The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation

Thanks to the additional military members who joined during 1702 and 1703, the Kit-Cat Club needed to move to a more spacious venue: likely the Fountain tavern on the Strand. Whig conspirators had clubbed in this tavern before the Revolution and this subversive history now held added appeal for the Kit-Cats as they entered an indefinite phase of political opposition to another Tory-leaning Stuart monarch. Some sources state that Mr Cat sold the Cat and Fiddle to buy the Fountain with a loan from Tonson, just as Cat moved his home and shop from Gray's Inn down to Shire Lane, a street that ran through the middle of where the Royal Courts of Justice stand today.

In addition, for summer gatherings, the Kit-Cat Club planned to erect some sort of clubhouse, referred to as a ‘convenient reception’, in the fresher air of Hampstead. The village of Hampstead was then visited mainly for its proximity to the Bellsise (today Belsize) Gardens—pleasure gardens like those in Kilburn, Vauxhall and St Pancras where Londoners could enjoy music, dancing, gambling and sex amid the shrubbery. The original proposal for the Hampstead venue in May 1702 was signed by fourteen members of the Club who each promised to contribute ten guineas (each guinea was worth 20–30 shillings or £130 to £200 today), with Wharton listed as ‘Controller of the Society’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The building was to be finished by the spring of 1703, but it may be that it was never begun. Though a 1708 poem does refer to the Kit-Cats dining on Hampstead's ‘airy Head’ in the summertime,

(#litres_trial_promo) no clubhouse has ever been identified there, and there is an oral tradition that they met in the gardens of the Upper Flask tavern, known for its ‘races, raffles and private marriages’, rather than in any purpose-built venue.

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When in power, the Kit-Cats always imagined themselves in terms of heroic, patriot governors, modelled on classical Roman senators—men whose friendship formed the pillars of civilization—but when out of power, Renaissance and humanist models came to the fore, and they imagined themselves a private circle in retreat from a repressive state. During these first years of Anne's reign, when all the Kit-Cats but Somerset had been unceremoniously ejected from the Queen's Cabinet, but when the country was embarking on a war most intensely desired and bankrolled by their party, the Kit-Cats were ambivalent about which image to cultivate: the Fountain politicians or the Flask revellers.

VIII KIT-CAT CONNOISSEURS (#ulink_aebc9524-0431-57e6-8a93-1ef6eccee52b)

If eating or drinking be natural, herding is so too.

3RD EARL OF SHAFTESBURY, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)

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IN EARLY 1703, Tonson acquired another summer home for the nomadic Kit-Cats. He leased a country house at Barn Elms, about seven miles west of London on the south side of the Thames, just west of Putney. The surrounding area was a picnic resort for Londoners, mentioned by Pepys as a place for strolls among the majestic elms and by Congreve as one of dubious morals. It was best reached by barge from Whitehall, rather than by the road (the original King's Road) that ran through the open country of ‘five fields’ and was notoriously plagued by highwaymen.

Elizabeth I had once stayed at Barn Elms' manor house. Tonson's property was a much more modest residence to the north of the manor, possibly its dairy. Taking the lease was nonetheless an expression of Tonson's social aspirations. The westerly migration from the stink of London into fresher air represented both his own and the Club's rising status since the 1690s. The proliferating villas of Twickenham and Clapham would soon become a clichéd image of new money's encroachment, as Whig ‘Cits’ (City citizens) imitated the rural idyll of the landed gentry but within commuting distance of the town. Like them, Tonson wanted to live within easy reach of London, but this Barn Elms property was unusual in being a status symbol not only for a private individual but also for a collective group.

