The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation

By now the Club had expanded beyond the first huddle of friends before Mr Cat's pie-oven, though it is uncertain whether it had already reached its later cap of thirty-nine members. Certainly a number of other dukes and earls had been admitted, and after Somerset finished the grace, these nobles were first to offer their plates to the carving man. They also initiated all calls for wine throughout the meal. The Kit-Cats' belief that it was vulgar to over-emphasize such distinctions of rank, however, would have blunted many rules of 1690s etiquette, good English breeding showing itself ‘most where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The very English prejudice by which the confidence to flout class divides is considered the sign of real class was just emerging.

Some class divisions were beyond flouting, however: a number of waiters—footmen brought by the guests mixed with ‘drawers’ from the tavern below—would have stood discreetly against the walls for long hours. These silent observers took their opinions of the Kit-Cat Club to their graves, but one such ‘Spectator of Gentlemen at Dinner for many Years’ complained how masters expected their servants to be sober and chaste when the masters themselves—with the advantages of education and property—could not exercise the same self-control.

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The waiters would have laid out the first course, including ‘pottages’ (stewy soups) and large joints of meat, before the Club members arrived. Dorset, in line with his other Restoration tastes, loved lavish banquets where diners ‘devour Fowl, Fish and Flesh; swallow Oil and Vinegar, Wines and Spices; throw down Salads of twenty different Herbs, Sauces of a hundred Ingredients, Confections and Fruits of numberless Sweets and Flavours’.

(#litres_trial_promo) By mid-winter, however, the contributions of game and fresh produce, brought to town at the end of the summer from the landed members' estates, would have been running out. If there were a separate dessert course, it would likely have involved fruit and nuts in preserving syrups, or a spiced rice pudding called a ‘whitepot’.

The vogue for decorative dishes in symmetrical or pyramidical shapes did not start until the latter part of the eighteenth century, so the Kit-Cat pies, with their decorative pastry, would have been the likely centrepieces. The menu almost certainly included native oysters, available then like sturgeon and lobster in cheap plenitude from the Thames. Fish, such as anchovy, was also used to make salty relishes to accompany meat, and passed around, like salt, on the tip of one's knife. Cutlery was just becoming commonplace, but using fingers and fingerbowls remained perfectly acceptable.

Eating the main meal of the day with friends in the mid-afternoon was an increasingly fashionable pastime, but also a civilizing duty. Only beasts, Epicurus taught them, dined alone. Congreve reflected that he disliked ‘seeing things that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature. I don't know how it is with others, but I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a Monkey without very Mortifying Reflections, though I never heard anything to the Contrary, why that Creature is not Originally of a Distinct Species.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Kit-Cat dinners demonstrated, among other more overt purposes, the members' distance from the apes—or, more to the point, from the London ‘mob’ outdoors. Public dining also, implicitly, demonstrated men's distance from women. Being a lady in this period required rejection of physical appetites, for food as for sex. It was no more polite for a woman to say she was hungry, or let men see her eating in public, than to mention if she was sweaty or lustful. The fact that the Kit-Cat was a dining club should therefore be seen as the corollary of its exclusively masculine nature; the first in a long line of clubs where men went to escape their uneducated wives and what they regarded as the intellectual wasteland of the domestic dinner table.

The men seated around the tavern table in 1697 brought a variety of experiences, worries and needs to the Club. Montagu, now 36, had been appointed First Lord of the Treasury in May, following the removal of the Tory-leaning Sidney Godolphin (known to his contemporaries and throughout this book as Lord Godolphin). Montagu had received this post only after managing, by the skin of his teeth, to save the country from financial mismanagement. In 1695, he and Somers had hatched a plan for a national recoinage, intended to deal with the problem of clipped coins. The policy was a disaster, however, forcing the new-minted Bank of England to renege on contracts such that army paymasters could not obtain supplies. With troops and sailors on starvation rations and the verge of mass desertion, the Dutch had had to bail out the English for several months. Luckily, a parallel economic crisis broke in France, leading both sides to look with sudden favour upon peace talks. Montagu extended £5 million of debt for just long enough to conclude such talks at William's palace of Ryswick, near The Hague, where Prior acted as his eyes and ears, checking the draft treaty's translations and sending copies back to Montagu, alongside cases of duty-free wine. The Treaty of Ryswick was concluded in September 1697. Among its terms was the return of North America to its state of pre-war division between France and England.

