The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation

When a newspaper in London falsely reported that Prior was engaged to a certain Lady Falkland, Prior joked to Montagu that such a courtship was impracticable:

She is an old Troy that will not be taken in ten years, and though fifty strong fellows should get in to her by stratagem, they might even march out again at a large breach without being able to set her on fire; but one single sentinel as I am with a thin carcass and weak lungs might lie before her walls till I eat horse-hides and shoe-leather, unless you kindly sent me some refreshments from the Treasury.

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Prior thus used gossip about his own love life as an excuse to beg cash, and to all such requests Montagu remained a responsive friend: ‘Of all my correspondents,’ Prior told him, ‘you are certainly the best, for you never write to me, yet do always what I beg of you. I am extremely obliged to you for the two last hundred pounds.’

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On another occasion, not long before Addison's arrival, Prior begged Montagu: ‘For God's sake, will you think of a little money for me, for I have fluttered away the Devil and all in this monkey country, where the air is infected with vanity, and extravagance is as epidemical as the itch in Scotland.’

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Montagu never reproached Prior for these ‘dunning’ letters, though he once defined ‘men of honour’ as being those who asked no favours of their friends: ‘Free is their service, and unbought their love.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Prior required some finesse to keep the two relationships, of patronage and friendship, in balance; he signed off one letter: ‘Adieu, Master; Nobody respects the Chancellor of the Exchequer more, or loves dear Mr Montagu better, than his old friend and obliged humble servant, Matt.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Inversely, as Dorset moved into retirement, his relationship with Prior became more that of a friend than patron: ‘I could almost wish you out of all public affairs,’ Dorset told Prior, ‘that I might enjoy your good company oftener and share with you in that ease and lazy quiet which I propose to myself in this latter part of my life.’

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Steele once declared that a gentleman should travel ‘to get clear of national Prejudices, of which every Country has its share’,

(#litres_trial_promo)yet Addison's time among the Kit-Cats in Paris only reinforced his pre judices. This experience underpinned Addison's lifelong patriotism and dedication to resisting the French model of unmediated and unlimited power, vested in a single monarch: ‘As a British Freeholder, I should not scruple taking [the] place of a French Marquis; and when I see one of my Countrymen amusing himself in his little Cabbage-Garden, I naturally look upon him as a greater Person than the Owner of the richest Vineyard in Champagne.’

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Addison adopted Prior's opinions on nearly everything they encountered in France, and most of those opinions were extremely critical. Prior complained to Montagu about the hypocritical pretence of cordial diplomatic relations with France during this lull before war was sure to resume: ‘We took our leave yesterday of this Court, from whom we had a great many compliments and a damned dinner…they are very obliging to us one day and the same to King James the next.’

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Elsewhere he observed frankly: ‘These people are all the same: civil in appearance and hating us to hell at the bottom of their heart.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Prior described Louis XIV as living ‘like an Eastern monarch, making waterworks and planting melons’ while his nation starved.

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He showed the elderly French king as a grotesque, vainly picking at his few remaining teeth, and described the exiled James II as ‘lean, worn and rivelled’

(#litres_trial_promo)—telling the English ministers, in other words, exactly what they wanted to hear: that their enemies were literally toothless and impotent. Addison, though wondering at the luxury of the French palaces, similarly criticized the disparity between rich and poor, and the displacement of whole villages at Louis' orders, just ‘for the bettering of a View’.

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Addison's only concession to the French was that they had the advantage over the English in good humour. In rural France, he wrote, ‘Everyone sings, laughs and starves.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The French were also much more at ease in their conversation, especially compared to Addison, whose natural reticence in groups was accentuated by his poor French. Later, in his essays, Addison would try to convert his own self-conscious personality into the general image of English national character, in contrast to the French: ‘Modesty is our distinguishing Character, as Vivacity is theirs.’

