The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation

(#litres_trial_promo) With its nepotism, cronyism and oligarchic management, government at the beginning of the eighteenth century was indeed a giant club—MPs were not called ‘members’ for nothing, and those who held government places, voting with the Court in the Commons, were sometimes known as ‘the Club Men’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Kit-Cat spirit translated to wider Whig party loyalty, which magnified itself into national patriotism, and collective identities forged in a tavern's backroom evolved into national identities. Such collective identity was formed most deeply during periods of political adversity, as during the winter of 1700–1.

The King was back to relying, against his own inclinations, on Tories like Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, and the Treasury management of Lord Godolphin. This necessity was confirmed by another Tory-dominated Parliament returned after the election in January 1701.

The Kit-Cat Club's lifespan was characterized by unusually frequent and highly contested elections, averaging one every second year. Individual Junto members' electoral influence, through direct patronage, but also through circular letters and regional party whips, was therefore key to the Club's wider influence. In particular, England saw a notable rise in ‘carpet-bagging’ and boroughs ‘succumb[ing] to affluent, absentee candidates in preference to indigenous minor gentry or merchants’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Kit-Cat Club contributed to this, in so far as it established bonds between the nobility and London gentlemen who were not their kinsmen, which were then imported into Parliament.

(#litres_trial_promo) Not all MPs who were handed seats without contest failed to serve their constituents honourably, but nor was such an MP likely to challenge his patron's instructions. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, despite her personal fondness for the Club, remarked that its members were ‘dupes to their leaders’.

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As in 1698, the Kit-Cats had tried to influence voters in 1701 in ways considered unconstitutional by many at the time: letters from Lord Carlisle to rally support for Whig candidates around the country, for example, led to a Commons vote against peers meddling in elections beyond the counties where they owned property. Halifax and Wharton so aggressively used their interests in Wiltshire to secure election of New East India Company supporters that the Tories afterwards sent the unlucky Whig election agents to the Tower.

After the 1701 election defeat of the Junto Whigs, Robert Harley's supporters nominated him for the Commons' Speakership. It is telling that the Junto did not organize its resistance to this move via the Kit-Cat Club but rather via another Whig club that ran in parallel—the Whig Rose Club, which met at the Rose tavern in Covent Garden. The Rose Club was a far less exclusive and yet more narrowly focused society than the Kit-Cat, founded at around the same time and used by Halifax and Wharton as a place to whip underling Whig MPs into line. Over seventy-five such MPs met at the Rose to co-ordinate their opposition to Harley's appointment as Speaker, but were defeated at the vote in February 1701.

The following month, the Commons passed the Act of Settlement, ensuring the English Crown would pass to the House of Hanover (Electress Sophia, followed by her son George) should both William and Princess Anne die childless. The ministry, including Lord Godolphin and Robert Harley, supported this crucial constitutional measure, and the Act was voted through ‘without any dispute’,

(#litres_trial_promo) since no MP of either party could openly oppose the Protestant succession and hope to retain a career in Williamite government. Behind the scenes, however, certain Tories tried to obstruct the clauses intended to consolidate the Whig model of limited parliamentary monarchy, such as limits on any future monarch's power to dictate foreign affairs. The Junto argued to retain such limitations and so believed themselves the true defenders of English liberties (even against William, if need be). The Act also sounded the death knell for the old Stuart idea of the monarch as God's Anointed, ruling by Divine Right. The succession was explicitly being determined, after all, by an Act of Parliament, not by God. After 1701, allegiance to the Hanoverian succession became an inviolable tenet of the Kit-Cat Club, as for most Whigs—a tenet the Kit-Cats would need to defend with all their energy in future. The Act of Settlement had secured the succession on paper, but it was a long way from being secure in practice.

The inseparability of the Kit-Cat Club's cultural and political pursuits is well demonstrated by the relationship between the parliamentary debate over ‘election’ of England's royal heir and the debate then raging between subjective (Lockean) and objective (classical) theories of criticism. Congreve dramatized the subjectivists' viewpoint in March 1701, just as the Act of Settlement was being passed, in a new musical masque entitled The Judgment of Paris. Congreve turned this piece—about goddesses competing in a kind of beauty pageant—into an actual competition for English composers, with the London Gazette advertising for new songs, the best of which, as voted by the audience, would win £200 (over £26,000 today). Tonson administered the competition. As with the Falstaff performance and Dryden's funeral, the event was a way for the Club to reassert itself culturally during a time of political difficulty, while making a case among intellectuals for a particularly Whiggish theory of critical judgement. They wished to show that, whether choosing one's leaders or one's entertainment, the same enlightened exercise of reason and good taste was required.

Only four musicians entered the competition because it was unfairly believed that the event, like a parliamentary election, would be fixed. A good audience, however, attended to hear the four alternative performances at the Dorset Garden Theatre, which had been lined with tin to improve its acoustics, and prettily decorated with extra candles. ‘The boxes and the pit were all thrown into one; so that all sat in common,’ wrote Congreve, ‘and the whole was crammed with beauties and beaux, not one scrub being admitted.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Free hot chocolate and cool drinks, including ‘ratafia’ (liqueur flavoured with almond or fruit kernels) and white wine, were served between the pit and the stage. Bracey, or ‘Our friend Venus’ as Congreve fondly called her, ‘performed to a miracle’. She and the other actresses playing the goddesses judged by Paris were at one point in the masque ordered to disrobe and partially did so, making it an extremely erotic performance for its day.

