The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation

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.17

Congreve's involvement made Montagu into a ‘great favourer’ of Betterton's new theatre company, in preference to the United Company at Drury Lane.18 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’.19 When his plays gained universal applause, Vanbrugh, flamboyant and sociable, relished the attention. Congreve pushed himself forward in less obvious ways: when he put his name as author on a playbill in 1699, Dryden remarked that this was ‘a new manner of proceeding, at least in England’.20

A contemporary critic said Vanbrugh's writing seemed ‘no more than his common Conversation committed to Paper’.21 This is tribute to the artfulness of 1690s conversation as much as to the seeming artlessness of Vanbrugh's writing, and if conversation was an art form, the Kit-Cat Club was its medium—the reality that Vanbrugh and Congreve refined and amplified. Indeed, their shared love of writing in naturalistic speech explains their general preference for comedy over tragedy, a genre in which more formal verse was expected. The playwrights' writing methods, however, were stark contrasts: while Vanbrugh rapidly churned out ‘new’ plays translated from classical or French sources, Congreve wrote and revised laboriously, relying on original if convoluted plots.

The surprising absence of reference to one another's work in their critical writings, and the fact that Congreve's library did not contain a single Vanbrugh play when it was sold after his death, suggest rivalry between the two men. On the other hand, there are generous compliments to Vanbrugh's ‘sprightly’ talent in two anthologies by Congreve's close friends,22 and Congreve would have a middle-aged portrait of himself painted reading a Vanbrugh play.

Congreve explained to an old friend from Kilkenny School, Joe Keally: ‘I need not be very much alone, but I choose it, rather than to conform myself to the manners of my Court or chocolate-house acquaintance.’23 It was as if Congreve found adopting his public mask—his Kit-Cat persona as a ‘man of wit’—almost an insult to his intelligence; as if he hated to feel like a trained monkey brought in for the amusement of his literary patrons. Congreve's plays contain characters that can be viewed as at least partial caricatures of the less intellectual Kit-Cat patrons: in The Double Dealer, for example, Congreve presents the peers of England as sexually and intellectually impotent. Their pretensions as wits and writers are the idle pastimes of trivial minds, and Lord Froth fancies himself a theatre critic who thinks he will look more knowledgeable if he does not laugh at a play's jokes. In Love for Love, Sir Sampson mocks the servant Jeremy for having ideas above his station, yet Jeremy is better educated than a ‘gentleman’ named Tattle, who thinks the head of the Nile is a Privy Counsellor. Such were the literary messages by which Kit-Cat authors began to detach class from birth, and pin it more squarely on a person's taste and education. It was not a new comedic device to show servants sharper than their masters, but this time it had a fresh and more pointed cynicism. At the Kit-Cat that evening in winter 1697, however, the dukes and earls seated around Congreve detected no disdain or boredom lurking beneath his indulgent smile and patient remarks: ‘No one, after a joyful Evening, can reflect upon an Expression of Mr Congreve's that dwells upon him with pain,’ Steele later recalled.24

The end of the meal would have been signalled by Tonson, as Secretary, or by Somerset, as highest in rank, throwing down his napkin and calling for a larger washbowl. Then, after the board was cleared of the final course, the servants brought ‘every man his bottle and a clean glass’,25 and Tonson turned the diners' attentions to the only official order of business: the nomination of ‘beauties’, and the recitation of light verses in their honour. Tonson, as one of Prior's poems put it, ‘bawls out to the Club for a toast’.26

As a drinking and dining society first and foremost—Addison called it a club ‘founded upon Eating and Drinking’27—the Kit-Cat Club was contemporaneous with another known as ‘The Knights of the Toast’ or ‘The Toasters’. These Toasters raised their glasses to nominated ‘beauties’ among the ladies of the town, without, it would seem, any ulterior political or cultural motive. They were just men who fancied themselves gallant connoisseurs of fine wine and women, as mocked by a 1698 ballad depicting them flirting outrageously during a church sermon. At least seven men were members of both clubs. Many Toasters never joined the Kit-Cat Club, however, disqualified from the latter by their Toryism.

