ever after several steps behind his friend academically. Steele entered Christ Church, Oxford, in December 1689, by which time Addison had been elected to one of the ‘demyships’ (scholarships offering free lodging) at Magdalen College. Christ Church, to which Steele was sent thanks to his uncle's connections, did not suit him well. It had stood on the losing side of the previous year's Revolutionary politics (in contrast to Magdalen, which had resisted James II's demands) and contained more nobly born students than the rest of Oxford's colleges. When Steele went up, his aunt gave him a pair of gloves and a sword to help him fit in.
After a year, Steele asked his uncle to pull strings with the Dean of Christ Church to get him a scholarship, reporting that though he had gained his tutor's respect, ‘these places are not given by merit but are secured by friends’.32 When his uncle's efforts failed to produce the scholarship, Steele moved to Merton College to accept one there instead. Steele left Merton in May 1692 and enlisted in the army as a ‘wretched common Trooper’,33 since he lacked the funds to buy an officer's commission. Years later, Steele recalled Oxford students who window-shopped, played billiards and bowls, and who were ‘seized all over with a general Inability, Indolence and Weariness, and a certain Impatience of the Place they are in’.34 Steele sounds as though he was well acquainted with these ‘loungers’, but he probably left university voluntarily, out of patriotic duty, rather than because he was expelled, as Jonathan Swift later hinted. Steele would have watched the fireworks in Oxford celebrating the Treaty of Limerick after William's victory in Ireland, and the troops returning from the Irish wars. Though Steele missed his chance to participate in this Protestant victory in his homeland, he could still serve the Protestant cause on the Continent. Since the regiment he joined belonged to his uncle's patron's son, enlisting may also have been a direct order from his uncle that Steele could not refuse.
Addison did not feel a similar pull towards the adventure of war. He remained to wander the water walks and gardens of Magdalen, translating and composing Latin poetry to the acclaim of his fellow academics. These pastimes between teaching duties sound more plausible from what we know of Addison than his later confessional lines referring to his ‘heedless steps’ upon ‘the slippery paths of youth’.35
One thing Addison never let himself be was heedless, and his decision not to enlist was decidedly careful of his own person.
When Addison sent a poem flattering Dryden's talent to the poet in London, Dryden and Tonson included it in the Miscellany Poems they co-edited in 1693.36 Addison's 1694 poem, ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets’, then summarized the history of English poetry, culminating—implausibly to modern judgement—with Charles Montagu at its pinnacle. Addison immediately found a flattered benefactor in the 33-year-old Chancellor of the Exchequer. Steele later recalled that Congreve was the instrument of Addison's ‘becoming acquainted with’ Montagu.37 How Congreve and Addison first met, however, is uncertain. Most likely it was through Dryden and/or Tonson, following Addison's inclusion in the Miscellany, or perhaps Tonson invited Addison home to the Fleet Street house the publisher then shared with Congreve. Either way, there was soon mutual respect between Addison and Congreve, whose respective specializations in Latin and Greek literature spared them direct rivalry.
By 1695, Addison was studying to take orders, though he increasingly wished neither to follow his father into the Church nor to remain a university tutor. Addison therefore sought to add a further patron to his portfolio and did so in the traditional way: by poetic tribute. His verse ‘On His Majesty, Presented to the Lord Keeper [Somers]’ was a bold move on the young academic's part, since he had never met Somers, and had no family connection to justify the presentation. Somers must not have minded, since he let Tonson and Congreve bring the poem's author to meet him. Until now, Addison had been not so much a Whig as Whig-leaning, but these two poems, courting Montagu and Somers, marked his first clear declaration of political allegiance.
Addison's friend Steele had more enthusiasm but less opportunity to serve William's government. Steele too wrote an elegy for Queen Mary: ‘The Procession: A Poem on Her Majesties Funeral, By a Gentleman of the Army’. Steele's, however, was not printed by Tonson, but by a lesser firm, probably at Steele's own expense. If Addison and Steele corresponded during these years while following such starkly divergent paths, the letters are lost. Addison seems not to have shared any of his impressive new literary contacts with his former school friend.
