Читать книгу The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation - Ophelia Field - Страница 12

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

Collier particularly criticized the Orange Comedians' disparaging view of marriage. In one sense, the Orange Comedians' attitude was simply an old joke inherited from Restoration drama, but they treated it with greater seriousness, bringing out the true dramatic tension of claustrophobic, bitter marriages. As one critic has observed, if today we are living through the death throes of the nuclear family, the Kit-Cat authors were living through its birth pangs,¹³ and Vanbrugh and Congreve explored their fears of this new social unit in their work while assiduously avoiding such commitment in their own private lives. In Congreve's Old Batchelor, Bellmour summed up the author's own attitude to the married state:

Bellmour: Could'st thou be content to marry Araminta?

Vainlove: Could you be content to go to heaven?

Bellmour: Hum, not immediately, in my conscience, not heartily.

Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife leaves its marital problems unresolved at the end of the play—a radical ending for a comedy but also a bitter truth in an age when divorce was a great rarity. Whether or not he was bisexual, Vanbrugh was certainly a confirmed bachelor in the 1690s, morbidly mocking his Kit-Cat friends whenever one of them became engaged. He gossiped to a fellow Kit-Cat, for example, that another Club member, Anthony Henley, was tying himself to ‘a mettled jade’¹⁴—this was, in fact, Mary Bertie, a cousin of Vanbrugh's friend Peregrine. Mary's chief attraction for Henley was probably her fortune of some £30,000 (well over £3.6 million today, and more than enough to cover Henley's debts of £10,000). Surrounded by mercenary matches, Vanbrugh's cynicism was understandable.

The Junto members conducted their love lives not unlike the libertine characters in a Restoration or Orange comedy, and Collier's criticism of the theatre was fired by rumours about the conduct of playwrights' patrons. Wharton was described as ‘something of a libertine’, and an anonymous satire referred to his whoring.¹⁵ He kept a mistress for many years during his first marriage, then in 1692, at 44, he married 22-year-old Lucy Loftus, who became a Kit-Cat toast in 1698 and was referred to as ‘the witty, fair one’.¹⁶ Though Wharton seems to have been unfaithful to his young wife, Lucy was rumoured to be just as ‘abandoned’ as her husband.¹⁷

Montagu, similarly, never treated his marriage to the dowager Lady Manchester as any impediment to his long-standing affair with a Kit-Cat toast named Mrs Catherine Barton, the niece of Sir Isaac Newton. The Duchess of Marlborough laughed at Montagu's playing the ladies' man, with ‘a great knack at making pretty ballads’, though he was so short and ‘hideously ugly’.¹⁸ A Tory satire accused Montagu of lining his pockets with public funds that he ‘whored away or pissed against the walls’.¹⁹ That this accusation may not have been simple libel is suggested by a Whig friend's joking remark that, when Prior and Stepney left London in 1698, Prior for Paris and Stepney for Saxony, their departures caused the business of a certain London brothel to nosedive.

Collier attacked the Kit-Cats not just for being sexual liberals but also for their godlessness. Beyond their anti-clerical one-liners, the plays of Vanbrugh and Congreve contain a fundamentally secular and cynical worldview that challenged Collier's religious faith to its core. Congreve's Way of the World has a character swear an oath on Tonson's Miscellany rather than on the Bible. While his plays epitomized the grace and elegance of the coming eighteenth century, Congreve's philosophy, at its darkest, was closer to twentieth century nihilism. He believed social conventions and good humour kept a thin lid on dark passions and the ‘power of baseness’.²⁰ Vanbrugh's view of life, meanwhile, was more martial and combative—a constant struggle in which God's mercy and justice played little part: ‘Fortune, thou art a bitch by Gad!’ exclaims Young Fashion in The Relapse.²¹

