The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation

SOMERS AND HALIFAX had to advise the King ‘behind the curtain’, as the contemporary phrase went, after their narrow escape from impeachment. In the summer of 1701, they also encouraged less prominent Kit-Cat friends who sat on Grand Juries throughout the country to petition the King and so make it appear as though the nation was crying out to resume war with France, and for another general election that might return a more Whiggish House of Commons. The Kit-Cat patrons simultaneously commissioned prowar propaganda, such as Stepney's Essay upon the Present Interest of England (1701), arguing that Louis' record of breaking international treaties made another war a necessary evil.

William needed no persuading. He had every intention of taking the country back to war, and had sent John Churchill, then the Earl of Marlborough, to The Hague as a plenipotentiary, to negotiate a new ‘Grand Alliance’ between the Austrian Habsburgs, the United Provinces and England. This confirmed the political rehabilitation of Marlborough, previously out of favour with the King, and the start of a vital alignment between the international objectives of Marlborough and those of the Kit-Cat Club. Stepney, who had finally been appointed Envoy to the Imperial Court in March, did what he could from Vienna to assist Marlborough with the negotiations.

The second Treaty of Grand Alliance was signed in August 1701. Soon after, when James II died in exile, Louis XIV took the decisive step of recognizing the deposed king's son, James Edward Stuart (known to the Whigs who alleged he was illegitimate as ‘The Pretender’ and then later as ‘The Old Pretender’), as James III of England and James VIII of Scotland. France and Spain also imposed an embargo on English goods. These actions persuaded many previously reluctant Tories to support the coming war and resupply the army they had so recently pressed to disband. Even so, the Tories believed England's only hope of victory was at sea, since the French army comprised between a quarter and half a million men and was considered invulnerable on land, especially if allied with the Spanish forces. The King, who favoured fighting on his home turf in Flanders, therefore dissolved Parliament as a prelude to a new election, just ten months after the last, in the hope that more Whigs, who would back his war strategy, might be returned. At the election, the Kit-cat lords once again emptied their purses and pulled strings on behalf of their candidates, Wharton influencing the return of some twenty-five MPs to the Commons. A Tory poem accused the Kit-cat Club of disseminating libellous election propaganda via street hawkers who were hired by ‘Trusty Secretary Jacob’

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The composition of the Commons after this election was more evenly balanced between the parties, and certainly more in favour of war. A series of promotions followed for the Whigs, especially the Kit-Cats. Though Marlborough, now Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, was willing to work with the Junto for the sake of the forthcoming war effort, his closest ally, Lord Godolphin, had resigned as First Lord of the Treasury before the elections, stating he refused to serve the Junto's will in place of the King's. The Kit-cat Carlisle was given this top Treasury post in December, and Manchester was appointed Secretary of State for the Southern Department (whose responsibilities included France, southern Europe, the plantations and American colonies, Ireland, and a share of domestic policy, including law and order). Addison wrote to Lord Manchester from Italy with congratulations and offering his services.

It was too soon after the impeachment crisis for Halifax or Somers to be officially rehabilitated. Somers remained without official appointment, dividing his time between his townhouse in Leicester Square and his country retreat of Brookmans Manor, in Bell Bar, Hertfordshire. Halifax meanwhile remained Auditor of the Receipt, continuing to grant profitable administrative places to impecunious writers. One of these was a Kit-Cat named Arthur Maynwaring, who would become the Club's leading propagandist in the decade ahead. He had been a friend of Congreve's since Middle Temple days, at which time Maynwaring was just sloughing off his early Jacobite sympathies and converting—with all the fervency of a born-again believer—to post-Revolutionary Whiggism. He had been among Dryden's literary disciples at Will's Coffee House, then another of Lord Dorset's protégés, and now in 1701 he was passed along from Dorset to the care of Halifax's patronage, thereby gaining a place as a Commissioner in the Customs House.

Addison remained another of Halifax's charges. He was travelling north from Florence to Geneva at the end of 1701, just as Halifax and Somers were beginning to regain their influence, and as he crossed the Alps, ‘shivering among the Eternal snows’, Addison claimed he distracted himself from his vertigo by composing, upon horseback, a verse ‘Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax’.