Steele had by this time seen active military service in Flanders during 1692–4, for a salary of about 4 shillings (now around £20) a day. Steele had thereby ‘wiped off the Rust of Education’,38 and depended, as a soldier puts it in one of Congreve's plays, ‘upon the outside of his head [rather] than the lining’.39 Nonetheless, in the army as in international diplomacy, promotion could be secured by demonstrating literary wit in flattery. As a result of dedicating his elegy on Queen Mary to Baron Cutts, a war hero turned governor of the Isle of Wight, Steele was permitted to switch to the Coldstream Guards, a more elite regiment that provided security at the royal palaces. Steele was made a captain, and, though Cutts was the Guards' nominal commander, much of the actual commanding was left to Steele, especially in early 1697 when he served as Cutts' private secretary. The prospect of a peace to end the War of the League of Augsburg spelled an end, however, to further army promotion for Steele.
Dick Steele would soon prove himself, like Tonson and Prior, an extremely enterprising man, in tune with this enterprising period of British history. This was the legacy of each of these three men's childhood struggles, in contrast to the more complacent confidence of Congreve and Addison—both of whom, despite the forced migrations of the Congreve family and the early death of Addison's mother, came from relatively stable and financially secure homes. Belonging to a club (or a political party) would always be a more primal need for Prior and Steele, both parentless, than for Congreve or Addison. Kindred spirits become far more important than kin if you have fewer kin to begin with.
III THE SCENT OF THE PIE-OVEN
Who knows but by the dint of Kit-Cat's Pies, You may, e'er long, to Gods and Monarchs Rise.
NED WARD, The Secret History of Clubs (1709)
A CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNT by a writer named Ned Ward states that the Kit-Cat Club originally convened at the Cat and Fiddle, a London tavern owned by one Mr Christopher (or ‘Kit’) Cat (or ‘Catling’1), a pastry cook from Norfolk, whose supposed portrait shows a gnarly man with a white knotted handkerchief on his head. The Cat and Fiddle was on Gray's Inn Lane, a street then noted for its fresh air blowing down from open fields to the north of the city.2 As a ‘kit’ was slang for a small fiddle, the Cat and Fiddle's signboard, jutting into the lane with its painted emblem of a fiddle-playing puss, may have been a punning reference to the tavern's proprietor.3
Ned Ward's account describes the meeting of this ‘greasy’ piemaker, Mr Cat, and the ‘amphibious’ publisher-cum-bookseller, Tonson, when they were neighbours in Gray's Inn. Ward envisaged Tonson, his aspiring writers and wealthy patrons gathered sweatily together within the scent of Mr Cat's pie-oven to eat a ‘collation of oven trumpery’—mutton pies, cheese-cakes, golden custards, puff-pastry apple tarts, rose-water codling tarts, and other ornate dishes requiring engineering in dough. As they became drunk, the guests composed doggerel in praise of Mr Cat's pastry creations. The ‘voracious mouth’ of the flaming oven swallowed what they bothered to write down on paper, suggesting it was as near to hand as a spittoon or wastepaper basket.4
The Kit-Cat Club thus began as an eccentric publishing rights deal, cooked up by Tonson,5 and has also been called ‘the first expenseaccount publisher's dinner on record’.6 The publisher ‘very cunningly’ resolved to feed a gang of ‘poetical young sprigs’—including his Fleet Street housemate Congreve—on a regular basis, with Cat's baked goods, provided the poets ‘would do him the honour to let him have the refusal of all their juvenile productions’.7 Beyond first options on the works of new authors, Tonson wished to forge professional loyalties in the heat of Cat's pie-oven, with an eye to longer-term profits.8 Ever since Tonson's earliest ventures, he had been securing authors' loyalties through gifts of food and wine—sending exotic melons to Dryden when first wooing the dramatist into his publishing fold, for example—and hiding commercial motives under a veneer of pseudo-baronial hospitality. As early as the 1680s, Tonson had organized what he called ‘Clubbing with Ovid’9—that is, assembling networks of translators to produce collaborative publications. Now he was simply clubbing men in the same way as he had previously anthologized their writings.