There was virtually no avowed atheism (any more than avowed republicanism) among Whigs, yet this was the obvious accusation for Tory satirists to hurl. These satires claimed the Kit-Cat Club fomented ‘free-thinking’: one written in the voice of a Kit-Cat founder, for example, recalled that ‘'Twas there we first instructed all our youth, / To talk profane and laugh at sacred truth.’²² Another later proposed that the ‘great discoveries’ of atheism ‘be adapted to the capacities of the Kit-Cat…who might then be able to read lectures on them to their several toasts’.²³ Individual Kit-Cat patrons notorious for irreligion included: Wharton (who never repaired the damage done to his image by a notorious incident in 1682 when he and some friends allegedly urinated and defecated on the altar and pulpit of a Gloucestershire church); Somers, who, though a member of his local vestry, was branded a deist (that is, one sceptical about revealed religion though not the original existence of God); and Dr Garth, whose choice of profession derived from, or reinforced, his innately sceptical outlook. One Tory satire imagines Garth speaking to a dying clergyman: ‘“Why, Sir, have you the vanity to think that religion ever did our cause any service?!…I'll tell the Kit-Cat Club of you, and it shall be known to every man at C[our]t that you die like a pedant.”’²⁴

In May 1698, inspired by Collier's attack and the King's call for moral reform, the Middlesex Justices of the Peace prosecuted Congreve for having written, five years earlier, The Double Dealer. Tonson and the printer Briscoe were prosecuted for publishing the play. Nobody was imprisoned or fined, but Congreve was forced to revise the play to prevent further prosecution. These revisions involved the character of the chaplain, Mr Saygrace, and deletion of allegedly profane and indecent language.

Congreve, embittered by this interference in matters literary, published Amendments of Mr Collier's False and Imperfect Citations (1698) in reply to A Short View. His main line of argument was that his words should not be judged out of context: the same justification often used against censors today and an early instance of a writer complaining against deconstruction of his text. Congreve added wit by emphasizing that smut was in the eye of the beholder: ‘[T]he greater part of those examples which he [Collier] produced are only demonstrations of his own impurity; they only savour of his utterance and were sweet enough till tainted by his breath.’²⁵ The charge of prurience was fair—Collier did seem to take great pleasure in spying out immorality—but Congreve's defence was weakened by the need he felt to claim some alternative reforming purpose for his satire.

Vanbrugh was thicker-skinned than Congreve (‘Fortunately, I am not one of those who drop their spirits at every Rebuff—If I had been, I had been underground long ago’²⁶) but his own response to Collier, A Short Vindication of ‘The Relapse’ and ‘The Provok'd Wife’ (1698), got off on an equally wrong foot by accepting Collier's premise that the purpose of theatre was to ‘recommend Virtue and discountenance Vice’.²⁷ King William had expressed approval of A Short View to demonstrate his sympathy with the moral crusaders, even permitting its Jacobite author impunity to come out of hiding. Knowing the King was content to see the theatres gagged, playing to the vocal Christian reformers, must have forced Vanbrugh to pull his punches and choose his words carefully.

Whereas Congreve pretended Collier's insults were too exaggerated to be wounding (‘He would have poisoned me, but he overdosed it, and the Excess of his Malice has been my Security’²⁸), Vanbrugh admitted A Short View's undeniable popularity now made it, as another Kit-Cat admitted, a ‘thing no farther to be laughed at’.²⁹

More self-confident defence came from a non-Kit-Cat writer also targeted by Collier, the neoclassical critic John Dennis. A friend of Congreve's since 1691, Dennis suffered from an absurd prickliness of temper, a quality that probably disqualified him from Kit-Cat membership, if he sought it. Dennis' response to Collier's Short View rightly linked the ‘high flying’³⁰ Jacobite author with those censors at the opposite end of the religious and political spectrum: the Puritans.³¹ Dennis defended the stage without denying its appeal to ‘passions’ above reason, and did not bother to claim that drama need serve a reforming purpose. One enemy asserted Dennis ‘sat at the head of a Club’ to ‘impeach’ Collier,³² which suggests that the Kit-Cats deferred to an ad hoc grouping of anti-Collierites to handle the matter. In his Defence of the Short View (1699), Collier stated he would only continue the debate with writers like Congreve and Vanbrugh, not with small fry like Dennis.

By 1699, there were nine Societies for the Reformation of Manners working across London, and by 1701 there would be almost twenty. Moral reformers in the Commons and Lords continued to introduce legislation that intruded into the private sphere, with the King's approval. Somers and his Kit-Cat colleagues in the Lords were among those to vote down a 1699 Bill to make adultery a misdemeanour punishable under the common law, for example. Somers had personal reasons for doing so: from as early as 1694, he had been the lover of his Herefordshire ‘housekeeper’, Mrs Elizabeth Fanshawe Blount, whose husband was in prison. One Tory satire accused Somers of having had Mr Blount arrested in order to bed the wife, whereas Somers' friends portrayed him as having rescued her from a negligent, shiftless husband.³³

In February 1699, William proclaimed that actors must avoid using profane and indecent language—disregarding the role of his own Cabinet ministers, Somers and Montagu, in encouraging and financing the writing of the allegedly profane and indecent plays in the first place. When Congreve's Double Dealer was revived in March 1699, it was in the expurgated version.