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Richard Steele, meanwhile, spent the summer of 1701 lodging in Wandsworth with a woman who tutored girls—an experience that may well have shaped his later views in favour of promoting female literacy. Steele was working hard on his first play, The Funeral, while spending his leisure time with Congreve, who was passing the summer just across the river in Chelsea. Tonson had already published Steele's first work, a didactic moral tract entitled The Christian Hero, suggesting that no overly hard feelings remained over the seduction of Tonson's niece. Given the impeachment proceedings that were commencing at the time, Steele had dedicated the tract not to any Junto lord, but to his army boss Lord Cutts. The primary aim of The Christian Hero was to make its author some quick cash, and indeed the book proved a bestseller in those Collierite times, running to twenty editions. Steele's literary friends, however, teased him as a hypocrite given his recent sexual indiscretions, including a dalliance with a woman called ‘Black Moll’ and a duel fought in Hyde Park against another Irish army officer, most likely over a woman. The wits ‘measured the least levity in his words and actions, with the character of a Christian Hero’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Whether due to these friends' teasing or the reflective exercise of writing the book, Steele does appear to have reformed his sex life after 1701. His spending habits were less easily cured, however. In a letter to an army friend at this date, he confided that ‘nothing can really make my heart ache but a dun’.

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Steele wrote The Funeral, like The Christian Hero, with an eye to commercial success, aiming to please censorious theatre audiences, but also to ‘to enliven his character’ in the eyes of his literary friends,

(#litres_trial_promo) since, as he put it, ‘Nothing can make the Town so fond of a Man as a successful Play.’

(#litres_trial_promo) For good measure, the play's anti-French jokes capitalized on the town's rising mood of bellicose Protestant patriotism. Even in December 1701, however, when the play opened and went to the printers, Steele remained politically cautious: he dedicated it to the wife of William's Dutch favourite, Keppel, rather than to an Englishman of a particular party or faction. The Funeral was, as hoped, an instant hit, performed more than 170 times over the next five years. Steele's reputation as a popular (if not erudite) writer was made, as was his career in the rearming army: as reward for his literary success, he was given a commission as Captain in the new 34th Regiment of Foot.

Two days before Steele received his commission, on 8 March 1702, King William died following a fall from his horse, and his sister-in-law Anne assumed the throne. Intelligent and diligent, Anne could also be stubborn and oversensitive. Innately Tory, she believed it her royal duty to stand above party and resented any attempt by political factions to force her decisions, begging Lord Godolphin, whom she appointed as Lord Treasurer, to help her keep out ‘of the power of the Merciless men of both parties’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Anne was, furthermore, devoutly religious, personally repelled by what she regarded as the gross immorality and open impiety of the Junto lords. The Tories played upon Anne's High Church prudishness, increasing their efforts to expose the Kit-Cat politicians' private sleaze, not only to shock Anne and the Collierites, but also to challenge the Whigs' claim to be ‘dispassionate’ men.

Anne held a grudge against Halifax, Wharton and Somers for their role in supporting her expulsion from William and Mary's Court back in the early 1690s. Several Kit-Cats complained in the House of Lords upon the publication of a history by one Dr Drake, who implied that the Junto had treated Anne disrespectfully and done everything it could to prevent her succession. Another Tory, Charles Davenant, wrote a pamphlet in which a Whig character confesses that preventing Anne's succession ‘was the Discourse of all our Clubs’.

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The Junto Whigs' rising hopes and ambitions therefore collapsed upon Anne's accession. Somers, who even in his unemployment had maintained an advisory relationship with William, was now persona non grata at Anne's Court, not even permitted to continue as a magistrate in his native Worcestershire. Halifax and Wharton were immediately dismissed from the Privy Council. The man replacing Wharton as Comptroller of the Royal Household, the Tory Sir Edward Seymour, declared in the Commons what a pleasure it was ‘to have a Queen that was entirely English’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Jack Smith, the leading Kit-Cat in the lower house, replied indignantly that ‘none but one whose heart was truly French would make a reflection on his late Majesty’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Defence of King William's memory quickly became the new litmus test of Whig allegiance.

Vanbrugh foresaw the sudden demotion of his patron Carlisle, who handed the Treasury back to Godolphin after less than three months in the job. Vanbrugh therefore bought a new army commission to keep himself afloat were Castle Howard's construction put on hold. Carlisle had also organized for Vanbrugh to be appointed Comptroller of the Board of Works—a part-time job, paid accordingly, but with several houses attached, which Vanbrugh could rent out for profit. In this way, a state income relieved the Earl of the personal expense of paying Vanbrugh's salary as an architect. The appointment came through in May 1702, with Vanbrugh supplanting William Talman for a second time. In fact, the Earl continued to build Castle Howard with additional vigour after his dismissal, as if not to lose face. By the end of 1702, there was a roof on the east wing and work starting on the central block.

Manchester also lost his job as Secretary of State for the South following Anne's accession. Lingering in Geneva, Addison had hoped that, through the influence of Manchester or Halifax, he might be appointed as English representative to the army camp of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Imperial Commander and Marlborough's most useful ally in the impending war. However, with news of William's death and of the demotion of so many Kit-Cat patrons, Addison's hopes were dashed.

