The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation

In the centre of Covent Garden was Will's Coffee House, where Dryden held court among literati of all political shades. Congreve was probably introduced to this circle by one of the other ageing Restoration dramatists of London: Thomas Southerne or William Wycherley, whom Congreve knew through some cousins. Dryden's court at Will's was imperious: those allowed to take a pinch from his snuffbox comprised his inner circle, while his special chair had a prescribed place by the fire in winter and on the balcony in summer, which he called ‘his winter and his summer seat’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Yet, at the same time, Dryden carried himself with a charming humility that impressed Congreve deeply: Dryden was, Congreve remembered, ‘of all the Men that ever I knew, one of the most Modest’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The next generation of writers would say much the same of Congreve.

Dryden soon declared ‘entire affection’ for Congreve: ‘So much the sweetness of your manners move / We cannot envy you, because we love,’ he wrote.

(#litres_trial_promo) Congreve, in return, said he was ‘as intimately acquainted with Mr Dryden as the great Disproportion in our Years could allow’, concluding quite simply that he ‘loved’ the old man.

(#litres_trial_promo) Congreve showed his Staffordshire manuscript to Dryden, who declared he had never seen ‘such a first play in his life’, but added that ‘it would be a pity to have it miscarry for want of a little assistance’. What the comedy, entitled The Old Batchelor, needed, Dryden declared, was only ‘the fashionable cut of the town’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Though ostensibly a plot of romantic intrigues, the real seduction of the play lies in the enviably quick wit exchanged between its male characters—it is a love letter to the urbane world Congreve must have imagined in his teens and in which he was now becoming accepted. Taking Dryden's suggestions on board, Congreve spent summer 1692 in Derbyshire reworking the text. By Michaelmas, thanks to Dryden's endorsements, Congreve was directing rehearsals of The Old Batchelor at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane.

It was likely during these rehearsals that Congreve fell in love with the woman who would become his muse throughout the next decade: the actress Anne Bracegirdle, or ‘Bracey’. Since adolescence, Bracey had acted under the tutelage of Mr and Mrs Betterton, two experienced members of the United Company, the theatre company based at the Theatre Royal. A brunette with dark sparkling eyes, a blushing complexion and a miraculously perfect set of even white teeth, it was said of Bracey that ‘few Spectators that were not past it could behold her without Desire’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Congreve met her when she was ‘blooming to her Maturity’

(#litres_trial_promo) and already a star.

It was more respectable to claim infatuation with Bracey than with most actresses, since she was reputed to be as chaste as the virgins she played. She lived with her mother in rented lodgings on Howard Street, where Congreve paid drawing-room visits. If their Northamptonshire family was related to the Staffordshire Bracegirdles, they may even have been distantly related to Congreve. But away from the decorum of Howard Street, backstage at the theatre, Congreve pursued Bracey with fervour, writing her a love poem that lamented her chastity:

Would I were free from this Restraint,

Or else had hopes to win her;

Would she could make of me a Saint,

Or I of her a Sinner.

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The Old Batchelor opened in March 1693 to a ‘Torrent of Applause’ that would have fulfilled any young writer's most immodest fantasies.

(#litres_trial_promo) The debut was such a success that ‘many persons of Quality cannot have a Seat, all the places having been bespoken many days since’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Jacob Tonson needed no further persuasion to become Congreve's publisher. Tonson printed, then quickly reprinted, the text of The Old Batchelor; he would thereafter hold exclusive rights to all Congreve's plays.

Around Michaelmas 1693, Tonson moved from above his shop in Chancery Lane to a house at the south side of Fleet Street, near the gate of Inner Temple. Soon after, according to poll tax records, Congreve moved out of Crane Court and became Tonson's lodger at this Fleet Street house. The two men, publisher and author, lived together, along with their several domestic servants, for seven years, until 1700. A later imaginary dialogue, written by a mutual friend of theirs, has Tonson exclaiming to Congreve that during these Fleet Street days, ‘While I partook your wine, your wit and mirth, / I was the happiest creature on God's earth!’

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As Congreve's Old Batchelor had its debut on the London stage, 29-year-old John Vanbrugh arrived in the city, in circumstances unlike those of most other ambitious young newcomers. His boat had come from France, where since 1688 Vanbrugh had spent the best part of his twenties, detained without trial and on charges that had been forgotten almost as soon as the key turned in his cell door. The French had arrested Vanbrugh because they had miscalculated the status of his family, believing he would make a valuable bargaining chip to trade for a high-profile French prisoner. Though Vanbrugh's mother did have various noble relations, his late father had been a merchant in Chester, trading in property, lead, grain and Caribbean sugar, and his grandfather was a penniless Flemish refugee. When Vanbrugh's father died soon after the Revolution, Vanbrugh had inherited only a small sum and the burden of responsibility for his numerous siblings.