The conclusion to the War of the League of Augsburg, however, left Montagu in an even more difficult economic position than before: peace did not immediately reduce the national debt, while making it harder to justify the taxation of landowners needed to service that debt. Physically and mentally exhausted, Montagu would therefore have come to the Kit-Cat that winter from his townhouse on Jermyn Street not only hoping to consolidate his political support but also to find solace in his old hobby of poetry and in his childhood friends.

This winter was the first time the Earl of Dorset and his three ‘Boys’ had been reunited in London for several years. Dorset, still at the Kit-Cat Club's ‘suckling centre’,

(#litres_trial_promo) had been sanguine when the King paid him off handsomely to resign as Lord Chamberlain in April, so that the place could be given to a Dutch royal favourite. Dorset was relieved, in fact, to relinquish a post that required him, against his nature (and ironically in light of his past indiscretions), to play state censor of the theatres. The resignation, however, left Dorset with fewer occasions to see his Privy Council friends and greater interest, like Somerset, in attending the Kit-Cat Club to hear Court and Commons gossip. By 1697, several of Dorset's other old friends from his days of youthful debauchery were also members. Most notable among these was John Vaughan, 3rd Earl of Carbery, described by Pepys as ‘one of the lewdest fellows of the age’

(#litres_trial_promo) and particularly notorious for having sold his Welsh servants into slavery in Jamaica.

Dorset's original ‘Boy’, Matt Prior, was now one of the most dominant, entertaining personalities at the table, said to leave ‘no elbow room for others’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He was in London only briefly, having returned from the Peace Congress at Ryswick and expecting to be sent next to a position in Ireland he had pulled several strings to obtain. He had pleaded with Montagu for a post lucrative enough that he could ‘come home again to dedicate the rest of his life amicitiae aeternae, and to the commands of my Master’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Clearly, Montagu's rapid rise had altered their relationship: they were no longer pretended equals, but master and servant. In January 1698, however, Prior went not to Dublin but to the English embassy in Paris. By the time he departed for France, he would be suffering from weak lungs, which smokefilled nights at the Kit-Cat had aggravated.

Stepney was also enjoying a brief sojourn in London, having returned in September after a series of postings in Hesse-Cassel, the Palatinate and Trier. By this time, Stepney was considered an expert on tumultuous central European affairs. He was, therefore, an important international informant to the Whig Junto, though his London bosses thought he cared too much about his own popularity in foreign Courts, to the possible detriment of England's interests. At the beginning of the year, travelling back and forth across central Europe between Anthonie Heinsius, Grand Pensionary of Holland, and the various German rulers (‘Electors’) within William's alliance, Stepney had told Montagu he could not take much more of ‘this vagabond life which is full of care and I fear will end in nothing but debts’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Such complaints, combined with the end of the war, provided an excuse to bring Stepney home and remind him of his native loyalties. There were few better places to do this than at the Kit-Cat Club.

Prior and Stepney had profited from Montagu's rise to power. Montagu ensured Stepney was admitted to the Commission for Trade and Plantations (or ‘Board of Trade’), which Somers had helped establish the previous year, and of which Montagu was an ex officio member. The Commission later became the administrative foundation of Britain's colonial empire. Stepney received his place in June 1697, with a £1,000 salary, and attended his first meeting after returning to London that September. It happened to be a historic meeting: the first time that independent statistics were presented to a government body with the intention of guiding economic policy along scientific lines.