The exact date at which the semi-professional friendships between Tonson, his patron-readers (such as Somers, Montagu and Dorset) and his young authors (such as Congreve, Vanbrugh, Prior and Stepney) turned into ‘The Kit-Cat Club’ is unknown, but it was certainly during the final years of the seventeenth century. Thanks to his family's bookshops in the Gray's Inn neighbourhood, Tonson would have frequented the Cat and Fiddle long after moving his own premises from the area. Whereas Tonson's biographers tend to credit him with the foundational love of pies,10 Somers' biographers claim it was the Lord Keeper who discovered Cat's bakery and took his drinking companion Tonson there one day to taste them.11
Although there had been clubs in England before, the Kit-Cat Club would be the first to have such wide-ranging interests and in-fluence, combining cultural, political and professional purposes. Previously, trade and craft guilds, political cliques and literary coteries had kept to their own relatively distinct spheres—so, for example, Will's Coffee House had been the venue one evening for Dryden's ‘Witty Club’ and for the politicians' ‘Grave Club’ another.12
The Kit-Cat Club would draw many of its literary members from the Witty Club, but whereas the Witty Club members were both Whigs and Tories, being a Whig was to be as essential a qualification as wit when it came to joining the Kit-Cat. The republican and Whig clubs of the Civil War and Restoration periods had been notorious as hotbeds of subversion, insurrection and treachery. King William, who relied on the Whigs but ‘believed the Whigs…did not love monarchy’, remained suspicious of any club that might engender new republican conspiracies.13 The Kit-Cat Club, through its emphasis on literature and other highbrow culture, would strive to shake off these inherited associations, and make clubbing into a respectable pastime for a post-Revolutionary Whig gentleman. In doing so, it would provide the template for the literary and cultural clubs that proliferated later in the eighteenth century, of which Dr Johnson's is the most famous.
Though the origins of the Club's name were disputed even within the members' lifetimes,14 the majority of primary sources support Ward's assertion that it came from Mr Cat's mutton pies, known as ‘Kit Cats’,15 on which the Club originally dined.16 The contemporary poet Sir Richard Blackmore writes, for example:
Indulgent BOCAJ did his Muses treat,
Their Drink was gen'rous Wine and Kit-Cat Pies their Meat,
Here he assembled his Poetic Tribe,
Past Labours to Reward, and New Ones to Prescribe.17
A half-pun on the Club's name may also explain why it was adopted. A 1711 letter allegedly written by Mr Cat is signed with the variant spelling ‘Ch Chatt’.18 The slang ‘chit-chat’ for small-talk was commonly used, and practising the art of conversation was a central preoccupation of the Kit-Cat Club, so this name may have been thought amusingly apt. In addition, the name contained a classical allusion pleasing to the founders' Whiggish tastes: in ancient Rome, cats symbolized liberty since no animal less likes to be caged, and the goddess of Liberty was often represented with a cat at her feet. Though Tories and Whigs competed to claim many of the same patriotic principles, liberty was one rhetorical term used far more frequently by the Whigs.
The heat of the scene before the pie-oven, as evoked by Ned Ward, was similarly symbolic. Warmth was considered a Whig characteristic, as shown by the anecdote in which the Kit-Cats asked Mr Cat to bake some pies with the poetry of the comic dramatist Thomas D'Urfey used as baking paper, to test that poet's Whig principles and fitness for membership. The story goes that the members complained when the pies were not baked through, to which Mr Cat replied that D'Urfey's writings were so cold they were cooling the dough. They were not, in other words, sufficiently Whig.
Pies were certainly baked on discarded bits of writing in that paper-frugal century. Dryden described worthless pieces of poetry as ‘Martyrs of Pies’19 and Addison later mused with false modesty that his journalism would ‘make a good Foundation for a Muttonpie, as I have more than once experienced’.20 The nice image of Mr Cat's customers picking the last of the ‘kissing crust’ (the old name for the soft under-crust of a pie) off a piece of blank verse, the ink transferring from browned paper to golden pastry, was not fanciful but real.
As pies and puddings were considered the best of English cookery, the Club's favourite dish would have signified the founders' selfconsciously English, as opposed to French, tastes. The pies were also regarded as humble fare symbolizing the condescension (in its archaic, entirely positive sense) of aristocrats conversing with struggling, lowly born authors. This was made clear by one playwright's hope that his play, even if lacking in delicacy, might nonetheless suit the taste of great men just as ‘A Kit-Cat is a Supper for a Lord’.21
The Kit-Cat authors were never literally starving for a meal, but they were certainly hungry for recognition and fame. Patrons such as Dorset, Somers and Montagu were therefore essential guests at Mr Cat's table. Throughout the Kit-Cat Club's several incarnations, from its 1690s' foundation to its demise some two decades later, patronage was to remain the single most important constant in the Club's story—the mechanism that made it tick.
