The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation

Lady Mary attributed her own wit partly to Congreve, who was to take as much interest in her mind as her beauty as she grew up, and whom she described as her wittiest friend. Though her father was, like most gentlemen of his generation, unconcerned with his daughter's education, Mary secretly educated herself to a high level starting the year after she visited the Club. Lady Mary is also remembered for bringing the concept of vaccination back to England from Turkey, introducing this practice into British society by convincing her aristocratic friends to try it. She thereby saved future generations from smallpox's life-threatening risk and the disfigurement she herself suffered in 1715, a year after she was last toasted as a beauty by the Kit-Cats.

Writing three years before this 1697 meeting took place, Mary Astell asked her fellow Englishwomen: ‘How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden, to make a fine show and be good for nothing?’

(#litres_trial_promo) Astell believed the way forward was through female education and therefore tried to form an early female academy. It would not be until the succeeding generation, however, that women would see far greater, albeit short-lived, educational opportunities. By the mid-1760s, Elizabeth Montagu and her bluestocking friends would be able to sit and discuss books and politics with willing men, in imitation of the French salons; in 1697, such a mixed gathering was unthinkable.

We know the Club could carouse until the early morning hours. Dawn may even have been breaking by the time Kingston took his daughter home. Tonson would not have covered the enormous bill of every meeting now that the Club was so rich in noble patrons. Ned Ward said the Kit-Cat wits performed their verses and then the richer members ‘would manifest by their Liberality, when the Reckoning came to be paid, the Satisfaction they had found in the witty Discourses of their wiser Brethren’.

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Stupefied with wine, the members said their loud farewells, leaving the exhausted servants of the Cat and Fiddle to deal with the feast's debris. Linkmen carrying lanterns were waiting outside to escort those who did not have carriages. From the overheated tavern, the Kit-Cats emerged into the damp, foggy night air in the labyrinthine alleys south of Gray's Inn. Wharton headed back to Gerrard Street, Somers to Powys House, Somerset to Northumberland House on the Strand, Carlisle to King's Square, Vanbrugh to his lodgings next to the Banqueting House in Whitehall, and Congreve and Tonson returned together to their shared house on Fleet Street. Unified by their Whig beliefs and an implied promise of mutual support, they had fortified themselves against the political risks that the final years of the 1690s would throw at them.

V CULTURE WARS (#ulink_dc2df617-f32f-52ac-8d59-8e540836f767)

There the dread phalanx of reformers come,

Sworn foes to wit, as Carthage was to Rome,

Their ears so sanctified, no scenes can please,

But heavy hymns or pensive homilies.

DR SAMUEL GARTH,

Prologue to Squire Trelooby (1704)

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THE KIT-CAT MEMBERS' relaxed attitudes to religion and morality were both ahead of their time, predicting later Georgian rationalism, and a remnant of the Restoration rakes' godless cynicism. As opinion-makers, the Kit-Cats tried to promote religious tolerance and moderation, in reaction to the ‘enthusiasm’ (fanaticism) they felt had inflamed the Civil War, the persecution they associated with Catholicism, and, as Voltaire noted when he saw the crowds in the Royal Exchange, because toleration was good for business. Although there was ‘less Appearance of Religion in [England], than any other neighbouring State or Kingdom’,

(#litres_trial_promo) many of the ‘middling sort’ who were profiting most from the growth of trade and commerce in the 1690s were devout Protestant churchgoers who felt they were clinging to the remnants of Christian morality amid a ‘debauched age’.

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The beginning of a correlation between one's faith and social position showed itself in the theatres where there was a mismatch between the censorious bourgeois audiences after 1688, on whom the permanently near-bankrupt theatres were dependent, and the authors who were still writing for a small, elite intelligentsia of morally and religiously liberal patrons. The Kit-Cats and their friends could support a playhouse for one night, but theatre managers needed the plays to be uncontroversial to draw regular crowds. All this came to a head in the Kit-Cats' battle with clergyman Jeremy Collier.