Steele wrote the most famous description of how toasting a beauty worked:

The Manner of her Inauguration is much like that of the Choice of a Doge in Venice; it is performed by Balloting; and when she is so chosen, she reigns indisputably for that ensuing Year; but must be elected anew to prolong her Empire a Moment beyond it. When she is regularly chosen, her Name is written with a Diamond on a Drinking glass. The Hieroglyphic of the Diamond is to show her that her Value is imaginary; and that of the Glass, to acquaint her that her Condition is frail, and depends on the Hand which holds her.28

A manuscript letter confirms that this passage describes not only the Toasters' but also the Kit-Cats' ritual and that a complimentary verse on each toasted beauty was engraved beside the name on each glass.29 No glass complete with lady's name or verse appears to have survived the centuries. (The glasses today known as ‘Kit-Cat’ style are erroneously named and date from the later eighteenth century.) That the toasting was in absentia allowed toasts to be made by married men, to married women. A Tory authoress named Mary Astell sarcastically rebuked the Kit-Cats for how their toasting could bring respectable society ladies unwanted attention: ‘When an Ill-bred Fellow endeavours to protect a Wife, or Daughter, or other virtuous Woman from your very Civil Addresses, your noble Courage never fails of being roused upon such great Provocations.’30

The only two essential qualifications to be a Kit-Cat toast were beauty and Whiggery. Many women were chosen as toasts purely as compliments to their fathers, uncles or husbands. Many were girls in their teens, toasted unashamedly by middle-aged men in a period when the legal minimum age for marrying or having sex with a girl was ten, and when a male reader could write a letter to a paper protesting that it was a gentleman's natural privilege to fornicate with ‘little raw unthinking Girls’.31

Steele's statement that women should ‘consider themselves, as they ought, no other than an additional Part of the Species…shining Ornaments to their Fathers, Husbands, Brothers or Children’32 may be belittling, but an ornamental role was for many women an improvement upon living as victims of casual molestation or beating. The Kit-Cat members set themselves up as gallant models for reforming men like Vanbrugh's character Sir John Brute in The Provok'd Wife, who beats his wife simply because he has the right to do so. Their rituals were the beginnings of a more ‘polite’ and chivalric treatment of women that would become codified in the later eighteenth century. A few of their toasts contain salacious puns, but they are relatively lacking in libido compared to the verses of the earlier Restoration rakes. Dorset when young, for example, had asked: ‘For what but Cunt, and Prick, does raise / Our thoughts to Songs, and Roundelays?’33

Now the answer seemed to be that the one-upmanship of literary competition was as rousing as lust. A 1700 poem, The Patentee, contrasts the Kit-Cats ‘swollen with wit’ to the Knights of the Toast ‘with lechery lean’,34 suggesting not only that the Toasters were less overweight, but also that they composed toasts to seduce women, while the Kit-Cats wrote more for the sake of impressing one another.

As a prologue to the nominations of toasted beauties for 1697, Congreve would have recited a standard ‘Oath of the Toast’:

By Bacchus and by Venus Swear

That you will only name the fair

When chains you at the present wear

And so let Wit with Wine go round

And she you love prove kind and sound.35

No list of toasted beauties exists this early in the Kit-Cat Club's history, though it is likely that one of the five surviving verses dedicated to Lady Carlisle dates from this period. She was the wife of the 28-year-old Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, having married him when he was 19 and she just 13. Dr Garth sought the patronage of Carlisle when he composed and recited the following toast to Lady Carlisle:

Carlisle's a name can every Muse inspire,

To Carlisle fill the Glass and tune the Lyre.

With his loved Bays the God of day shall Crown,

Her Wit and Beauty equal to his own.