The Kit-Cat Club survived Collier's attacks on its members because it did not attempt to defend the imaginations of Vanbrugh and Congreve as they really deserved to be defended. Instead, the Kit-Cat critics emphasized the points on which they agreed with Collier: that wit without decency is not true wit; that smut should not be used to compensate for a deficit of ‘sprightly Dialogue’,³⁴ and that mobbish audiences needed elevation and education, for the whole nation's sake. While the Kit-Cat patrons supported the Club's authors in defiance of the censors, the more ambitious Whig politicians also recognized that they needed to work on their public image, and that a new, more ‘improving’ literature was required to win the moral highground back from the Tories. Congreve and Vanbrugh were not, however, willing to produce it.

It would be the stars of the following generation of Kit-Cat authors—Addison and Steele, not yet members in 1698—who succeeded in bridging the gap between the Club's libertine, Restoration founders, led by Dorset, and Collier's puritanical strictures. Steele, who was at heart a faithful Christian, later admitted to having privately admired much that Collier preached, ‘as far as I durst, for fear of witty Men, upon whom he had been too severe’.³⁵

In 1698, at the height of the culture wars, Steele was known as ‘Captain Steele’—one of the many demobilized officers whose uniforms reddened the theatre audiences after the peace of Ryswick. Steele was then living either with his aunt and uncle at their Bond Street house, or at the Whitehall home of his boss, Lord Cutts. Steele said Cutts treated him like a son and provided him with ‘an introduction into the world’, so it may have been through this military patron that Steele first entered Dryden's outer orbit at Will's Coffee House. There was already, of course, the connection established with this circle through Addison, though Addison lived in Oxford until 1699.

Steele seems to have charmed Congreve, in particular, with whom he passed ‘many Happy Hours’.³⁶ This was quite an honour, since Congreve confided to Joe Keally that he was ‘not apt to care for many acquaintance, and never intend to make many friendships’.³⁷ Steele, for his part, said that he felt the ‘greatest Affection and Veneration’ for Congreve, admiring, in particular, Congreve's poem ‘Doris’.³⁸ No evidence survives to tell us whether Steele felt a similarly warm regard for Vanbrugh in the late 1690s; as a soldier-turned-playwright, Vanbrugh was the obvious role model for Steele at this juncture.

Steele also appears to have befriended Congreve's housemate, Tonson, by 1698. That year, Tonson moved his firm's offices from Chancery Lane to his family's old premises in Gray's Inn, where they would remain until 1710. A satirical advertisement appeared cruelly referring to Tonson's ‘Sign of the two left Legs, near Gray's Inn BackGate’.³⁹ Steele was often to be found at this shop during 1698. There he could sit for hours and read for free, with a glass of wine by his side, as bookshops then were more like paying libraries where, for a small subscription, one could read the most recent publications on the premises, leaving a bookmark in a volume if not finished at a single sitting.

An additional attraction at Tonson's shop was the publisher's 18-year-old niece Elizabeth, an assistant in the business. In 1699 or 1700, she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter by Steele, christened Elizabeth and given the surname of ‘Ousley’, after Dorothea Ousley, a nurse who raised illegitimate infants and orphans in the neighbourhood. How Tonson felt about Steele, an insolvent Irishman, ex-soldier and aspiring playwright, having impregnated his unmarried niece is not recorded, nor is there evidence that Steele's guardian aunt and uncle ever found out about the baby.

Steele felt that an illegitimate child was deeply shameful, not an everyday occurrence. He must have known how Addison disapproved of the ‘Vermin’ who carelessly produced bastards and whose punishment should be, Addison joked, transportation to a colony in need of population.⁴⁰ The person to whom Steele therefore turned during the crisis was not Addison, nor any of his witty male friends, but Mrs Mary Delariviere Manley, an unconventionally worldly woman who had been a confidante to Charles II's mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland, and who had lived with several men in London, starting with John Tilly, a lawyer and warden of Fleet Prison. Steele met Mrs Manley through Tilly, who in the mid-1690s had joined Steele and another old university friend as gullible investors in some alchemical research.