In April 1696, Collier, a middle-aged Cambridgeshire clergyman, attended the Tyburn execution of two men condemned for plotting to assassinate King William. Alongside his fellow ‘non-jurors’ (clergymen who had refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchy), Collier ascended the scaffold and, by laying on hands, offered the plotters absolution for their treachery. Since this was a serious crime under English law, Collier thereby condemned himself to living as an outlaw. Over the following months, he published, semianonymously and from hiding, views that challenged King William's ‘false’ authority and the Church of England's feeble acceptance of this authority. Collier portrayed post-Revolutionary England as in need of urgent salvation.

Many non-Jacobites agreed with Collier on the last point. The first Society for the Reformation of Manners was established in the Strand roughly contemporaneously with the Kit-Cat Club's foundation in Gray's Inn. This society vowed to spy out and report offenders against the laws on immoral behaviour, and monitor which Officers of the Peace were effective or negligent in enforcing these laws.

After Queen Mary's death in 1694 and the end of the War of the League of Augsburg in 1697, William needed a new way to legitimize his rule and was fearful of alienating or antagonizing the Society for the Reformation of Manners' army of grassroot Christian activists. He therefore deliberately set about becoming the leader (rather than target) of those seeking to reform the loose morals of the age. In December 1697, to offset the unwelcome news that peace with France would not bring a drop in taxes, he promised the Commons that he would commence a kind of Kulturkampf at home—a crusade against ‘Prophaneness and Immorality’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This encouraged certain zealous MPs to present an address to him in February 1698 concerning suppression of unchristian books and punishment of their authors, ultimately resulting in ‘An Act for the more effectual suppressing of Atheism, Blasphemy and Prophaneness’.

The previous month, on a freezing day in January 1698, a fire destroyed most of Whitehall Palace. Certain Jacobite pamphleteers, including Collier, played upon people's Sodom-and-Gomorrah-ish superstition that God had frowned upon the Williamite Court. Some suggested William enjoyed sodomy with his male favourites. Vanbrugh faced a similar accusation of bisexuality in an anonymous poem alleging that the playwright did ‘Active and Passive, in both Sexes Lust’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Vanbrugh was specifically accused of sodomy with Peregrine Bertie, with whom he lodged in Whitehall, and therefore blamed for the fire that destroyed the Palace.

(#litres_trial_promo) While a manuscript of 1694 confirms Bertie and Vanbrugh were intimate friends, nothing more is known of their relationship.

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Vanbrugh's sexuality was attacked because his satirical plays had made plenty of enemies in church pulpits. When The Relapse (1696) was first performed, with its comparison of church congregations to social clubs and its depiction of a careerist chaplain, Vanbrugh was saved from the Bishop of Gloucester's wrath only by his friends' ‘agility’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the Preface to the first printed edition of The Relapse, Vanbrugh answered his attackers:

As for the Saints (your thorough-paced ones I mean, with screwed Faces and wry Mouths) I despair of them, for they are Friends to nobody. They love nothing, but their Altars and Themselves. They have too much Zeal to have any Charity; they make Debauches in Piety, as Sinners do in Wine, and are quarrelsome in their Religion as other People are in their Drink: so I hope nobody will mind what they say.

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Vanbrugh's scepticism about the moral conversion of the husband in The Relapse implied allegorical scepticism about the country's moral reformation, but it was a scepticism he could not afford to voice more openly.

Immediately after the Whitehall Palace fire, capitalizing on London's fin de siècle mood, Collier published A Short View of the Immorality and Prophaness of the English Stage (1698). This book censured immorality and profanity in recent plays by the so-called ‘Orange Comedians’,

(#litres_trial_promo) foremost among whom were Congreve and Vanbrugh. It did so in a style of close textual analysis that would be highly influential on future critics, both Christian and secular. It opened with the premise that ‘The business of Plays is to recommend Virtue and discountenance Vice’, and ended with a section complaining that sinful characters were escaping dramatic justice. A Short View was rancorous, pugnacious and literal-minded, but also intelligent and biting. It was an instant bestseller.