Tonson may have been allowed to use the unspent Kit-Cat subscription monies, collected to build a Hampstead venue, to renovate the Barn Elms house instead. He hired Vanbrugh to fit up the house's interior. Like Vanbrugh's ‘Goose Pie’ house in Whitehall, Tonson's small property was good practice for the self-taught architect before working at Castle Howard, though in the latter case Vanbrugh would largely leave Hawksmoor to design the interior. Both houses, small and large, reflected their owners' desires to be judged more on how they spent their money than on how much money they had—in Tonson's case because he had more than was considered decent for an untitled merchant, and in Carlisle's case because he had less than his title suggested. As with membership of the Kit-Cat Club, the fad for architecture and interior design, and thereby the demonstration of one's taste, was a way to set oneself apart from an ever-increasing number of prosperous but perhaps less educated neighbours. A diverse range of luxury furnishings available at this date—thanks to the East India Company's imports of cotton, chintz and porcelain, for example—made it as easy for Tonson as for Carlisle to participate. As Defoe wrote when he saw a tradesman's house filled with velvet hangings, embroidered chairs and damask curtains, it was now common for such a man to own ‘Furniture equal to what, formerly, sufficed the greatest of our Nobility’.

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The first time Tonson took Vanbrugh down to Barnes to survey the property, the men shared a simple supper in the kitchen, which Vanbrugh would remember fondly some twenty years later as ‘the best meal I ever ate’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Tonson thus became Vanbrugh's second architectural patron, after Carlisle. By this date Tonson and Vanbrugh were also close personal friends. Tonson allocated a bedroom for Vanbrugh's permanent private use at Barn Elms, and a poem by a mutual friend contained a fictionalized dialogue in which the character of Tonson says of Vanbrugh: ‘…so much I dote on him, that I / If I were sure to go to Heaven, would die’.

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Tonson convened the Club in London in March 1703, telling the members it would be the last meeting for some time, as he would be travelling to Holland on book business. Stepney, who was in Vienna cajoling Emperor Leopold into devoting greater military resources to the Grand Alliance, sent his ‘hearty affections to the Kit-Cat; I often wish it were my fortune to make one with you at 3 in the morning’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This March 1703 meeting seems to have been a particularly late and lively one. A dangerously indecent poem by an unidentified Kit-Cat was recited, mocking Queen Anne for her phantom pregnancies. In the poem, Anne knights her doctor with her bare, gouty leg, in a fit of pleasure when he declares her pregnant. It is a nasty piece, reflecting the Junto Whigs' disgruntlement, out of office thanks to what they considered a woman's ignorant and irrational prejudices.

The Kit-Cats' published propaganda was more restrained. Tonson's press, for example, published The Golden Age Restor'd (1703), which was a sarcastic call to arms, suggesting the Jacobites should oust the few remaining Whigs at Court as the prelude to a Franco-Jacobite invasion.

(#litres_trial_promo) Written by William Walsh, the poem was printed anonymously and its authorship mistakenly attributed to Arthur Maynwaring, who almost lost his commission at the Customs House as a result. Yet Maynwaring did not break ranks and betray the poem's true author. The Kit-Cats stood collectively behind the publication's anonymity, just as the Tories concealed the author of their reply, The Golden Age Revers'd (1703), which reviled the Kit-Cat Club as a gang of hubristic conspirators.

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Tonson departed for Holland soon after the March meeting. Now 47 and balding (‘spacious brow[ed]’, as one poet delicately put it

(#litres_trial_promo)), he travelled this time with the youngest Kit-Cat: the indolent 19-yearold Charles Fitzroy, 2nd Duke of Grafton (grandson of Charles II and his mistress Barbara Villiers), who had joined the Club upon reaching his maturity. Vanbrugh thought Tonson would find it amusing to hear that the Tories suspected the bookseller of travelling as a Junto messenger destined for Hanover, and that his subscription list to a new edition of Ceasar's Commentaries was rumoured to be a sinister list of rebels plotting to overthrow Queen Anne. While Tonson's subscription lists were not without political subtext, there was no such undercover mission. It was simply a trip to acquire new texts, typeface and paper from the Continent.

Tonson left his nephew, Jacob Tonson Junior (brother to Elizabeth and uncle to Steele's illegitimate child; referred to hereafter as ‘Jacob Junior’ to avoid confusion) in charge of the publishing firm. This partnership would continue after Tonson's return, and from this date forward it is often unclear which of the two Tonsons was responsible for particular publications or business decisions. Despite the trust placed in Jacob Junior, however, there is evidence that he did not feel unalloyed affection for his domineering uncle.