Whereas writing for money was condemned by Renaissance critical theory as limiting an author's imaginative freedom, patronage allowed its recipients to profit without feeling sullied by the pecuniary motives of Grub Street hacks (one of whom, in their eyes, was Ned Ward). The Kit-Cat Club provided, in other words, the same ‘cover’ as verse letters—mimicking an earlier, courtly way of doing things. Verse letters in the 1690s pretended to have a readership of one, the aristocratic addressee, while actually having print runs of hundreds. The Club's authors pretended to be a carousing circle of amateurs with private incomes, when really they were piecing together their livings out of day-jobs, book sales and audience figures.
They hoped to be permitted exceptions to the rules of class, familiarity being among the most valuable gifts that a noble patron could bestow. For a writer to be admitted into a nobleman's ‘conversation’ implied a rise in status with tangible benefits in terms of one's creditors. It was not simply a flattering attention from a social superior; it was an asset that could be spent afterwards as though it were hard cash.
The tantalizing promise of patronage was meant to guarantee a certain level of conversational virtuosity at the Kit-Cat Club, in contrast to the conversation at the Witty Club, where Dryden's approbation was the only reward on offer. Though Will's Coffee House was supposed to be an ‘Exchange for Wit’, the fact that there was more profit in publishing a good line than throwing it away on one's friends caused the ‘Wit-Merchants’ to meet there, it was said, ‘without bringing the Commodity with them, which they leave at home in the Warehouses’.22 A character in one of Congreve's plays similarly refers to wit as an alternative currency, in which writers are naturally richer than their patrons: ‘None but dull rogues think; witty men, like rich fellows, are always ready for all expenses; while your blockheads, like poor needy scoundrels, are forced to examine their stock and forecast the charges of the day.’23
A later satirical play about the Kit-Cat Club referred to certain members ‘who only listen in it’24—these were the aristocratic patrons who came in the spirit of an audience, ready to exchange one currency for another. It was a fair exchange, in so far as a poet might determine a patron's reputation among contemporary readers (and voters) and in the eyes of posterity. Tonson shrewdly realized that busy, wealthy and powerful men would gladly pay for the glamour of association with popular writers such as Vanbrugh and Congreve, or at least would prefer to play patrons than become targets of their satire. As Ned Ward put it, some Whig grandees joined ‘in hopes to be accounted wits, and others to avoid the very opposite imputation’.25
The Kit-Cat authors, in their poetry and classical translations, self-interestedly perpetuated the idea that a well-rounded nobleman must be a generous patron. They constantly reminded their superiors that there was a parallel value system, independent of inheritance, in which the nobly born were expected to compete, if not with their own literary talent then at least as discerning patrons. The Kit-Cat Club's broad membership implied a hierarchy based on values other than birth and wealth: ‘Though not of Title, Men of Sense and Wit.’26
Prior and Stepney, for example, showed an imaginative sensitivity throughout their writings and classical translations to the theme of ‘meanly born’ men who led virtuous lives, or proved themselves great senators, lawyers or soldiers. In his translation of Juvenal's Eighth Satire, Stepney contrasted the great achievements of lowborn Cicero, or Tully ‘the native mushroom’, to highborn Rubellius whose useless life was no better than that of ‘a living statue’.27 It was an old Christian idea, given a fresh political edge: the natural corollary, or ultimate logic, of the Whig theory of kingship, that each man had to earn his own honour in this world.
Lord Dorset was flattered as ‘bountiful Maecenas’, especially after his appointment as the King's Lord Chamberlain. This was a reference to the Roman patron whose circle had included Virgil and Horace, and who was therefore the prime classical model for Kit-Cat patronage. Dorset had been a patron to Tonson's authors, including Dryden, since before the Revolution, and when Tonson published Congreve's second play, Love for Love (1695), it was with a dedication to Dorset attached—a transparent bid by Congreve to become another of the Earl's favoured ‘Boys’. The publisher tended to broker the patronage of Somers when one of his prose authors needed subsidy, but that of Dorset when it was an aspiring poet or playwright.