As an outsider, ostracized by Williamite society, Collier did not hesitate to attack the biggest literary names of the day, including Dryden, Congreve and Vanbrugh, whom he called ‘snakes and vipers’. Though Collier said he wanted only to reform the theatres, his Short View fanned the flames of a popular movement driven by an abolitionist impulse. It was not the first shot fired in the culture wars, but it was the loudest, and the one aimed most directly at the Kit-Cat Club's authors. The Club's own name was not yet, in 1698, well known enough for its members to be attacked as a collective entity, but the battle against Collierite attitudes was one of the struggles that helped bond the Club's friendships in these early years.

Collier attacked the representation of women in the plays of Vanbrugh and Congreve as bold, libidinous and knowing creatures. He blamed the playwrights for allowing women to act these roles on stage, ‘to make Monsters of them, and throw them out of their kind’.

(#litres_trial_promo) As early as 1693, when Congreve's Double Dealer was first performed, ladies were so outraged by the realism of his female characterization that, in ironic defence of their modesty, they shouted out protests during the performance and hurled things at the stage. Congreve responded that the ladies in his audiences could no more expect to be flattered by a satire than ‘to be tickled by a surgeon when he's letting 'em blood’.

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Collier particularly criticized the Orange Comedians' disparaging view of marriage. In one sense, the Orange Comedians' attitude was simply an old joke inherited from Restoration drama, but they treated it with greater seriousness, bringing out the true dramatic tension of claustrophobic, bitter marriages. As one critic has observed, if today we are living through the death throes of the nuclear family, the Kit-Cat authors were living through its birth pangs,

(#litres_trial_promo) and Vanbrugh and Congreve explored their fears of this new social unit in their work while assiduously avoiding such commitment in their own private lives. In Congreve's Old Batchelor, Bellmour summed up the author's own attitude to the married state:

Bellmour: Could'st thou be content to marry Araminta?

Vainlove: Could you be content to go to heaven?

Bellmour: Hum, not immediately, in my conscience, not heartily.

Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife leaves its marital problems unresolved at the end of the play—a radical ending for a comedy but also a bitter truth in an age when divorce was a great rarity. Whether or not he was bisexual, Vanbrugh was certainly a confirmed bachelor in the 1690s, morbidly mocking his Kit-Cat friends whenever one of them became engaged. He gossiped to a fellow Kit-Cat, for example, that another Club member, Anthony Henley, was tying himself to ‘a mettled jade’

(#litres_trial_promo)—this was, in fact, Mary Bertie, a cousin of Vanbrugh's friend Peregrine. Mary's chief attraction for Henley was probably her fortune of some £30,000 (well over £3.6 million today, and more than enough to cover Henley's debts of £10,000). Surrounded by mercenary matches, Vanbrugh's cynicism was understandable.

The Junto members conducted their love lives not unlike the libertine characters in a Restoration or Orange comedy, and Collier's criticism of the theatre was fired by rumours about the conduct of playwrights' patrons. Wharton was described as ‘something of a libertine’, and an anonymous satire referred to his whoring.

(#litres_trial_promo) He kept a mistress for many years during his first marriage, then in 1692, at 44, he married 22-year-old Lucy Loftus, who became a Kit-Cat toast in 1698 and was referred to as ‘the witty, fair one’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Though Wharton seems to have been unfaithful to his young wife, Lucy was rumoured to be just as ‘abandoned’ as her husband.

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Montagu, similarly, never treated his marriage to the dowager Lady Manchester as any impediment to his long-standing affair with a Kit-Cat toast named Mrs Catherine Barton, the niece of Sir Isaac Newton. The Duchess of Marlborough laughed at Montagu's playing the ladies' man, with ‘a great knack at making pretty ballads’, though he was so short and ‘hideously ugly’.

(#litres_trial_promo) A Tory satire accused Montagu of lining his pockets with public funds that he ‘whored away or pissed against the walls’.