Vanbrugh, trusted as closely as Tonson's nephew, was left in charge of the renovation work at Barn Elms. He travelled there to inspect the site amid unseasonably heavy rains in June 1703, and reported to Tonson that the carpenters had been neglecting the job for the past fortnight: ‘[E]very room is chips—up to your chin!’ The neighbours had also failed to steal the peas and beans from Tonson's kitchen garden, so that they hung rotting on the vine. Vanbrugh assured Tonson, with a gentle jibe at Tonson's aspirations for the modest property, that the house would soon be ready ‘for the reception of a king’.

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Other Kit-Cat Club members took an active interest in the Barn Elms works, supporting the theory that it was intended to become a Club venue. Congreve told Tonson in Amsterdam: ‘I believe Barn Elms wants you and I long to see it but don't care to satisfy my curiosity before you come.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Vanbrugh wrote, meanwhile, that ‘the Kit-Cat wants you much more than you ever can do them…Those who remain in town are in great desire of waiting on you at BarnElms.’

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This last statement emphasizes how central Tonson remained as Club secretary and chairman, even now that the Club's membership had expanded to include more than a dozen peers of the realm. A month later, Vanbrugh complained again: ‘The Kit-Cat…will never meet without you, so you can see here's a general stagnation for want of you.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The Duke of Somerset sent the same message, though in a more imperious tone: ‘Our Club is dissolved, till you revive it again; which we are impatient of.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Congreve, Vanbrugh and Halifax drank a toast to Tonson's quick return one day that summer at Hampton Court, ‘as we were sopping our Arses in the Fountain, for you must know we have got some warm weather at last’.

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Yet Tonson's position remained, at the same time, precarious. Though still the Club's convener and nominal host, he seems to have also been the butt of the Club's raillery during repeated rifts between the publisher and his Kit-Cat authors. A satirical advertisement was printed in January 1704, ostensibly composed by Tonson to deny that he was ‘infamously expelled a certain Society called the K-t C-t Club’ as a result of his ‘ill-timed freedom with some of the Principal Members at the Reading of a Late Satire upon his Parts and Person’ and also to deny he was ‘since Clapped up in a Madhouse’. To the contrary, the advertisement explained, Tonson had withdrawn himself voluntarily ‘in scorn of being their Jest any longer’ and ‘walks the public Streets without a Keeper’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The notice has the tone of an inside joke, meriting speculation about the incident behind it. What was the ‘Late Satire’? Was it Faction Display'd (1704), William Shippen's poem which incorporated three lines mocking Tonson's freckles and lameness? And what was Tonson's ‘ill-timed freedom’? Could it be, as the phrase suggests, that the tradesman had finally taken a liberty too far?

Another poem, The Kit-Cats, written sometime before June 1704, seems to refer to the same rift. Structured around an allegory in which the Club's literary members rebel against Tonson's authority (‘They cry he Sep'rate Interest Carries on, / Pretends their Profit, but designs his own’), the poem is the literary bruise remaining after a fight which history has forgotten.

(#litres_trial_promo) Again, two sources dating to 1705 refer to Tonson being so severely teased by the Club's members that he talked of leaving them: a poem referred to Tonson being ‘Sullen through his late ill-Usage’ at the Club,

(#litres_trial_promo) while a play called The Quacks showed ‘Stationer Freckle’ feeling aggrieved when his authors teased him in their verses. A private letter from Halifax to another Kit-Cat confirms Tonson bore the brunt of the Club's raillery, and was growing sick of it: ‘Our friend Jacob seems to have abdeclared [i.e. abdicated] his government of the Chit-Kat…[T]hey had teased him so unmercifully of late that I fancy he intends to leave them.’

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Another, later poem described Tonson as having ‘more Humours than a dancing Bear’ but ultimately being persuaded to reconcile with his Kit-Cat authors.

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As Vanbrugh helped Tonson realize his social aspirations at Barn Elms, so he continued to help Carlisle confirm his family's status—as well as Carlisle's personal educational and cultural status—at Castle Howard. With time on his hands since the Queen had relieved him of his Treasury office, Carlisle was able to personally oversee the construction site there. That summer of 1703, some 200 men were working on the Yorkshire house and gardens. When work had hardly begun, Carlisle took a party of friends, including Kit-Cats Kingston, Grafton, Wharton and William Cavendish, for an impromptu site inspection, demonstrating that the project was, from the start, distinctly Whiggish.