Montagu also admitted Prior and Stepney as Fellows of the Royal Society, of which he was President. The Society had started as a private members' club, dedicated to furthering scientific knowledge, in a London tavern in 1660. After 1677, however, the Society had published no reports for nearly forty years, even though 1687–97 was a decade of high-voltage scientific and mathematical creativity following the publication of Newton's Principia. Though the Kit-Cat Club existed on the verge of the first mechanical-industrial age, none of its members were what we would consider scientists. Dorset and Somers were also Royal Society Fellows, but such Kit-Cats were so honoured because they had influence at Court, not because they were engaged in the work of empirical or experimental discovery.

Since 1695, Somers had been among the seven regents administering England during the King's absences, and his loyalty was rewarded in December 1697 when he finally accepted a barony, alongside valuable estates in Surrey to finance the expense of this peerage. Somers was by then Lord Chancellor, overseeing the appointment of all judges and Justices of the Peace. He had spent the summer in retirement at Clapham and Tunbridge, in poor health, but by the winter he was back at Powys House, in daily contact with Montagu and the two other Junto lords. The Kit-Cat Club was one of the key venues where three of the four Junto lords conferred outside Whitehall. Its congenial, alcohol-mellowed atmosphere no doubt minimized the risk of division while they argued policy and political strategy.

The third Junto Kit-Cat, attending this dinner besides Montagu and Somers, was Baron Wharton. A 49-year-old, large-souled man with a pock-scarred, open face that his contemporaries felt better suited to a tavern keeper than a baron, ‘Tom’ Wharton had composed a marching tune called ‘Lillibullero’ that became the popular anthem of the Glorious Revolution. Afterwards, it had been he who proposed that William and Mary should reign jointly, and, for the better part of the decade, Wharton was Somers' and Montagu's closest political ally and the Whig party's unofficial manager. Wharton and Montagu defined the Junto's tactics by leveraging their way into power through the collective strength of their followers in the Commons. Now, in 1697, Wharton remained a man to be reckoned with, thanks to extensive electoral influence derived from his estates and income (some £13,000 per annum, equivalent to around £1.2 million today).

His influence also derived from his leadership of the Dissenters' wing of the Whig party. Raised a Calvinist in the era of Charles II's anti-Dissenter Test Acts, young Wharton had been barred from attending Oxbridge, and educated at home by tutors and among the Huguenots in France. Throughout his career, promoting toleration of Dissent was his personal crusade, even as he embraced the apparent hypocrisy of ‘conforming’ to the Church of England in order to hold public office himself. Sitting at this Kit-Cat dinner, however, Wharton was not feeling at the top of his game; he had not won a place in the King's recently reshuffled ministry. Wharton was Comptroller of William's Household and was given various appointments in April—Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, Chief Justice of Eyre, and Warden of the royal forests south of the Trent—but these were far from the real power he coveted. Compared to his younger Junto colleague Montagu, Wharton felt underappreciated.

To be a Kit-Cat now required more, in terms of political allegiance, than being a Whig: it required allegiance to the Junto (although the fourth Junto member, Lord Orford, was never a Kit-Cat). Accordingly, the six or so young MPs who belonged to the Club during these early years were each aligned to a Kit-Cat patron.

(#litres_trial_promo) At this dinner, they would have tried to impress their patrons when the Club's conversation turned to politics and discussion of the war's end. Despite public celebrations around a temporary triumphal arch constructed in St James's Square, and celebratory poems on the new peace, insiders like Montagu and Somers understood that the peace of Ryswick was merely a breathing space in which to rearm. Louis XIV had recognized William III as lawful King of England, and promised not to aid any further Jacobite invasions like the attempt he had funded in 1692, but too much remained at stake for the peace to be more than an uneasy truce.

The Treaty of Ryswick left unresolved the fundamental question of who would succeed the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, Carlos II, and so control the balance of power in Europe. William therefore wished to maintain a ‘standing army’ of over 24,000 men, but needed Parliament's consent. The Junto members supported this policy, and were therefore considered leaders of the ‘Court Whigs’, while a number of other ‘Country Whig’ MPs formed an opposition coalition with the Tories. The Country Whigs opposed the standing army, believing that the King might abuse it and turn it into a tool of domestic tyranny, while the Tory landowners opposed the tax burden of paying for it. The young MP Robert Harley headed this anti-Junto coalition, and exchanged fierce words with Montagu over the issue in the Commons that winter. Montagu argued ‘that the Nation was still unsettled, and not quite delivered from the Fear of King James; that the Adherents to that abdicated Prince were as bold and numerous as ever; and he himself [James II] still protected by the French King, who, having as yet dismissed none of his Troops, was still as formidable as before’.