Manley claimed Steele dealt with two unwanted pregnancies in the late 1690s—one baby died, the other was presumably Elizabeth Ousley. It is unclear whether Elizabeth Tonson was the mother in both instances. Mrs Manley explained that she had stood as guarantor for Steele when he needed credit with a midwife, though whether for an abortion or a birth is unclear. Steele never paid the midwife's bill, so she threatened to sue and make the matter public. A note in Steele's hand confirms this story, referring to blackmail by a Mrs Phip[p]s in Watling Street, near St Paul's, ‘at the sign of the Coffin and Cradle’, through her ‘threatening to expose the occasion of the debt. It is £22.—£5 of it is paid’.⁴¹

Steele's refusal to return the favour and lend Mrs Manley some ‘trifling sum’ ended their friendship some years later.⁴² She complained of his ingratitude, to which Steele responded that he only refused because he did not have the ready cash to lend. He still had, he insisted, ‘the greatest Sense imaginable of the Kind Notice you gave me when I was going on to my Ruin’.⁴³

This guilty sense of his own ‘ruin’ was the source of Steele's sympathy for Collier's coinciding jeremiads about national ruin, though Steele was too much of a Whig to think the Williamite world any more sinful than its Restoration predecessor. Steele's comment about Collier having been ‘too severe’ on witty men was similarly born of his growing friendship with Collier's targets, Congreve and Vanbrugh. Steele recognized that Tory efforts to caricature the Whigs and their wits as unfaithful individuals, both sexually and politically, ignored a certain code of honour upheld by these men, who proved, in fact, as emotionally loyal to their mistresses as they were to their ‘Revolution Principles’.⁴⁴ Their fidelity to one another as friends, through the Kit-Cat Club, was also an important way in which they sought to counter these Tory accusations and attest their virtue.

During the first five years of the new century, the Collierites and their allies did not slacken in their efforts to force moral reform on the theatres and society as a whole—over thirty pamphlets on the controversy would be published by the end of 1700 alone, including A Second Defence of the Short View by Collier himself. This pushed the Kit-Cat Club to display its defiance of these repressive religious forces more overtly, as on 9 January 1700, when the Club went to the theatre ‘in a body’, to see a performance designed as a rebuff to denunciations of the Whig theatres. The day before, Matt Prior, in London, wrote to Abraham (‘Beau’) Stanyan, one of Congreve's friends from Middle Temple student days and now a fellow Kit-Cat, serving as a diplomat in Paris: ‘Tomorrow night, Betterton acts Falstaff, and to encourage that poor house the Kit Katters have taken one side-box and the Knights of the Toast have taken the other.’⁴⁵

The two clubs were, it seems, putting on a show of friendly rivalry for a common cause. The ‘poor house’ was Betterton's theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, under the patronage of Montagu and the rest of the Kit-Cat Club. Betterton's low rumbling voice and round belly made him perfect for the part of Shakespeare's Falstaff. Prior, meanwhile, had penned ‘a Prologue for Sir John [Falstaff] in favour of eating and drinking’,⁴⁶ which teased the Knights of the Toast for living on ‘meagre Soup and sour Champagne’ instead of good English fare like Falstaff. It also teased Jacob Tonson as looking like ‘old plump Jack [Falstaff] in Miniature’.⁴⁷

It is significant that the Kit-Cats so honoured Falstaff, a character moderating tragedy with comic excess and abundance, resilient in his frivolity, regenerative in his adaptability, and a patriotic nobleman who fondly mentors young Hal, the future King of England. Falstaff could be viewed as a hero of English paternalism and materialism, while his love of food and drink was a straightforward connection to Kit-Cat dining. As A Kit Cat C—b Describ'd (1705) put it: ‘None but Sir John Falstaff's of the Party: Fat, Corpulent Lords, Knights and Squires, were to be Admitted into [the Kit-Cat] Society by the Laws of its First Institution.’⁴⁸ Falstaff's capacious love of life was contrasted to images of rectitude, chastity and neo-Puritanism in the performance. The Club, which counted ‘keeping up good Humour and Mirth’ as an objective equal to ‘the Improvement of Learning’,⁴⁹ was making the case for a new style of Whiggism—with hedonistic appetites, yet with heart, honour and national pride.