Some of Vanbrugh's captivity was spent in the Bastille, where his health suffered. Now, in 1693, having been traded for an insignificant Frenchman thanks to his mother's tireless lobbying, he returned to England a free man and, to use his own phrase, as ‘sound as a roach’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Imprisonment was a formative experience for Vanbrugh: it gave him a real appreciation of what arbitrary government could mean, and a violent aversion to boredom. He was determined not to waste another minute of his life.

After his return from France, Vanbrugh stayed in London for only a year before leaving ‘that uneasy theatre of noise’

(#litres_trial_promo) to join a marine regiment. Purchasing an officer's commission both advanced his social position and promised a secure income. In wartime, however, it was also an act of patriotism: Captain Vanbrugh saw action at a disastrous naval battle and was lucky not to be recaptured by the French. He borrowed some money from a fellow army officer, which he repaid when back in London by writing a play for the Theatre Royal, where his creditor was a patentee. The Relapse opened there in November 1696 and proved an overnight sensation, reviving the sinking fortunes of the United Company and more than repaying Vanbrugh's debt. Its success inevitably introduced Vanbrugh to Tonson and the coveted cultural patrons—like Somers—for whom Tonson acted as gatekeeper and broker. Congreve and Vanbrugh therefore started climbing ‘Jacob's ladder’ to fame and fortune as undeclared rivals, with only three years between their brilliant entrances into the London theatre world and Jacob Tonson's circle of highbrow friends. Soon, however, Tonson would find a solution to make the way less steep for them both: he and his patrons would found the Kit-Cat Club—an institution which would support the two authors throughout the rest of their lives.

II FRIENDSHIPS FORMED (#u5ac7c94c-4115-5756-8b1e-ab78272cabba)

[W]e very often contract such Friendships at School as are of Service to us all the following Part of our Lives.

The Spectator no. 313, 28 February 1712

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THE SENSE of unbounded possibility felt by many individual Englishmen in the 1690s owed much to what one historian has dubbed the ‘educational revolution’ of the earlier seventeenth century.

(#litres_trial_promo) A surprisingly high proportion of England's sons (though none of its daughters) attended grammar schools, dissenting academies or the liberally endowed foundation or charity schools, so that teaching was no longer the preserve of the clergy and private tutors in noble households. For the generations of boys who enjoyed this expansion in primary and higher education, there were lifelong side effects: the formation of friendships that felt as important to them as family bonds, and a lasting enthusiasm for all-male camaraderie that would express itself subsequently in all-male clubbing.

Westminster School, refounded by Elizabeth I, was a private London school that was now expanding its intake and supplying a new breed of gentleman to government offices and the professions. Jacob Tonson once explained that whereas Eton was ‘very much filled by the Sons of Quality & who are not to be much pressed to study’, Westminster produced ‘manly Orators, & the very air of London brings on the Improvement of Youth for any business of the world…’

(#litres_trial_promo) There, in around 1680–2, a gang of three schoolboys, known among themselves as ‘Matt’ (Matthew Prior), ‘Chamont’ (Charles Montagu) and ‘Cat’ (George Stepney), formed a bond of friendship that would not weaken for a full two decades, until the day when one of them dramatically betrayed another.

The three boys slept in a dilapidated former granary next to Westminster Abbey, where, in fireless rooms reeking of damp wool socks and cheap candles, they spent their evenings translating and memorizing passages from classical authors, preparing to be tested at six the next morning. Amid mild malnutrition, older boys could receive extra food from the table of the headmaster, Dr Busby, if they composed particularly well-turned Latin epigrams. The template was set: food in exchange for wit. ‘Chamont’ shared the scraps of meat his epigrams won with his two younger friends, and with his earnest little brother ‘Jemmy’, also at the school.

Enduring the hardships of Westminster's regime not only formed firm bonds of male friendship but also made the three boys mistake themselves for social equals, despite widely varying family backgrounds. Matt Prior had by far the humblest origins and was only at the school thanks to a fairytale stroke of good luck. One day in the 1680s, he had been working at the Rhenish Wine House, a fashionable Whitehall tavern owned by his vintner uncle, when the ageing Restoration rake, Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, came in with some friends and noticed that Matt was working behind the bar with a copy of Horace in his hand. To test whether the boy understood what he read, the noblemen asked him to translate one of Horace's odes into English, and they were impressed when he quickly returned with a translation in metric verse. No matter how many times they repeated the test, Matt delivered. Dorset learned that Matt's joiner father had sent him to Westminster School some years earlier, where he had been taught Latin, but then, when his father died, his uncle had withdrawn him ‘in the middle of the third form’ to work at the Rhenish.