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Harley and his followers, who met at the Grecian tavern on the Strand, organized propaganda, calling for the army to be reduced to its 1680 levels. In response, Somers authored an anonymous pamphlet, in the form of a letter to the King, defending the royal policy. In it he argued that, in the end, ‘we must trust England to a House of Commons, that is to itself’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a debate about the balance between national security and civil liberties. The Kit-Cat Club was a place for Somers to run this pamphlet's arguments past his friends, and to encourage others to pick up a pen in service of Court policy. Prior supported Montagu and Somers with A New Answer to An Argument against a Standing Army (1697)—a poem that asked:

Would they discreetly break that Sword,

By which their Freedom was restored,

And put their Trust in Louis' Word?

It concluded that those opposing a standing army in the name of limiting William's powers would ironically find themselves responsible for the return of the more absolutist Stuarts. Organizing production of such propaganda was one of the Kit-Cat Club's earliest collective political activities.

The standing army debate was the first face-off between Harley and the Junto—a foretaste of the rivalry that would flare over a decade later and almost destroy the Junto Whigs and the Kit-Cat Club. In 1697, Harley had triumphed: a Commons resolution was passed that a Disbanding Bill should be introduced. This crisis, and analysis of the Junto's tactics in the press and in the Commons, would therefore have carried the Kit-Cats' conversation through several courses.

The literary conversation of the Club that winter is equally easy to deduce. Around half of the members had just subscribed to Dryden's new translation of the Works of Virgil, which Tonson had published with an introduction by Addison. Dryden said the book was only for the ‘most Judicious’ audience. Though the 500 subscribers were both Whig and Tory, and Dryden, with his Jacobite sympathies, gave the work several Tory dedications, the publication still had a distinctly Whiggish colouring; the author was grimly amused, for example, to find Tonson had made an illustration of the hero Aeneas bear a marked resemblance to King William.

Subscription editions were a bargain way for the nobility to patronize writers: a hybrid solution at a time before the general public was literate and prosperous enough to act as the greatest patron of them all. By advertising their names as subscribers in the publications, aristocrats shifted from commissioning books towards being their celebrity promoters. This was Tonson's answer to issuing more specialist or scholarly works with high unit costs. In the case of Dryden's Virgil, besides the deluxe editions sent to the subscribers, Tonson also published a cheap edition, for the general public to buy from his shop. Dryden and Tonson's collaborations before the Kit-Cat's foundation had helped popularize classical translation in England, and Dryden and Congreve's translation of Juvenal and Persius in 1693 ushered in the notion of the translated author, as Dryden put it, ‘speak[ing] that kind of English, which he would have spoken had he lived in England, and Written to this Age’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Such accessible publications, with their attractive illustrations and lack of scholarly paraphernalia, were part of the Kit-Cat's patriotic agenda to better educate their literate countrymen and did much to pave the way for the neoclassical populism of the later eighteenth century.

One Kit-Cat subscriber to The Works of Virgil, whom Dryden described as ‘without flattery, the best Critic of our Nation’,

(#litres_trial_promo) was William Walsh. Walsh's reputation as a critic must have been based on his conversation at the Witty Club rather than his writing, since what little Walsh had published (through Tonson) was mostly amorous poetry and boasts of his exploits with women. Walsh was an object of ridicule for his excessive love of fine clothing and his wig containing over three pounds of powder that produced little puffs of cloud with every sharp movement of his head. In 1697, Walsh was in his mid-thirties and beginning to suspect his name would not become immortal. His estate, by this date, was reportedly ‘reduced to about £300 a year, of which his mother has the greatest part’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Though he had been seeking patronage from Somers since 1693, this winter marked a turning point, after which Somers' support was decisive in getting Walsh elected to a parliamentary seat for Worcestershire.