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Addison was caught in the middle of a certain tension between Prior and Manchester during Prior's final months in Paris. Prior described how even the servants there, including his girlfriend Jane, considered Manchester's manners too crude for a diplomat—blowing his nose into his napkin, spitting in the middle of the room, or laughing too loudly. A rude letter from Manchester, complaining how Prior wasted money and left his post with tasks half-done, suggests the dislike was mutual. Though Prior had proved himself useful at Ryswick, Lord Manchester's diplomatic record in Venice had been less impressive—he was assessed as being ‘of greater application than capacity’ and ‘of good address but no elocution’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Manchester's noble birth, however, protected him from explicit criticism, while Prior grew resentful at how little remuneration or simple thanks he received after compensating for the failings of his nobly born superior. When Prior returned to London, he travelled the last leg of the journey from The Hague in the company of both King William himself and the Tory Earl of Jersey, who had been Prior's boss at the Paris embassy before Manchester and was now allied to William's rising Dutch favourite, Arnold van Keppel. Prior not only caught a chill while crossing the Channel but also sensed which way England's political wind was blowing: away from the Junto Whigs. From this point onwards, Jersey, though in opposition to Prior's Kit-cat friends, superseded Montagu and Dorset as Prior's leading patron.

Addison lodged at the Paris embassy until October 1699, then retreated to study French at a remote abbey at Blois, in the Loire, for a year. Stanyan kept Addison supplied from Paris with updates on international developments, though it is likely neither man was informed of the most important but top secret development—the signing by France and England, in October 1699, of a ‘Partition Treaty’ to peaceably divide the Spanish Empire, including the Americas, after Carlos II's death. Earlier in the summer, Somers had used his power as Lord Chancellor to permit the King to negotiate such a treaty without informing Parliament. It was not illegal for Somers to do this, but it would create severe problems for Somers when the Treaty, and its successor, the second Partition Treaty signed in March 1700, were later discovered by Parliament.

Addison was in Blois when he belatedly heard news that, thanks to sustained pressure from Harley's opposition, his patron Montagu had resigned from the Treasury and hence as the King's chief minister. Montagu's resignation and move to a less powerful but more lucrative post (as Auditor of the Receipts of the Exchequer) was a blow to his friends and followers. It confirmed Prior in his decision to shift patrons, discarding the bonds of friendship formed by school, university and, latterly, by the Kit-Cat Club.

Prior said that after Montagu's resignation he expected Somers, the only Kit-Cat and Junto member remaining in the King's inner circle, to be next ‘fallen upon’ by the Tories, ‘though God knows what crime he is guilty of, but that of being a very great man and a wise and upright judge’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Prior was prescient: when a Commons vote against Somers' probity was very narrowly defeated in April 1700, the King was reluctantly forced to dismiss Somers. Montagu's outrage at this decision showed his deep personal loyalty to Somers, yet neither he nor other politico Kit-Cats resigned en bloc to protest their friend's martyrdom. It would hardly help Somers if all his political allies fell on their swords and thereby left the King wholly in other hands: ‘You may easily think Lord Somers cannot but have a great many friends, but they may show their friendship and yet continue their duty to the King,’ Manchester advised Prior.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Club instead showed its solidarity with both Montagu and Somers in more subtle ways—its members' show of public unity at the Falstaff theatre outing and at Dryden's funeral had this as specific political motive, alongside defiance of Jeremy Collier.

All three Lord Dorset's Boys were reunited in London at the time Somers was forced to surrender the Great Seal. Stepney was working on the Commission of Trade and Plantations, where in June 1700 he formed a sub-commission to negotiate the boundaries of Hudson's Bay in Canada with the French. Soon after, Prior, who had given little outward sign of his shift towards Jersey's patronage, was appointed to the same Commission of Trade, replacing the retiring Commissioner (and famous Enlightenment philosopher) John Locke. With Montagu a member of the same Commission, this was possibly the only time the three old friends worked side by side.

With his Commission income, Prior bought a large townhouse on Duke Street, overlooking the promenades and dairy fields of St James's Park, and he entertained there in a manner consistently beyond his means. He invited Dorset, Montagu and Stepney to dinners there of ‘Bacon-Ham and Mutton-shin’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Such hospitality disguised Prior's deepening involvement with the Tories, and allowed him to gather information from his old Whig friends to pass on to the rival party.