(#litres_trial_promo) Dorset remedied this situation by asking the Dean of Westminster to readmit Matt to the school at the Earl's personal expense, thereby becoming Prior's first patron.

At the other extreme, Charles Montagu was the grandson of the 1st Earl of Manchester, whose London residence, Manchester House, stood imposingly across from the Rhenish Wine House. Despite his venerable family name, however, Montagu was a younger son of a younger son and knew his future would depend largely upon his own efforts. George Stepney (nicknamed ‘Cat’ because he always seemed to land on his feet) similarly had no expectation of a significant inheritance, while being acutely aware of his own intelligence. Stepney's father, though briefly a Groom of Charles II's Privy Chamber, had essentially been a grocer and died in debt. His widowed mother survived by renting out properties in Scotland Yard. Stepney's rank therefore fitted roughly equidistant between Prior's near-total obscurity and the ancient lineage of the Montagus.

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Montagu, Prior and Stepney resolved to stay together at university. As Westminster's top scholar, Stepney could afford to turn down a place at Christ Church, Oxford, to join Montagu at Trinity College, Cambridge, to which Montagu had been elected some years earlier. In 1683, Prior joined them in Cambridge, attending St John's, where he was able to gain a scholarship and so save Lord Dorset considerable expense. Matt's background would have been less unusual at Cambridge than at Westminster since the majority of Cambridge students were non-gentry by this date. Prior had several advantages over most of his ambitious fellow students: Dorset's vested interest in his future, a naturally magnetic wit, and epicene good looks, with bright blue eyes under a mop of dark hair.

While he was at Cambridge, Prior maintained his connection with Dorset, sending an epistolary poem comparing the poor mutton at St John's with the ‘kindest entertainment’ he had enjoyed at his patron's table.

(#litres_trial_promo) Then, in February 1685, Montagu, Prior and Stepney decided to build on Lord Dorset's interest in Prior and bring themselves collectively to the Earl's notice. It was a good moment to apply to Dorset as he had recently inherited his family seat at Knole in Kent, and expected further enrichment through his second marriage to a 17-year-old heiress. Prior, Stepney and Montagu therefore each wrote Dorset a poem on the death of Charles II, criticizing the accession of his crypto-Catholic brother James. These poetic offerings led Dorset to invite Prior's two chums to London to receive the benefit of some high society introductions. Montagu accepted Dorset's invitation, but Stepney believed he could not afford to enter London society without an income. Montagu therefore used his family contacts to help Stepney find a diplomatic posting in Hamburg, to which he travelled directly from Cambridge. The pretence of the boys' social equality was already beginning to wear thin.

In 1687, Montagu and Prior sat over a bottle in the Middle Temple rooms of Montagu's brother Jemmy and composed a parody of a recent Dryden poem about the Catholic and Anglican churches. They correctly guessed that the Whiggish Lord Dorset would be pleased by such a parody, which they entitled The Hind and the Panther Transvers'd To the Story of The Country-Mouse and the City-Mouse. Dorset circulated the poem widely among his political allies who opposed James II's religious policies during the tense year preceding the Revolution. Prior later claimed he did nothing more than take dictation from Montagu when they collaborated on the Mouse poem, but it is hard to know whether this was just Prior's way of flattering his friend after the latter became a rich and powerful man. If true, it would be less unjust that Dorset's recompense for the poem was to promote Montagu but not the more needy Prior, prompting the wry observation that ‘one Mouse ran away with all the Bacon, whilst the other got Nothing but the empty Cupboard’.

(#litres_trial_promo) When William arrived in England the following year, the Dutchman already knew of the poem; Dorset introduced the impish 27-year-old Montagu as its author, ‘Mouse Montagu’, and the soon-to-be-crowned King gave ‘the Mouse’ £500 ‘to make a man of him’.

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From this point on, Montagu determined to follow Dorset's example and be more statesman than struggling poet.

(#litres_trial_promo) Montagu left a frank explanation of this choice, in which he is likeably without illusions:

I less affect to fiddle than to dance.

Business and Poetry do ill agree,

As the World says, and that's enough for me;