The plan for the 9 January theatre outing was for the Kit-Cats to dine at Dorset's townhouse then proceed to Lincoln's Inn. Prior had had difficulty breathing a few days earlier, so he went to the dinner intending only to ‘sit down to table when the dessert comes, eat nothing but roasted apples, and drink sack and water’.⁵⁰ The others would have honoured the Falstaffian spirit of the evening with a hearty meal. Their drunken posse, when it turned up at the theatre, must have looked the epitome of privileged debauchery to the servants sent ahead to save their seats. A satirist described Montagu in the theatre ‘sitting on the Kit-Cat side, and Jacob T[onson] standing Door-Keeper for him’.⁵¹ The Toasters, on the other side, were led by the Earl of Carbery, acting as ‘general of the enemy's forces’, despite also being a member of the Kit-Cat Club by this date.⁵²

Congreve described the theatre as an open arena full of ‘washy rogues’ to whose semi-illiterate judgement he reluctantly submitted his ‘repartee and raillery’.⁵³ Elsewhere, he despised the ‘swarm of Scribblers’ and City men who arrived before three o'clock to make sure they had enough elbow room, and who ate plum cake while watching the play.⁵⁴ If the people in the pit did not approve of the performance they blew on little toy whistles called ‘cat-calls’.

The constant, defensive reference to the verdict of the pit by Congreve, Vanbrugh and other Kit-Cats hints at major tension between these writers and their audiences, and reflects their anxiety about the coarsening of the culture. The Kit-Cat Club emerged while popular culture was perceived as expanding at an unprecedented rate, and highbrow authors sought to cling to the opinions of the tasteful, educated few. The Kit-Cat critics were unified, for example, in their distaste for the popular entr'acte entertainments (rope dancers, singers, trained animals, tumblers and acrobats) added to even the most serious plays. They also distrusted mechanical innovations in scenery and special effects that appealed to the pit. Prior's Prologue for Falstaff, in this case, urged the audience to ‘save the sinking stage’ by preferring English comedy to the ‘Apes’ of French farce.⁵⁵

Watching this performance, which probably consisted of extracts featuring Falstaff rather than an entire history play, the Kit-Cats would have been as much part of the show as the actors: Dorset boasting his ribbon of the Garter; Garth in his distinctive red cloak; Walsh with his heavily powdered wig. The key difference between theatres in this period and those in the Restoration was a larger forestage, so most of the action took place in the middle of the audience. Theatres remained well lit throughout the performances, and after 1690 there was some reintroduction of seating on the stage itself, further blurring the demarcation between the play's intrigues and those in the audience.

The plan to assist Betterton's theatre succeeded beyond expectations. Nearly three weeks later, a Londoner wrote: ‘The Wits of all qualities have lately entertained themselves with a revived humour of Sir John Falstaff…which has drawn all the town more than any new play that has been produced of late.’⁵⁶

The Kit-Cat Club continued its outings to the theatre over the next few years. In 1700, one satire referred to the Dorset Garden Theatre on the Thames at Whitefriars, ‘Where Kit-Cats sat, and Toasters would be seen.’⁵⁷ They could attend either the opening night and support the theatre and its company, or the third night to support the playwright. Such excursions were an ideal way for the Club to publicize itself and its patronage, showing London society it was no gang of political conspirators skulking down a back alley like the regicide, republican clubs of the seventeenth century, and that the Kit-Cat's members refused to be cowed by the Collierites' moral condemnation of their dramatic poetry.

Congreve's new comedy of manners, The Way of the World, began rehearsals at Lincoln's Inn soon after the Falstaff performance closed. Again, the hopes and incomes of Betterton's company were pinned on the new play, with Vanbrugh remarking that ‘if Congreve's Play don't help 'em, they are undone’.⁵⁸ The play, however, though costing its author some ‘care and pains’ to write,⁵⁹ was a risky work which Congreve said he doubted London's degenerate audience would appreciate, rather than one designed for popularity. Betterton's actors no doubt felt some ambivalence about the work—so brilliant, yet so difficult—as they rehearsed it. Congreve knew that parts of the play were provocative: two fingers stuck up to those who wanted less cynicism and more moral certainties on the English stage. The Prologue, for example, to be spoken by Betterton and concerning the author's intentions to entertain rather than reform, addressed itself sarcastically to any Collierites in the audience:

Satire, he [Congreve] thinks, you ought not to expect;

For so reformed a town who dares correct?