The contemporary writer John Macky emphasized Dorset's role as one of the Kit-Cat Club's ‘first founders’,28 alongside Tonson and Somers, and if this was indeed the case, then Dorset's motives were largely nostalgic and escapist. By the mid-1690s, Dorset was in his late fifties and his second marriage was souring because of quarrels over his wife's estate. He was therefore spending more time in town, pretending to a bachelor's lifestyle. At Charles II's Restoration Court, Dorset had enjoyed a dissipated youth, one of the ‘Merry Gang’ of poets and rakes alongside the infamous Earl of Rochester. Dorset had fought in street brawls and duels, been Nell Gwynn's lover and survived nearly fifteen years of nocturnal, riotous, self-destructive living. He had escaped frequent brushes with the law, including charges of murder and of gross indecency after a drunken appearance stark naked on a tavern balcony. Now in the 1690s, having a mid-life crisis, Dorset wanted to recapture the carefree spirit of his youth, or at least help the next generation of poets enjoy a similar camaraderie.
For Montagu, as for Prior and Stepney, nostalgia for the collegiality of Westminster and Cambridge was a significant motive in their clubbing. These men treasured memories of sharing the life of the mind, before the realities of the world had separated them. To their eighteenth-century minds, family was directly associated with nature, in contrast to friendship, which they associated with the power of reason to make discerning, civilized choices. Montagu, at least, sought a place where his intellectually noble friendships with Prior and Stepney might be preserved, despite all that had changed in their relative circumstances since Cambridge. He also sought to extend his reputation as a patron by supporting other authors beyond his childhood friends. The Old Batchelor, for example, had won Congreve Montagu's patronage and friendship—something that may have aroused some jealousy from Prior and Stepney, since Prior once complimented Stepney's poetry by comparing it favourably to Congreve's weaker efforts.29
For the Whig government ministers, furthermore, solidifying friendships through new clubs and associations was part of a wider civic duty to resolidify the nation. Civil turmoil had meant not knowing who your friends were from one day to the next; post-Revolutionary peace and prosperity now required rebuilding trust between like-minded men. When Dorset or Montagu was flattered as a modern Maecenas, it was not simply because they were each generous literary patrons, but because their aims resembled those of the Roman governor who, via his literary circle, had tried to reconcile a fractured society and forge ideals of ‘Roman-ness’ in the decades following a civil war.
Over the years, many observers would complain that the Kit-Cat Club monopolized literary patronage. One imagined Tonson boasting:
I am the Touchstone of all Modern Wit,
Without my Stamp in vain your Poets write.
Those only purchase ever-living Fame,
That in my Miscellany plant their Name.30
Another saw the Club's monopoly of literary fame as a corruption of literary justice: ‘But Mastiff Poets oft are doomed to Starve, / Whilst Lapdog Wits are hugged, who less deserve.’31 Cognoscenti have been envied in every age, but the Kit-Cat Club's networking was more acutely resented because it was unapologetically partisan. The Whigs recognized, years before the Tories, the benefits of creating a ‘sympathetic climate of opinion’ through art, and set about establishing a patronage network to incubate this ‘climate’.32 Dr Johnson called Dorset and Montagu ‘universal’ and ‘general’ patrons, meaning they rewarded writers of either party, but the majority of their largesse was dispensed within their own political fold.33 They did not regard the exclusion of Tory writers from the Kit-Cat Club as a corruption of the arts by politics, since they shared a belief in ‘amicitia‘—a community in which political fellowship flowed naturally from virtuous characters thinking and acting in perfect accord. The Tories of the 1690s may have shared the same classical reference points, but their power base, centred on country squires and clergy, was—for the time being at least—intrinsically less ‘clubbable’ than that of the more metropolitan Whigs.
