The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation

For some may laugh and swagger if they please,

But we must all conform that Love our Ease.

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Montagu also made an advantageous match in 1688 to a rich sexagenarian widow whose first marriage (six years before Montagu's birth) had been to his relation, the 3rd Earl of Manchester. When Prior heard the news, he composed a poem about how ‘Chamont’ would be elevated above his reach by the marriage, comparing the wedding to an apotheosis: ‘Pleased that the Friend was in the God improved.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Montagu, however, sent his old school friends assurances that the married state would not lessen his desire for ‘a constant friendship and correspondence’ with them.

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In reward for having escorted James II's younger daughter, Princess Anne, in her midnight escape to join the rebel forces in 1688, Dorset was appointed King William's Lord Chamberlain, the Court's chief functionary. Montagu, Prior and Stepney became popularly known as ‘Lord Dorset's Boys’, though Stepney at first received favours and ‘protection’ from Dorset only indirectly, and may not have met the Earl in person until a visit home from the German states in 1693. Prior remembered ‘Sneaking…among the Crew’ of ‘Crowding Folks with strange ill Faces’ who came to beg favours from Dorset after his appointment.

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While Prior was ‘sneaking’, Montagu's career advanced at speed, thanks to brilliant performances in the Commons. By 1692, Montagu was a Privy Counsellor, alongside Somers and Dorset, a Lord of the Treasury, and the youngest addition to the Whig Junto. Montagu won the King's particular favour by loyally supporting the army supply Bills and promoting a Treasury plan to raise a million-pound loan for the government—a loan identified by the nineteenth-century historian Macaulay as the ‘origin’ of England's national debt, and still admired by recent historians, such as D. W. Jones, for its ingenuity.

(#litres_trial_promo) Montagu thereafter became a dispenser of patronage in his own right—someone to whom Prior addressed epistolary poems, seeking patronage, much as Montagu had addressed Dorset only a few years earlier.

Montagu was also responsible for shepherding through Parliament the Act founding the Bank of England in 1694, in return for which he would gain the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Montagu personally pledged £2,000 (equivalent to some £235,000 today) to the Bank's first subscription, and was joined by many friends. Tonson, probably at the encouragement of Somers, subscribed £500. The new institution was closely tied to the interests of the Whig party, and to financing the Anglo-Dutch alliance. The Tories were less invested (literally and metaphorically) in finance capital. They felt increasingly insecure in the midst of this 1690s financial revolution, and Montagu was an easy figurehead for them to attack. His Tory enemies said Montagu was ‘a party-coloured, shallow, maggot-headed statesman’

(#litres_trial_promo) who caressed those who approached him with projects until he had all the details then mysteriously cooled towards them before stealing their ideas. Montagu thought of it merely as keeping an open door to proposals that might benefit the new nation.

While Montagu helped Stepney advance his diplomatic career, Dorset found a diplomatic posting for Prior in The Hague, the Anglo-Dutch allies' headquarters. Stepney often broke his journeys from Berlin back to England with a visit to Prior in The Hague, where the two would sit before ‘a good turf fire’,

(#litres_trial_promo) roasting chestnuts, getting drunk and offloading their professional and private problems. Prior's lover at the time, a cook-maid nicknamed ‘Flanders Jane’ whom Prior declared he loved ‘above Interest or lust’,

(#litres_trial_promo) would have refilled their glasses on these occasions. Stepney was meanwhile sowing his wild oats across central Europe during the early 1690s, writing frankly to a lady in Dresden who had romantic designs on him: ‘[T]o make love perfectly, methinks Body is as necessary an Ingredient as Brandy is in Punch. Your Wit and Friendship are very good sugar and nutmeg, but there must go something more to make the Dose complete.’