To please, this time, has been his sole pretence,

He'll not instruct, lest it should give offence.

The Way of the World, like Congreve's earlier plays, reflected the author's view of the urbane society in which he moved: the primacy of male friendships, bonded as much by clubbing and card-playing as business contracts and kinship. Congreve complicates theatrical stereotypes by making the play's hero, Mirabell, one of these suave and socially adept young London gentlemen—qualities traditionally belonging to morally suspect stage villains. Mirabell's final proof of integrity in the play, furthermore, is his kindness to Mrs Fainall, his former mistress. Even today, the question of one's moral duties to one's ex-lovers would be subtle territory for a play; in 1700, facing an audience of Collierites, it was an astonishing question to pose.

Congreve laughs at the affectations of Mirabell's friends, in the characters of Witwoud and Petulant, yet at the same time invokes sympathy for the social insecurities that require such pretences, as when Witwoud laughs at Petulant's attempts to feign popularity by saying he will dress up in costume and ‘call for himself, wait for himself, nay and what's more, not finding himself [at home], sometimes leave a letter for himself’.⁶⁰ The mutual exposure of faults and fears is simultaneously cruel and affectionate, as male friendships so often are. The author showcases the men's conversation, and hence his own, while implying that they are balancing on their tightropes of wit above great social uncertainty.

When the play moves on to women, courtship and marriage, it mixes traditional complaints against the marriage yoke with a more honest account of which partner really lost their rights through marriage in the 1700s. In the famous ‘proviso scene’ where Millamant and Mirabell lay out their conditions of engagement, Millamant tries to preserve her rights, while her lover, Mirabell, tries to encroach upon them. The scene has often been complimented for showing equality between the sexes, yet it is a deceptive sort of equality: the couple are well matched in their knowledge of literature and parity of wit, but for Millamant her wit and coquetry are her only means of exercising some small power. She asks for a less conventional marriage because she fears to ‘dwindle into a wife’.⁶¹

Congreve was troubled by the discordance between patriarchal laws and the reality of several strong women he knew and admired. In 1695, he wrote, ‘We may call them the weaker Sex, but I think the true Reason is because our Follies are Stronger and our Faults the more prevailing.’⁶² In The Way of the World, Congreve emphasizes that women are often less delusional in love than men, and in Millamant—a part written with Bracey specifically in mind—he celebrates the attractions of an intelligent, spirited woman. Mirabell's speech explaining why he loves Millamant is the writing of an author who loved, at this point, without illusions: ‘I like her with all her faults, like her for her faults. Her follies are so natural, or so artful, that they become her; and those affectations, which in another woman would be odious, serve but to make her more agreeable.’⁶³

As late as September 1698, nearly six years since their first meeting, Congreve was still being teased that he ‘need not covet to go to Heaven at all, but to stay and Ogle his dear Bracilla, with sneaking looks under his Hat, in the little side Box’.⁶⁴ Tom Browne commented sceptically on Bracey's famed chastity, noting that Congreve ‘dines with her almost every day, yet She's a Maid; he rides out with her, and visits her in Public and Private, yet She's a Maid; if I had not a particular respect for her, I should go so near to say he lies with her, yet She's a Maid’.⁶⁵ Several later satires suggested Congreve and Bracey secretly married, though this is improbable since, when Bracey died in 1748, her will described her as a ‘spinster’.⁶⁶

The Way of the World went over the heads of its first audience in March 1700, as its author had expected, one observer saying it was ‘hissed by Barbarous Fools in the Acting; and an impertinent Trifle was brought on after it, which was acted with vast Applause’.⁶⁷ Dryden was too ill to attend its opening night, but there is something poignant about the fact that Congreve's masterpiece, so far ahead of its time and predictive of so much later eighteenth-century literature, was one of the last works Dryden read before he died. He recognized its genius, and told Congreve not to mind its disappointing reception by everyone but, as Steele put it, ‘the Few refined’.⁶⁸

The Way of the World was to be Congreve's last play; he retired from dramatic writing at 30. This was not a fit of pique because his masterpiece failed to gain universal acclaim, as is sometimes said. Rather, he felt he had reached the height of his powers and had nothing further to prove to an audience becoming increasingly censorious, bourgeois and unimaginative.