The Kit-Cat Club would function as a centre of opposition to Anne's first, Tory-dominated administration. Anne's ministerial favourites—Godolphin, Marlborough, and later Harley—tried, futilely, to claim they stood aloof from party like the monarch herself, but, like Anne, all three leaned instinctively towards the Tories. Anne chose to retain just two non-Harleyite Whigs in her first ministry, one of whom was the Duke of Somerset—his reward for having stood by Anne and the Marlboroughs during their 1690s quarrels with William and Mary. Somerset, in turn, was able to retain and even promote his personal Kit-Cat clients. Most significantly, Harry Boyle, a cousin of Somerset's, remained Chancellor of the Exchequer. A fictionalized record of a Kit-Cat meeting in the weeks before King William's death had depicted the Club, like a mock-parliament, passing a motion that ‘Harry Boyle's head of hair be demolished and afterwards burned by the hand of the Common hangman’. Apparently, Boyle's wig had turned rancid with the pomatum (gum or grease) used to thicken it, and was offending their noses. Now that the political ground had shifted, leaving so few Kit-Cats in government, Boyle became a much more important figure, worthy of respect.

The Whigs feared Anne might desert the Grand Alliance and shy away from war with France, perhaps even making a deal with her exiled half-brother, The Pretender, to undo the Act of Settlement. These fears were unfounded. Marlborough and Godolphin shared the Whigs' conviction about the need to contain French imperialism, and when, in February 1702, Louis' troops seized Dutch fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands, Anne reassured Europe she would not break the Alliance. On 4 May 1702, England formally declared war on France.

As the War of Spanish Succession began, Steele, who had spent the spring travelling through Essex and Norfolk hiring his company of soldiers with money borrowed from friends, found his whole regiment quartered at the dilapidated Landguard Fort in Harwich. It was a bleak, windy spot where Steele's men fell sick from chills, a place far removed from Steele's recent success in the London theatres and with little opportunity for either heroism or promotion. Steele at least had time to write. Local tradition has it he wrote his second play, The Lying Lover, on his off-duty evenings at the Queen's Arms in Harwich.

Addison meanwhile continued his European travels within Allied territory during the first campaign of the war. He visited Stepney's embassy in Vienna in the summer of 1702, then Hamburg that winter, complaining of being unable to see the German landscape because everything was so covered in snow that the dirty linen on inn beds was the only thing not white. As Addison was travelling on a tight budget, it was all the more welcome when Stepney opened doors for him with letters of introduction to the Electoral Courts of Dresden and Hanover, and by obtaining dinner and opera invitations from the Prince of Liechtenstein and the nobility in Hamburg. Addison likely sent Stepney an early draft of his Italian travel journal, later to be dedicated to Somers, which Addison said was passed around so many friends in manuscript that it ‘made a greater voyage than that which it describes’.

(#litres_trial_promo) More than any of his literary tourism in Italy, these months among the northern European Courts, under Stepney's tutelage, would prove useful to Addison in future.

Somers told Halifax he now saw their role as fighting at home the war that Marlborough was to fight on the Continent. By this he meant that it was their responsibility to run the Whig publicity machine in support of Britannia's crusade in Europe—selling a woolly conflation of liberty and national destiny not dissimilar to American patriotism in later centuries. Somers edited and Tonson published Several Orations of Demosthenes…(English'd from the Greek by several Hands) (1702), for example, which included speeches calling the Athenians to war. Four of seven contributors to this book were Kit-Cats.

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When it came to whipping up Whig Protestant patriotism, the Kit-Cats were hindered by the profiles of the monarchs fate handed to England: first William, a Calvinist Dutchman, then Anne, an un-attractive Tory woman, and finally the prospect of a Lutheran German from Hanover. Marlborough was therefore quickly chosen to become ‘the hero of the Whigs, though he was never a Whig hero’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This was made possible largely thanks to Marlborough's wife Sarah, who was a vehement Whig and spent much of the following decade pressing her husband to side with, or at least work with, the Whig leadership. Like Sarah, the Kit-Cat Club was eager to absorb the Allied Commander into its party, and from 1702 onwards recruited a series of Marlborough relations and supporters as the next best thing to the man himself, who protected his political independence. A Tory satire, written after Marlborough received his dukedom, described a typical Kit-Cat member as being a ‘humble servant’ of Marlborough ‘from the Teeth outwards’, but ‘the Duke will not be led by the Nose by him, which very much alters his [the Kit-Cat's] inward Respect’ for the Duke.