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At their sessions before the turf fire, Prior and Stepney also discussed the financial strain of living like gentleman-diplomats when they were entirely dependent upon the Treasury to reimburse their expenses. Both were aware that their humble births mattered more in Europe than at Westminster or Cambridge. Prior referred to himself as ‘Albion's meanest son’,

(#litres_trial_promo) while Stepney was hurt when someone told the Elector of Saxony he was not of noble birth, which prevented the Elector from inviting him to dine for a month. In answer, Montagu and Dorset had Stepney made a Gentleman of King William's Privy Chamber, and Montagu arranged an advance on Stepney's salary, for which Stepney thanked Montagu warmly, calling him his ‘good Angel at the Brink of the Pool’.

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On another occasion, Stepney told his mother he had declined a £1,000 personal loan from Montagu for reasons that show the men remained, in the early 1690s, more old school friends than patron and client: ‘[I]t is the last use any man should make of his friend, & which I should be sorry to be reduced to,’ Stepney declared.

(#litres_trial_promo) Prior had less scruple about begging for cash from his old friend: ‘If you can get me any ready money, it would be more charity than to give alms to the poorest dog that ever gave you a petition; if not, patience is a virtue, and a scrap or two of Horace must be my consolation.’

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Like Somers, Montagu believed in the Ciceronian ideal that literary endeavour was an essential qualification for being a great statesman, and if one was not writing oneself, then playing patron to poets was the next best thing. Montagu and Dorset therefore ensured that Tonson published the witty, self-mocking verses that both Prior and Stepney continued to write in between the ‘prose affairs’ of international diplomacy.

(#litres_trial_promo) Pursuing identical courses, and consulting one another on their poems in manuscript, they would not have guessed that Stepney would be remembered as one of England's first modern diplomats, while Prior would be remembered primarily as a poet.

Montagu, Prior and Stepney all wrote elegies on the occasion of Queen Mary's death in December 1694, to demonstrate their loyalty to the widowed King. The Tories had always felt more at ease with Mary, as a Stuart daughter, than with her husband's largely parliamentary claim to the throne, and Mary's death now meant William had to renew his bid for popular support. William's childlessness also placed increased importance on Mary's sister Anne, now William's heir apparent, and on Anne's choice of friends. From The Hague, Prior observed the political upheavals consequent upon Mary's death in a letter to Montagu:

These matters will be decided before the King's coming over, so we must have a vigilant eye. I call it ‘we’, for you, Sir, have always regarded my interest as if it were your own; and when I consider that you have taken your poor neighbour and made a friend of him, and solicited for that friend as if he had been your brother, I doubt not but you will have the reward you deserve (though a good while hence) in the Court of Heaven; and I the credentials I do not deserve to some Court or Republic a little nearer.

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Another writer to produce an elegy on Mary's death, published by Tonson, was a young Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, named Joseph Addison. Addison was, like Prior and Stepney, a product of the late seventeenth century's widening access to education. He had attended Charterhouse, a charitable school and hospital then located near to today's Barbican Centre that was considered one of the best grammar schools in England. It took in forty nominated scholars for free, alongside sixty fee-paying non-boarders or ‘town boys’.

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Like Westminster, Charterhouse ran a long, spartan day from six in the morning to six in the evening in summer, with an hour's later start in winter, and taught the classics (mainly Cicero and Horace) with a heavier dose of stick than carrot.

Entering as a scholarship boy in 1686, the 14-year-old Addison formed a close friendship with another scholar the same age, who would become his lifelong companion and collaborator. This boy, Richard (or ‘Dick’) Steele, had already been at the school for two years when Addison arrived.

Steele's father, an Anglo-Irish gentleman from Dublin, died in his early childhood, a fact Steele believed left him calamitously hypersensitive forever after. Steele dramatized the event in a later essay:

I remember I went into the Room where his Body lay, and my Mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my Battledore [a toy] in my Hand, and fell a-beating the Coffin, and calling Papa; for I know not how I had some slight Idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her Arms, and transported beyond all Patience of the silent Grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her Embrace, and told me in a Flood of Tears, Papa could not hear me and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under Ground, when he could never come to us again.