That same summer of 1700, Montagu flexed the strained muscles of his remaining influence to procure another sinecure for Congreve: the post of Customer of the Poole Port—a post Congreve held for just over two years. Congreve's portfolio of sinecures, totalling just under £200 a year, now gave him some degree of financial security. He (and his beloved dog ‘Sappho’) moved out of Tonson's house, but he continued to live as a rent-paying lodger, this time with a married couple named the Porters who lived on Arundel Street. Mrs Frances Porter was Bracey's sister.

Congreve's move from Fleet Street did not signify any falling out with his publisher, as shown by the fact that the playwright accompanied Tonson to Europe in the summer of 1700. Congreve let his friends know of their safe arrival in Calais, after which he travelled to Het Loo (William's palace and hunting lodge in Guelderland), then Rotterdam. Congreve would have been quizzed by the Dutch courtiers about the latest news from England, which was causing disquiet among Europe's Protestants. Princess Anne's only son and heir, the 11-year-old Duke of Gloucester, had just died unexpectedly in July. This threw the English Crown's Protestant succession back into doubt, making the Whigs fear that the post-Revolutionary regime, under which, for all their present problems, they had generally thrived, could yet be reversed. In August, the Junto lords stayed together at a country house near Hampton Court, and they there decided that Stepney should take advantage of his good standing with Sophia, Electress Dowager of the German state of Hanover and the Protestant granddaughter of England's James I, to ask informally whether she and her heirs would accept the English succession. This letter, in Stepney's own humble name, was sent from London in late August or early September 1700.

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October 1700 saw another pivotal royal death: that of Carlos II of Spain. Carlos, it emerged, had bequeathed his Spanish Habsburg Empire, including its lucrative Spanish American trade, to Louis XIV's grandson, Philippe Duc d'Anjou, rather than to the Austrian Habsburgs. When Louis XIV decided to defend his grandson's inheritance, thereby disregarding the two Partition Treaties signed with England, the stage was set for a new European war. The English and Dutch saw that a merger of the French and Spanish empires would upset the balance of world power. The Junto Whigs in particular, being most closely allied with the Dutch and Dissenting interests, advocated mounting a new defensive war against Louis XIV. As the Tory Charles Davenant put it, the mood of the Junto Whigs in 1700 was all ‘“To your tents, O Israel!”’

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Tipped that war would soon break out, Congreve and Addison accelerated their European travels. Addison gave up improving his French, ‘which has been a Rock in my way harder to get over than the Alps,’

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(#litres_trial_promo) as well as Edward Wortley, a nephew of Montagu's, and former Middle Temple chum of Congreve's and Stanyan's. By chaperoning these two young men through Italy, Addison was paid enough to cover his own expenses. In Rome, Addison watched Pope Clement XI officiate for two hours at St Peter's, and purchased twenty volumes of European manuscripts for Somers.

Congreve was back in London by December 1700, at which time he gave an Irish friend advance notice of Montagu's elevation to the House of Lords as ‘Baron Halifax’. The patent for Montagu's title, drawn up by Prior, referred to Montagu having provided the ‘sinews of war’ by establishing the Bank of England and generally restructuring English commerce in the 1690s, which was no more than the truth.

(#litres_trial_promo) The peerage, however, was less royal thanks for services rendered than acknowledgement of Montagu's growing impotence in the Commons since the last election.

It was said Lord Halifax (as Montagu shall henceforth be called) ‘brought up a familiar style’ to the House of Lords, which made the tone of debates there far more informal.

(#litres_trial_promo) While the Kit-Cats admired this style, just as they admired Wharton's rumbustious colloquialisms whenever he spoke in the upper house, a Tory critic snobbishly described it as ‘Billingsgate rhetoric’, unfit for a peer.

(#litres_trial_promo) Such remarks point to the close relationship between the conversational style of the Kit-Cat Club, which increasingly behaved like a mock-parliament in its meetings,

(#litres_trial_promo) and the tone of actual parliamentary debate—one elite talking-shop echoing another.

Dickens famously remarked that the House of Commons was ‘the best club in London’.