Just as the play's early closure was a blow for Betterton's struggling company, so too Congreve's retirement from playwriting in 1700 must have been a blow for his publisher, Tonson, so close upon the death of Dryden. Dryden's name had been a critical seal of approval on any book that bore it in the preface or dedication. The editions of Miscellany Poems Dryden had edited for Tonson since 1684, for example, had become the most prestigious anthology of England, such that Tonson continued to produce the series long after Dryden's death. As one poem in the third Miscellany put it, Dryden's opinion was like a monarch's face stamped on a coin, giving value in an otherwise uncertain age.

A Satyr against Wit (1699), by Richard Blackmore, reversed this metaphor to mock the authors mentored by Dryden and the patrons assembled by Tonson. Describing the writings of those Montagu patronized as being like clipped or devalued coin, a sideswipe at Montagu's failed recoinage scheme of 1696, Blackmore suggested that Congreve and Vanbrugh would be left with little reputation were their work cleansed of its impurities. Blackmore further proposed Somers, Dorset and Montagu should underwrite a ‘bank of wit’ to reform the currency of English poetry, meaning that they should give their support to worthier poets, like him.⁶⁹ Garth, Steele and Walsh contributed, on behalf of Dryden and his Witty Club, to a collected volume of verses as a counter-attack to Blackmore,⁷⁰ and this literary skirmish on the eve of Dryden's death did much to consolidate the Kit-Cat Club's sense that it must ensure Dryden's critical standards for English literature were not forgotten. In June 1700, a young man wrote to Garth on behalf of a group of unknown poets who had compiled a collection of elegies for Dryden, asking forlornly, ‘who shall make us known, and stamp Esteem, / On what we write…?’ He begged for the book to be commended by Dr Garth, even though the young man and his friends had no ‘swelling Kit-cat’ patron on their title page.⁷¹

After Dryden's death, Tonson used the Kit-Cat Club's collective opinion as a replacement for Dryden's critical taste when evaluating works submitted for publication or when compiling the Miscellanies, letters of acceptance from Tonson to various writers often referring to work having passed the test of the ‘best judges’.⁷² One Tonson biographer has even conjectured that the anonymous poems in the later Miscellanies ‘as a whole represent the literary activities of the Kit-Cat Club’.⁷³

Critical taste was understood to require cultivation, so that a true critic was made, not born. The paradox that this was believed by some of the highest born men in England was awkwardly explained by another shared belief: that a gentleman who had no need to work or seek a patron should, thanks to such independence, be the most impartial critic and arbiter of taste. Fresh works were therefore submitted to the Kit-Cat Club's ‘peer review’ not merely to seek patronage but also because of a residual respect for aristocratic opinion, according to classical theory. In an age that believed ‘Fame consists in the Opinion of wise and good Men’,⁷⁴ the Kit-Cat Club sought to be the makers of fame. As its own fame grew, the Club became a whetstone for sharpening its members' critical faculties, and a practical help to Tonson's publishing firm in the absence of paid editorial staff.

Dryden's Witty Club had been attacked for being self-serving, selfimportant and malicious. The Kit-Cat Club now became the new target for such envy and resentment, as it sat and decided what writing should go to Tonson's presses and what into the tavern fireplace. Ned Ward was among those who questioned the Whig lords' right to sit as the self-styled custodians of English literature and who complained that the Kit-Cats, unlike Dryden, now made the critical process too Whiggishly ideological: ‘[T]hey began to set themselves up for Apollo's court of judicature, where every author's performance, from the stage poet to the garret-drudge, was to be read, tried, applauded, or condemned, according to the new system of Revolutionary Principles.’⁷⁵

Soon the Kit-Cats were to give the same ideological treatment to other art forms, including architecture.