Carlisle's aesthetic, like Vanbrugh's, seems to have gained definition through exchanges at the Kit-Cat Club. Though the Kit-Cats published no manifesto, we can retrospectively discern an unwritten manifesto directing all their cultural projects, whether literary or architectural. This manifesto involved competing with French culture but not, as might be expected, rejecting it wholesale. The Kit-Cats drew from French comedies, architecture and gardening manuals, just as they imported other Continental models from Venice or Vienna, but they aimed to modify all these European imports and so establish a more ‘modern’ and distinctively English brand of neoclassicism. Vanbrugh tried to temper the baroque style, associated as it was with Europe's absolute monarchies, with historical English elements—for example, long Jacobean galleries—and with numerous visual allusions to the Roman republic that the Whigs considered the classical parallel to their constitutional monarchy.

The question of why the Kit-Cat Club felt such an urgent need to define England's national style is a complex one. There was a sense that pre-Revolutionary elites had been lapdogs to the French, a sense that the large number of immigrants in London and at Court during William's reign had further diluted English identity, a sense that European baroque architecture had left England lagging behind, and a wish, in light of England's rising commercial power, to hold their heads high and build properties exuding new-found national self-confidence. There was no English school of architecture to constrain Vanbrugh, and he was lucky that his Kit-Cat commissioners gave him great imaginative freedom during a time of stylistic transition. The Kit-Cat Club directed him only by endorsing his search for a new, distinctively English style. Perhaps his own sense of coming from a family of recent migrants sharpened his personal passion for this quest.

One of the most radical, innovative aspects of Castle Howard was its location—that someone should build such a palatial home on a windswept hillside in Yorkshire. Carlisle saw himself as extending the reach of civilization by importing Continental styles he had seen on his travels into the depths of the English countryside, for his neighbours' edification. The project brought direct economic benefits to the local craftsmen it employed, and the emulation of such great Whig houses by more minor nobility and gentry—such as the building of Beningborough by John Bourchier in Yorkshire in 1716—was to have trickle-down economic benefits.

Castle Howard was also a Whiggish project in the sense that its contents boasted of English trade and manufacture. Its interior was started after 1706, though interior designs had been a part of the house's overall plan from the beginning, with Vanbrugh commissioning Hawksmoor to design the ‘Eating Room’ interior, for example. This was a new way of working, reflecting the fact that a private citizen's private rooms could now make public statements, as only royal palaces' interiors had previously done. Carlisle engaged several London merchants to do the upholstering and make the furniture for his rooms, and collected delftware and other exotic decorative items from the London importers. The house's bedchambers were hung with oriental silk damasks, its dressing rooms with India wallpapers, and the Earl's Grand Cabinet with angora mohair imported by the Turkey Company. The whole house, in other words, became a receptacle for the luxuries of British trade, but with its owner constantly aiming to emphasize that he was a collector and connoisseur, not just a greedy shopper.

The magnificent building, as it rose, provoked the ire of some smaller Yorkshire landowners, resentful of raised wartime tax ation and of peers like Carlisle who were aligned to the City of London's interests. Had they known the extent to which Carlisle's income had dwindled, and how watchful he had to be of expenditure on building a house financed largely through credit and card winnings, they might have felt less aggrieved.

Carlisle had the power to bestow heraldic rewards through the College of Arms, and therefore was able to pay Vanbrugh for building Castle Howard by making him a ‘Carlisle Herald’ in June 1703, an appointment from which Vanbrugh was then promoted to the lucrative place of ‘Clarenceux King of Arms’. This required only that Vanbrugh occasionally appear at the College of Arms in ornate costume. A contemporary's reaction to news of the appointment was pragmatic: ‘Now Van can build houses.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Suspicions that Carlisle and Vanbrugh were treating the heralds' internal hierarchy with cynical disrespect, however, were confirmed when Vanbrugh later referred to this appointment as ‘a Place I got in jest’.