Another motive of the Kit-Cat patrons, to which Blackmore alluded in his verse account of the Club's foundation, was that ‘warlike William’ had no interest in English literature, so that authors ‘met with small Respect’ at Court and felt they must seek their rewards elsewhere. It had been, in fact, a deliberate policy on William's part to present himself as a warrior-king, too busy saving the Protestant world to bother with flattering poetic dedications. William avoided literary patronage partly in order to imply he had no need of propagandists—as a providential leader who needed no help but God's—and partly because he had little love for a language that was not his own. Hampton Court's competition with Versailles motivated royal patronage of the visual arts and architecture, but no similar royal bounty flowed towards English authors to match Louis XIV's patronage of writers such as Racine and De La Fontaine. Though the relative beneficence of previous English Courts to poets may have been exaggerated, the rising numbers of men attempting to pursue writing careers without private incomes under William III made it appear as if royal reward for wit was in short supply. This was the gap the Kit-Cats felt it their patriotic duty to fill.34
The Kit-Cats' sense of patriotic duty was linked to their sense of historical continuity with previous literary clubs during what they regarded as England's last golden age: the reign of Elizabeth I. They had in mind the legendary ‘merry meetings’ of Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson and others at the Mermaid tavern, or the ‘Apollo’ wits Jonson gathered around himself at the Devil tavern in Temple Bar. This latter club fascinated Richard Steele (he described taking a party up to the Devil in 1709 and finding ‘the rules of Ben's Club’ were still to be seen ‘in gold letters over the chimney’35), and Tonson once received an unsolicited poem that flattered the Kit-Cat Club by comparison to Ben Jonson's club at the Devil.
The dating of the Kit-Cat Club's foundation to the second half of the 1690s would place it in the context of a significant relaxation in attitudes to the public exchange of opinion. Sixteen ninety-five saw the second lapse of England's Licensing Act, after which there was a huge surge in the number of books, papers and pamphlets flying off London's presses—especially pamphlets which debated public affairs or satirized public figures.
Authors and printers could still be prosecuted under blasphemy, obscenity and sedition laws, particularly if they expressed Jacobite views (that is, supportive of James II's restoration), but there was now a feeling that just about anyone and anything could get published. It was no coincidence that the Kit-Cat's members chose Tonson as their chairman and secretary, emphasizing this link between their Club and the power of England's comparatively unfettered printing presses.
By the 1710s, there would be some 21,000 books published in Britain—far more than in any other European country—and, by approxim ately the same date, clubbing would be seen as a quintessentially English activity, John Macky observing: ‘[A]lmost every parish hath its separate Club, where the Citizens, after the Fatigue of the Day is over in their Shops, and on the Exchange, unbend their Thoughts before they go to bed.’36 Freedom of commerce, association and expression went hand in hand.
The Kit-Cat Club, like many of the clubs that would follow it, had an ambivalent relationship to the birth of the new style of financial capitalism around it. On the one hand, the Club was a way to preserve the ancient loyalties and hereditary customs that its members feared the new modes of commerce might extinguish. London's worlds of politics, publishing and commerce were ruthless and unregulated, making people seek refuge in the gentler ideal of ‘clubbability’. At the same time, as Whigs who generally appreciated and exploited the benefits of credit-based commerce and urban life, its members recognized that they needed to invest in social capital as much as financial capital, and the Club was formed to assist with such investment. This meant acquiring a reputation for learning and taste, and securing well-connected friends with inside information about both stocks and politics.
This was a period of great social anxiety, as boundaries between classes became increasingly blurred and the concept of gentility increasingly uncertain. In the seventeenth century, a ‘gentleman’ had been a man entitled to bear arms and with no need to work for a living, but by the 1690s gentility was becoming a more fluid matter of education, manners and taste. Outward indicators of a genteel education, such as the great private libraries of Somers and Montagu, could be imitated by anyone with money, as when a character in one of Vanbrugh's plays mocked the way gilt-covered books were valued as interior décor by the nouveau riche. Another Vanbrugh character was a ‘fake’ peer who purchased his peerage from the Crown for £10,000. To be a Kit-Cat, in this context, was to wear a badge of cultural honour that could not be faked or debased by imitation. For the first time, membership of a particular club became a recognized social credential.
It would be unfair, however, to describe the Kit-Cat Club as concerned only with preserving the reactionary cultural credit of the aristocracy in the face of entrepreneurial capitalism and social mobility. As would become clear in the following decade, the Club promoted a very particular, patriotic agenda, slicing through every art form, to raise the nation as a whole up to their cultural level, and for that they had to look outwards, far beyond their own charmed circle. Tonson's presses, pouring forth their texts for the literate public, were the first evidence of this engagement with the wider world.
It was not self-interest, self-improvement or civic duty that made these men leave their homes and go out to a tavern on a cold wet night, however, but rather a longing for relaxation, amusement and the sympathy of friends. The tasty wine and pies of Mr Cat and the enticingly warm wit of Congreve or Prior, were as crucial to the successful foundation of the Kit-Cat Club as any social or economic cost-benefit analysis at the back of its founders' minds.
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