It is uncertain how boisterous Kit-Cat toasting became. If the texts of the Kit-Cat toasts are anything to go by, the atmosphere was ludic but not lewd. When Montagu once sent poetry to Stepney in Hamburg, however, he had added with a wink that ‘There are some others which are fitter to create mirth over a glass of wine than to be put into writing.’36 One example may be a poem that survives among the Kit-Cat manuscripts about a lady's use of a massive candle as a dildo. Such poetry, produced alongside the toasts but unfit to be published by Tonson's press, would have been another obvious reason for keeping women away from Kit-Cat meetings. This evening, however, an exception would be made.

Though there seems to have been a rule that members could not toast their own wives, one member decided that evening, ‘on a whim’, to make the unusual nomination of his own daughter. The member was a widower named Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl of Kingston-upon Hull. Kingston argued that his daughter, Mary Pierrepont, though not yet 8, was far prettier than any of the candidates on the list. No objection was made to Mary's age, but there was another rule that forbade members from electing a lady whom they had never seen. ‘Then you shall see her,’ declared the Earl, and ‘in the gaiety of the moment’ sent orders to a house in the village of Chelsea, where Mary was then lodging, to have the child finely dressed and brought to him at the tavern.37

By the time Mary reached Gray's Inn, the other toasts had been balloted and drunk. Entering the sybaritic atmosphere of that tavern room was, by her own account, an overwhelming experience for the sheltered girl: dozens of men around the table and spitting fire, all eyes fixed on her, greasy chins shining, like the silver and pewter, in the guttering candlelight, the stinking smoke from their long thin pipes mixed with the stew of their bodies and the whiff of the piss-pot in the corner. She must have first gone to curtsy to her handsome 30-year-old father, seeking his approbation for her outfit, which, in the style of the 1690s, was much like a grown woman's in miniature. Her heart beat nervously against her stays.

Years later, Lady Mary recalled she was received ‘with acclamations’ and ‘her claim [as a toast] unanimously allowed’.38 The members, raising their brimming glasses in her direction, then drank her health. Pride blushed over the little girl's face under the spotlight of the men's attentions and stayed with her for years afterwards as a vivid memory—a highlight, she said, of her life: ‘Pleasure…was too poor a word to express [my] sensations. They amounted to ecstasy; never again…did [I] pass so happy a day.’39 She is the only Kit-Cat toast to leave us a proud record, albeit verbal and repeated perhaps inaccurately by her granddaughter, of how it felt to be so honoured.

Lady Mary's name was then ‘engraved in due form upon a drinkingglass’.40 She certainly saw the glasses, since in one of her private letters as an adult she laughs about a chamber pot being engraved like a Kit-Cat glass. She was also, it seems, toasted by the Club as an adult, in 1712 and 1714, though no verses in her honour have survived.

The image of the 8-year-old ‘kitten’ being handed round by the Kit-Cats, including so many members of the King's Cabinet, is a striking embodiment of patriarchy. A woman's beauty equated to tangible value on the marriage market, and Mary Pierrepont would later confound her own beauty's ‘value’ in this sense by eloping with her preferred suitor, who could not pay her father's asking price. Under her married name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, her poetry, letters and conversation would then win her a reputation as the most brilliant female wit of her generation.

Lady Mary attributed her own wit partly to Congreve, who was to take as much interest in her mind as her beauty as she grew up, and whom she described as her wittiest friend. Though her father was, like most gentlemen of his generation, unconcerned with his daughter's education, Mary secretly educated herself to a high level starting the year after she visited the Club. Lady Mary is also remembered for bringing the concept of vaccination back to England from Turkey, introducing this practice into British society by convincing her aristocratic friends to try it. She thereby saved future generations from smallpox's life-threatening risk and the disfigurement she herself suffered in 1715, a year after she was last toasted as a beauty by the Kit-Cats.

Writing three years before this 1697 meeting took place, Mary Astell asked her fellow Englishwomen: ‘How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden, to make a fine show and be good for nothing?’41 Astell believed the way forward was through female education and therefore tried to form an early female academy. It would not be until the succeeding generation, however, that women would see far greater, albeit short-lived, educational opportunities. By the mid-1760s, Elizabeth Montagu and her bluestocking friends would be able to sit and discuss books and politics with willing men, in imitation of the French salons; in 1697, such a mixed gathering was unthinkable.