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The clearest example of this forcible assimilation of the Marlborough ‘brand’ is the admission of Francis, Viscount Rialton and future 2nd Earl of Godolphin, who was both son and heir of the Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin and husband of Marlborough's eldest daughter Henrietta. In a Kit-Cat toast to Henrietta, she is complimented in terms clearly referencing her father: ‘Her conquering race with Various fate surprise / Who 'scape their Arms are Captive to their Eyes.’

Marlborough's other daughters were also repeatedly nominated as Kit-Cat toasts after 1702. Similarly, the Kit-Cat Club membership of Edmund Dunch can be explained by his marriage in spring 1702 to Elizabeth Godfrey, daughter of Marlborough's sister Arabella. Two other Kit-Cats later married a daughter and a granddaughter of the Marlboroughs. Dr Garth's importance within the Club rose significantly after he became Marlborough's personal physician, and after Garth helped Marlborough's younger brother avoid murder charges, earning Marlborough's lasting gratitude.

Another Kit-Cat member who was admitted thanks to his links to Marlborough was Charles, Lord Mohun. By 1702, Mohun had stood trial for murder no less than three times, escaping conviction in at least one case thanks to the value of his vote in the Lords, which he gave to King William in exchange for clemency. Following his return from a trip to Hanover to meet with Electress Sophia, Mohun was teased for putting on ‘a Politician's Face’ for the Whigs.

(#litres_trial_promo) Kit-Cat membership sometime between the autumn of 1701 and May 1702 therefore fitted neatly with Mohun's resolution to rectify his ‘slips of youth’ and become a political player.

(#litres_trial_promo) It would also have fitted, cynically, with his need for more friends in the Lords in order to win a complicated inheritance dispute that began in 1701. At his first attendance at the Kit-Cat Club, Mohun ‘broke down the gilded emblem on the top of his chair’, giving Tonson the opportunity to allude slyly to Mohun's wayward past by complaining that ‘a man who would do that would cut a man's throat’.

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A number of military men were also admitted to the Kit-Cat after 1702, all of whom, almost inevitably given the limited size of the army's officer class, had links with Marlborough.

(#litres_trial_promo) Most important of these was James, 1st Earl of Stanhope, eldest son of the respected diplomat Alexander Stanhope. By May 1698, when James Stanhope served briefly alongside Prior at the Paris embassy, a friend told Alexander that his son was the ‘greatest hope in England, and I believe no man of his age hath by his own personal merit made himself so many friends and rendered himself so universally acceptable’.

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King William had at first been charmed by Stanhope's precocity and outspokenness, but cooled towards him when the young man wrote in favour of disbanding the army after Ryswick and argued with one of the King's Dutch friends. This anti-Court positioning alone excluded Stanhope from the Kit-Cat Club when it was first formed in the late 1690s. Stanhope also lost royal favour at the outbreak of the culture wars in 1698 because of his overt anticlericalism. When Anne came to the throne, however, Stanhope was one of those lucky enough to survive the Whig purge thanks to Somerset's protection. Somerset supported Stanhope in gaining a parliamentary seat for Cockermouth in Cumberland, and probably a simultaneous seat at the Kit-Cat Club, in summer 1702. Stanhope's erudition, particularly as a translator of Greek, and his exquisite family seat of Chevening in Kent, qualified him for the Club from a cultural standpoint, one contemporary calling him ‘the best scholar perhaps of any gentleman of his time’.

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At the outbreak of the War of Spanish Succession, Stanhope had been posted to the Iberian Peninsula, but, after commendation for his part in storming Vigo Bay in October 1702—England's first significant victory—he had been transferred in 1703 to serve directly under Marlborough in Flanders. Stanhope developed a good working partnership with Marlborough, who recognized that Stanhope possessed a mixture of soldierliness, diplomatic charm and intellect not unlike his own.

Another of the Kit-Cat Club's new military members after 1702 was James, future 3rd Earl of Berkeley, a naval officer admitted on the same day as Mohun. Richard Boyle, 2nd Viscount Shannon, also joined the Club soon after leading the grenadiers who stormed the fortifications at Vigo with Stanhope in October 1702.

(#litres_trial_promo) Two soldier brothers, John and James Dormer, may also have entered the Club, simultaneously or in succession, soon after the war began. A ‘Mr Dormer’ is recorded as dining at Wharton's house on Dover Street, alongside four other Kit-Cat members, on 5 December 1702, and again with three Kit-Cats on 27 December.

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The only military Kit-Cat whose membership certainly predated 1702 was Colonel John Tidcomb, a Restoration Court pal of Dorset's who had led deserting troops towards William's invasion force in 1688 and was now enjoying the Club in his retirement. Tidcomb and Dorset provided the prototypes for the admission of Kit-Cat soldiers who possessed enough cultural refinement that their conversation did not, as Addison put it, ‘smell of gunpowder’.

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