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Steele's mother—whom he remembered as ‘a very beautiful Woman, of a Noble Spirit’

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Steele's uncle was private secretary to the 1st Duke of Ormonde, the same Lord Lieutenant of Ireland served by Congreve's father, and it was Ormonde who, as a governor of Charterhouse, arranged for Steele's admittance. One letter from the schoolboy Steele to his patroness-aunt survives. It includes a formal apology for not writing more often, mixed with a pained awareness of his dependency, expressed with less than complete humility: ‘Madam, should I express my gratitude for every benefit I receive at Your Ladyship's and my good Uncle, I should never sit down to meat but I must write a letter when I rise from table.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Steele addressed successive patrons with similarly mixed feelings throughout his life.

Their intellects, and the loss of their mothers when they were 12, were what Addison and Steele had in common; the rest was all contrast. Steele was short and square-bodied, with a ‘dusky’ complexion that, combined with his fading Irish accent, would have been interpreted by contemporaries as indicating lowly birth;

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Addison was tall for his age, with pale blue eyes and the pallor of a bookworm. Soon the advantage of Steele's previous years at the school was erased as he came to idolize his new friend.

Addison invited Steele home for the holidays. Addison's father was Dean of Lichfield, having settled there after an exotic life as chaplain to the British garrisons at Dunkirk and Tangier. Addison had immense respect for his father, who imbued him with a profound belief in selfcontrol. In 1686, the Dean was raising four children alone—three boys and a girl, of whom Joseph was the oldest. Steele admired how the Dean taught his sons to vie for his favour and called it ‘an unspeakable Pleasure to visit or sit at a Meal in that Family’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Steele was warmly welcomed into the Lichfield deanery that school holiday, and recalled how Addison's father ‘loved me like one of them’.

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Addison only stayed at Charterhouse for a year before being elected to his father's former Oxford college, Queen's, at the age of 15. This confirmed Steele's belief in Addison's superiority; Steele remained ever after several steps behind his friend academically. Steele entered Christ Church, Oxford, in December 1689, by which time Addison had been elected to one of the ‘demyships’ (scholarships offering free lodging) at Magdalen College. Christ Church, to which Steele was sent thanks to his uncle's connections, did not suit him well. It had stood on the losing side of the previous year's Revolutionary politics (in contrast to Magdalen, which had resisted James II's demands) and contained more nobly born students than the rest of Oxford's colleges. When Steele went up, his aunt gave him a pair of gloves and a sword to help him fit in.

After a year, Steele asked his uncle to pull strings with the Dean of Christ Church to get him a scholarship, reporting that though he had gained his tutor's respect, ‘these places are not given by merit but are secured by friends’.

(#litres_trial_promo) When his uncle's efforts failed to produce the scholarship, Steele moved to Merton College to accept one there instead. Steele left Merton in May 1692 and enlisted in the army as a ‘wretched common Trooper’,

(#litres_trial_promo) since he lacked the funds to buy an officer's commission. Years later, Steele recalled Oxford students who window-shopped, played billiards and bowls, and who were ‘seized all over with a general Inability, Indolence and Weariness, and a certain Impatience of the Place they are in’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Steele sounds as though he was well acquainted with these ‘loungers’, but he probably left university voluntarily, out of patriotic duty, rather than because he was expelled, as Jonathan Swift later hinted. Steele would have watched the fireworks in Oxford celebrating the Treaty of Limerick after William's victory in Ireland, and the troops returning from the Irish wars. Though Steele missed his chance to participate in this Protestant victory in his homeland, he could still serve the Protestant cause on the Continent. Since the regiment he joined belonged to his uncle's patron's son, enlisting may also have been a direct order from his uncle that Steele could not refuse.

Addison did not feel a similar pull towards the adventure of war. He remained to wander the water walks and gardens of Magdalen, translating and composing Latin poetry to the acclaim of his fellow academics. These pastimes between teaching duties sound more plausible from what we know of Addison than his later confessional lines referring to his ‘heedless steps’ upon ‘the slippery paths of youth’.