We know the Club could carouse until the early morning hours. Dawn may even have been breaking by the time Kingston took his daughter home. Tonson would not have covered the enormous bill of every meeting now that the Club was so rich in noble patrons. Ned Ward said the Kit-Cat wits performed their verses and then the richer members ‘would manifest by their Liberality, when the Reckoning came to be paid, the Satisfaction they had found in the witty Discourses of their wiser Brethren’.42

Stupefied with wine, the members said their loud farewells, leaving the exhausted servants of the Cat and Fiddle to deal with the feast's debris. Linkmen carrying lanterns were waiting outside to escort those who did not have carriages. From the overheated tavern, the Kit-Cats emerged into the damp, foggy night air in the labyrinthine alleys south of Gray's Inn. Wharton headed back to Gerrard Street, Somers to Powys House, Somerset to Northumberland House on the Strand, Carlisle to King's Square, Vanbrugh to his lodgings next to the Banqueting House in Whitehall, and Congreve and Tonson returned together to their shared house on Fleet Street. Unified by their Whig beliefs and an implied promise of mutual support, they had fortified themselves against the political risks that the final years of the 1690s would throw at them.

V CULTURE WARS

There the dread phalanx of reformers come,

Sworn foes to wit, as Carthage was to Rome,

Their ears so sanctified, no scenes can please,

But heavy hymns or pensive homilies.

DR SAMUEL GARTH,

Prologue to Squire Trelooby (1704)1

THE KIT-CAT MEMBERS' relaxed attitudes to religion and morality were both ahead of their time, predicting later Georgian rationalism, and a remnant of the Restoration rakes' godless cynicism. As opinion-makers, the Kit-Cats tried to promote religious tolerance and moderation, in reaction to the ‘enthusiasm’ (fanaticism) they felt had inflamed the Civil War, the persecution they associated with Catholicism, and, as Voltaire noted when he saw the crowds in the Royal Exchange, because toleration was good for business. Although there was ‘less Appearance of Religion in [England], than any other neighbouring State or Kingdom’,2 many of the ‘middling sort’ who were profiting most from the growth of trade and commerce in the 1690s were devout Protestant churchgoers who felt they were clinging to the remnants of Christian morality amid a ‘debauched age’.3

The beginning of a correlation between one's faith and social position showed itself in the theatres where there was a mismatch between the censorious bourgeois audiences after 1688, on whom the permanently near-bankrupt theatres were dependent, and the authors who were still writing for a small, elite intelligentsia of morally and religiously liberal patrons. The Kit-Cats and their friends could support a playhouse for one night, but theatre managers needed the plays to be uncontroversial to draw regular crowds. All this came to a head in the Kit-Cats' battle with clergyman Jeremy Collier.

In April 1696, Collier, a middle-aged Cambridgeshire clergyman, attended the Tyburn execution of two men condemned for plotting to assassinate King William. Alongside his fellow ‘non-jurors’ (clergymen who had refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchy), Collier ascended the scaffold and, by laying on hands, offered the plotters absolution for their treachery. Since this was a serious crime under English law, Collier thereby condemned himself to living as an outlaw. Over the following months, he published, semianonymously and from hiding, views that challenged King William's ‘false’ authority and the Church of England's feeble acceptance of this authority. Collier portrayed post-Revolutionary England as in need of urgent salvation.

Many non-Jacobites agreed with Collier on the last point. The first Society for the Reformation of Manners was established in the Strand roughly contemporaneously with the Kit-Cat Club's foundation in Gray's Inn. This society vowed to spy out and report offenders against the laws on immoral behaviour, and monitor which Officers of the Peace were effective or negligent in enforcing these laws.