At Dryden's Witty Club, Walsh had drunk and quipped with Dr Samuel Garth, who was now also his fellow Kit-Cat. Garth attended that winter, eager to see Stepney and Prior after their long stints overseas. Garth had known ‘Lord Dorset's Boys’ at Cambridge and had written a poem praising Prior and Stepney as the best and brightest hopes of English literature. Like them, Garth had had to make his own way in the world after receiving a mere £10 legacy from his family. Now, at 37, he was a respected physician, but still writing poetry—largely revisions of his mock-epic Dispensary. He had subscribed five guineas (some £700 today) to Dryden's Virgil.

Though many Kit-Cat patrons dabbled in authorship, there was no real risk of confusing the bluebloods with the literary thoroughbreds at the Club's table. At this meeting of 1697, Congreve was the leading literary man. He was overseeing a new production at Inner Temple of his three-year-old hit, Love for Love (1694). This play, his third, was originally the debut production of a new theatre company that had splintered off from the United Company in 1695. The defection had been led by Bracey's mentors, the Bettertons, so she went with them, and her suitor Congreve devotedly followed, promising to write for the new company. More importantly, Congreve used his credit with Dorset to obtain an audience with the King for Bracey and the Bettertons, thereby gaining a royal charter for their new company. Congreve was offered shares in it by way of thanks.

Betterton's company set up in an old tennis court building at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the King himself was in the audience on the opening night. Bracey played the complex lead role of Angelica in Love for Love, and also spoke the Epilogue, in which Congreve had her complain of men who ‘wanting ready cash to pay for hearts, / They top their learning on us, and their parts.’ There may have been self-mockery in this, given the lewd pun in ‘parts’ and the fact that Congreve certainly remained short of ‘ready cash’ at that date.

Montagu showed his approval of Love for Love by appointing Congreve in March 1695 to a commission for regulating and licensing hackney and stagecoaches, with a salary of £100 (around £10,000 today) plus a percentage fee for each licence issued. Congreve could lease out the actual work to a clerk at a much smaller salary, pocketing the difference. This commission was a clear example of the Kit-Cat Club's modus operandi for literary patronage, the patrons frequently dispensing public offices rather than cash from their own private pockets. (Such ‘jobs for the boys’ were, of course, of little use to the female authors whom Tonson published, the most notable of whom were Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips and Susanna Centlivre.)

In April 1697, Congreve was further made one of eleven managers of the Malt Lottery, a government scheme for raising duties on malt used for brewing and distilling. The following month, Montagu added yet another post for licensing hawkers and pedlars. All this added up to a secure but still modest income for the playwright. Congreve's work in progress that winter was a poem, ‘The Birth of the Muse’, which would be dedicated in gratitude to Montagu, ‘by turns the Patron and the Friend’, when Tonson printed it the following year.

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Congreve's involvement made Montagu into a ‘great favourer’ of Betterton's new theatre company, in preference to the United Company at Drury Lane.

(#litres_trial_promo) Though the two companies' rivalry was never partisan, both being essentially Whig, the Kit-Cats clearly backed the new house at Lincoln's Inn. Montagu, who, like Tonson and Somers, had taken a sudden interest in Vanbrugh's career after the success of The Relapse the previous winter, saw Vanbrugh's second comedy, The Provok'd Wife, in manuscript and persuaded (perhaps paid) the playwright to adapt it to better suit Betterton's company. For Vanbrugh, this was a smart move, as he now had access to a more talented cast: The Provok'd Wife's portrayal of marital misery was brilliantly brought to life by Mr Betterton, now in his sixties, and the ageing actress Mrs Barry. Bracey played Belinda.

In 1697, therefore, Congreve and Vanbrugh were showing their work on the same stage. They avoided direct competition thanks to the fact that Congreve produced a tragedy instead of a comedy for the same season as Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife. Congreve's tragedy was The Mourning Bride and, as usual, the lead role was written for his beloved Bracey. Both Vanbrugh's comedy and Congreve's tragedy were hits, with the playhouse ‘full to the last’.