Читать книгу The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation - Ophelia Field - Страница 11

We taught them how to toast, and rhyme, and bite, To sleep away the day, and drink away the night.

WILLIAM SHIPPEN, Faction Display'd (1704)

IN THE FADING light of a Thursday afternoon during the winter of 1697–8, the Kit-Cat members made their way—by foot, coroneted coach, carriage and swaying sedan chair—towards the Cat and Fiddle tavern in Gray's Inn, to attend a Club meeting that would end with an unusual visitor.

Tonson would have arrived early to ready the room. As a later Kit-Cat advised: ‘Upon all Meetings at Taverns, 'tis necessary some one of the Company should take it upon him to get all Things in such Order…such as hastening the Fire, getting a sufficient number of Candles, [and] tasting the Wine with a judicious Smack.’¹

When the other members arrived, each bowed to the gathered company before being relieved of his outer jacket or cloak, hat, gloves, cane or sword by a waiting servant. Disrobing elegantly was an art, and Congreve mocked country bumpkins who went too far and pulled off their boots on such occasions.

It has been suggested that the Club's seating arrangements mimicked an Oxbridge college dining hall, with a ‘high table’ for the grandest nobles and lower tables at right angles for everyone else, but it is more likely that such a sharp distinction between aristocrats and wits was deliberately avoided, to the mutual flattery of both. The Club's presidential pride of place, a wooden ‘elbow chair’ (armchair) at one end of the table, was occupied not by the Club's highest ranking peer, but by Tonson, while Matt Prior mentions that it was unnecessary to sit in one's seat for the duration of a Kit-Cat meal.

The diners first washed their hands in a basin, then the highest ranking member said grace. In 1697, this was the Duke of Somerset, Charles Seymour, the second highest ranking peer in the kingdom. He was a vastly wealthy and notoriously proud man, who spoke with an affected lisp and had once disowned his daughter when he awoke from a nap and caught her seated in his presence. Only 35 in 1697, however, such caricaturish excesses lay ahead of him. Somerset was at this time renovating his stately home of Petworth in Sussex, where he and his wife had spent the preceding summer, and he was the Chancellor of Cambridge University, responsible for re-establishing that university's press. Tonson's firm was collaborating with it to produce a series of Cambridge classics: a canon-forming list first shaped by Dryden and, after Dryden's death, by the Kit-Cats. Somerset may also have been personally responsible for Montagu receiving the title of High Steward of Cambridge University earlier in the year.

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’.² 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.³

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’.⁴ 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.’⁵ 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’,⁶ 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’⁷ 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’.⁸ 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’.⁹ 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’.¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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’.¹²

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’.¹³ 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’.¹⁴ 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’,¹⁵ 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’.¹⁶ 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.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.