After Queen Mary's death in 1694 and the end of the War of the League of Augsburg in 1697, William needed a new way to legitimize his rule and was fearful of alienating or antagonizing the Society for the Reformation of Manners' army of grassroot Christian activists. He therefore deliberately set about becoming the leader (rather than target) of those seeking to reform the loose morals of the age. In December 1697, to offset the unwelcome news that peace with France would not bring a drop in taxes, he promised the Commons that he would commence a kind of Kulturkampf at home—a crusade against ‘Prophaneness and Immorality’.4 This encouraged certain zealous MPs to present an address to him in February 1698 concerning suppression of unchristian books and punishment of their authors, ultimately resulting in ‘An Act for the more effectual suppressing of Atheism, Blasphemy and Prophaneness’.

The previous month, on a freezing day in January 1698, a fire destroyed most of Whitehall Palace. Certain Jacobite pamphleteers, including Collier, played upon people's Sodom-and-Gomorrah-ish superstition that God had frowned upon the Williamite Court. Some suggested William enjoyed sodomy with his male favourites. Vanbrugh faced a similar accusation of bisexuality in an anonymous poem alleging that the playwright did ‘Active and Passive, in both Sexes Lust’.5 Vanbrugh was specifically accused of sodomy with Peregrine Bertie, with whom he lodged in Whitehall, and therefore blamed for the fire that destroyed the Palace.6 While a manuscript of 1694 confirms Bertie and Vanbrugh were intimate friends, nothing more is known of their relationship.7

Vanbrugh's sexuality was attacked because his satirical plays had made plenty of enemies in church pulpits. When The Relapse (1696) was first performed, with its comparison of church congregations to social clubs and its depiction of a careerist chaplain, Vanbrugh was saved from the Bishop of Gloucester's wrath only by his friends' ‘agility’.8 In the Preface to the first printed edition of The Relapse, Vanbrugh answered his attackers:

As for the Saints (your thorough-paced ones I mean, with screwed Faces and wry Mouths) I despair of them, for they are Friends to nobody. They love nothing, but their Altars and Themselves. They have too much Zeal to have any Charity; they make Debauches in Piety, as Sinners do in Wine, and are quarrelsome in their Religion as other People are in their Drink: so I hope nobody will mind what they say.9

Vanbrugh's scepticism about the moral conversion of the husband in The Relapse implied allegorical scepticism about the country's moral reformation, but it was a scepticism he could not afford to voice more openly.

Immediately after the Whitehall Palace fire, capitalizing on London's fin de siècle mood, Collier published A Short View of the Immorality and Prophaness of the English Stage (1698). This book censured immorality and profanity in recent plays by the so-called ‘Orange Comedians’,10 foremost among whom were Congreve and Vanbrugh. It did so in a style of close textual analysis that would be highly influential on future critics, both Christian and secular. It opened with the premise that ‘The business of Plays is to recommend Virtue and discountenance Vice’, and ended with a section complaining that sinful characters were escaping dramatic justice. A Short View was rancorous, pugnacious and literal-minded, but also intelligent and biting. It was an instant bestseller.

As an outsider, ostracized by Williamite society, Collier did not hesitate to attack the biggest literary names of the day, including Dryden, Congreve and Vanbrugh, whom he called ‘snakes and vipers’. Though Collier said he wanted only to reform the theatres, his Short View fanned the flames of a popular movement driven by an abolitionist impulse. It was not the first shot fired in the culture wars, but it was the loudest, and the one aimed most directly at the Kit-Cat Club's authors. The Club's own name was not yet, in 1698, well known enough for its members to be attacked as a collective entity, but the battle against Collierite attitudes was one of the struggles that helped bond the Club's friendships in these early years.

Collier attacked the representation of women in the plays of Vanbrugh and Congreve as bold, libidinous and knowing creatures. He blamed the playwrights for allowing women to act these roles on stage, ‘to make Monsters of them, and throw them out of their kind’.11 As early as 1693, when Congreve's Double Dealer was first performed, ladies were so outraged by the realism of his female characterization that, in ironic defence of their modesty, they shouted out protests during the performance and hurled things at the stage. Congreve responded that the ladies in his audiences could no more expect to be flattered by a satire than ‘to be tickled by a surgeon when he's letting 'em blood’.12