The Kit-Cat patrons dominated the all-Whig subscription supporting this production and competition, with Halifax being its prime sponsor, and Somerset lobbying for his favourite contestant to win. Ironically, as in the last two parliamentary elections, it was not the Kit-Cat candidates who triumphed, however, but another young man, John Weldon, who later became the King's organist.

There was soon little time for such cultural contests, as another parliamentary crisis erupted around the ‘discovery’ of the two secret Partition Treaties. Harley, who only wanted an excuse to further decapitate the Junto Whigs, promptly led his coalition of Tories and radical Country Whigs (who feared William's secret diplomacy as a return to the autocratic ways of Charles II) to attack the Treaties' makers. Declaring passionately that Somers had to be punished or ‘our posterity will curse us’,

(#litres_trial_promo) Harley tried to persuade his fellow MPs to impeach Somers.

On 14 April 1701, Somers delivered a half-hour speech in his own defence to the Commons, ‘with great plainness and presence of mind’, explaining he had only been following the King's orders.

(#litres_trial_promo) He then withdrew before the House voted on his case.

Prior was one of the MPs sitting in the Commons that evening. He had obtained his East Grinstead seat three months earlier through the influence of his childhood patron, Dorset. Though he had written to Dorset in 1698 complimenting William's wisdom in concluding the first Partition Treaty (in which Prior himself had had a significant hand), Prior now took the extraordinary step of voting with Harley and the Tories in favour of impeaching Somers for ‘a high Crime and Misdemeanour’ in the Lords. If the Kit-Cats had not suspected the shift in Prior's loyalties before, it was now made dramatically evident. As Prior voted, he must have avoided the eye of fellow Kit-Cat William Walsh, acting as teller. Though there was often the odd deviancy on a division list, such outright defection away from a political party and its patrons was observed with shock. Prior further voted with the majority, 198 to 188, to bring impeachment charges against two other Junto lords: Orford and—incredibly, in light of their long friendship—Halifax.

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Afterwards, the Kit-Cats unanimously denounced Prior as an ungrateful Judas, concerned only with keeping his place. One remarked that Dorset had not raised Prior from tavern-sweeping obscurity for disloyalty such as this. Halifax's brother Jemmy, now the eminent jurist Sir James Montagu, struggled as only a lawyer could to excuse their old school friend, explaining that Prior must have felt voting otherwise would have turned the guilt for the two Treaties upon the King himself. The Kit-Cat Club was unconvinced, and though Prior was not expelled from the Club straight away, he was unwelcome at its meetings from this date onwards.

A little lament, written by Prior in 1701, may suggest he regretted the price paid for his political choices that year:

Reading ends in Melancholy;

Wine breeds Vices and Diseases;

Wealth is but Care, and Love but Folly;

Only Friendship truly pleases.

My Wealth, my Books, my Flask, my Molly,

Farewell all, if FRIENDSHIP Ceases!

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At the same time, another Prior verse conveys his overriding pragmatism, which had led him to act as he did:

For conscience, like a fiery horse,

Will stumble, if you check his course;

But ride him with an easy rein,

And rub him down with worldly gain,

He'll carry you through thick and thin,

Safe, although dirty, to your inn.

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Stepney, the third Lord Dorset's Boy, could not easily forgive Prior's betrayal. That summer, he told Halifax that the second ‘mouse’ had been ‘nibbling towards drawing me into a correspondence with him, but I waived it in as cold a manner as I could’.

(#litres_trial_promo) What Halifax's own feelings were when he learned that his friend of almost twenty years was among those who voted for his impeachment can only be guessed.

Somers and Halifax coordinated a press campaign against the impeachment charges, using the Kit-Cat Club to liaise with Whig writers in their defence. A Tory complained that those who were ‘solicitous for the nation’ were being libelled as Papists, Jacobites and French spies, as ‘given out in a certain printed ballad, said to be written by a certain club of great men, which was then held not far from the King's Head tavern in Holborn [on Chancery Lane, hence plausibly the Kit-Cat Club at Gray's Inn]…The mob took the hint…and gave it out for gospel in an instant.’

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Jonathan Swift, who had watched with envy as Congreve received favours from the Kit-Cat patrons, contributed an anonymous pamphlet in defence of the impeached lords. Somers and Halifax sought the acquaintance of the pamphlet's author via its printer, and were, boasted Swift, ‘very liberal in promising me the greatest preferments I could hope for, if ever it came in their power’. Swift claimed he ‘grew domestic’ with Halifax during 1701, and was ‘as often with Lord Somers as the formality of his nature (the only unconversable fault he has) made it agreeable to me’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nonetheless, Swift was not invited to join the Kit-Cat Club.

Congreve turned his legally trained eye to the various charges against Somers and concluded, in June 1701, that the impeachment would never go through, ‘for there is neither matter nor proof’.

(#litres_trial_promo) After a tussle between the lower and upper houses, his fellow peers acquitted Somers and dismissed the other charges against Halifax and Orford. This was a crucial political moment, at which a Whigdominated Lords overrode a Tory-dominated Commons, allowing the Tories to thereafter cast the Whig Junto as an anti-democratic force, for all their talk of English liberties. It was a crisis that polarized the parties and set the terms for heated Whig/Tory debates throughout the decade to follow. As one Tory muttered, these impeachment proceedings had launched ‘a feud that I fear will not die’.

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VII THE WHIGS GO TO WAR (#ulink_870a43bd-7710-5c06-a881-41f854db6ec4)

[T]o say ‘these are my friends’ implies ‘those are not’.

C. S. LEWIS, The Four Loves (1960)