During the summer of 1699, while Somers and Montagu were visiting Somerset and others at their country seats, and several fellow Kit-Cats were touring France, Vanbrugh—who had seen enough of France during his long captivity there—toured the great houses of northern England. He travelled by high-speed ‘calash’ (a light twowheeled carriage with a removable hood) and stayed with at least two Kit-Cat friends: William Cavendish at Chatsworth for four or five days, then, in July, with his distant kinsman, Carlisle. Carlisle's membership of the Kit-Cat Club rested on his proven influence in the 1695 Cumberland election, and on the fact that, though Carlisle's Howard ancestors were prominent Catholics, his grandfather and father had been Whigs and his own Whiggery was fervent. Carlisle's love of books would also have recommended him to Tonson and the Kit-Cat collectors; he catalogued his family's libraries and added to them constantly. In the summer of 1697, Carlisle had stayed with the Somersets at Petworth and admired it with an envious eye, developing his own ambitions to become an architectural patron—ambitions that would be spectacularly realized in his later building of Castle Howard.

By 1699, Carlisle had been appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber—a Court place to add to his other honours: Governor of the town and castle of Carlisle, Lord Lieutenant of Cumberland and Westmorland, and Vice Admiral of the seacoasts for those two counties. Thinking his future income secure, and eager to lend additional status to his title, which dated back only as far as his grandfather, Carlisle decided to build the Howard family a new seat, on a scale that would allow him to entertain royalty.

Carlisle had already invited the architect William Talman to develop plans for a house at Henderskelfe, northeast of York. Talman, who designed much of Chatsworth, was Carlisle's first choice because he was the King's favoured architect, and the project could demonstrate shared tastes with William III in one of the few artistic spheres where the King took interest. By July 1699, however, when Carlisle invited Vanbrugh to the same site, it appears Talman had been dropped. Whether Talman's designs simply disappointed Carlisle, or whether Kit-Cat favouritism displaced a more qualified man, is hard to know. Talman, at any rate, thought he had been unfairly dismissed and threatened to sue.

The ebullient Vanbrugh, who seemed to have no fear of failure despite his near-total lack of architectural experience, described his earliest designs for what would become ‘Castle Howard’ to one of the Kit-Cat patrons as being for ‘a plain low building like an orange house’.⁷⁶ This does indeed describe Vanbrugh's earliest, amazingly plain sketches. Such consultations with Whig patricians were probably the source of the legend that Vanbrugh designed Castle Howard on a napkin or scrap of paper during a Kit-Cat Club dinner. It is true that Vanbrugh designed the house by committee—a way for Carlisle to enjoy the prestige of undertaking such a project long before there was a finished product to show off—but there is no specific Kit-Cat dinner that can be credited with the house's conception. As Vanbrugh wrote, ‘There has been a great many Critics consulted upon it since, and no objection being made on't, the Stone is raising and the Foundations will be laid in the Spring [of 1700].’⁷⁷ This prediction was, as Vanbrugh's predictions of time and cost almost always were, unrealistic. The foundations were not laid until the spring of 1701. First the villagers and small farmers of Henderskelfe had to be evicted and the property enclosed. (A contemporary said Carlisle was zealously concerned for those on his lands, but this was more a concern for their obedience at the polls than their rights.) During the two years between the first designs and the first work on site, the Kit-Cats were consulted and various elaborations added.

King William also reviewed the plans in June 1700. As with a poem dedicated to a monarch or noble patron, so architecture was not only an expression of status and power but also a bid to obtain them. To build on such a scale, albeit in the Continental baroque style, was seen as a patriotic act that ought to bring cultural prestige to the nation and royal favour to the owner. The English baroque expressed the ‘communal will’ of the Kit-Cat Club in architectural form, taking ‘its emotion from the sense of grandeur and confidence enjoyed by the old Whigs of the 1688 revolution’.⁷⁸ Carlisle was 30 when he commissioned Castle Howard, five years younger than Vanbrugh. So, although of the ‘old Whig’ generation, Carlisle acted in the ambition of youth. He was the first and most important of six Kit-Cat architectural patrons who would help make Vanbrugh into one of Britain's greatest architects.

For all his social climbing, Vanbrugh knew how to pull someone else up the ladder behind him. He introduced the experienced builder and designer Nicholas Hawksmoor to Carlisle, and got him a salary almost twice what the average craftsman was paid. Vanbrugh was not paid at all; his rewards consisted of jobs and sinecures. Not only did this shift the expenditure from Carlisle's pocket to the Crown, but it also permitted discretion within the Club: the tactful illusion that members were not divided into employers and employees.

Vanbrugh used the time between first design and commencement of building, while living on half-pay from the Second Marine Regiment, to gain some little experience by building himself a house in London. In July 1700, soon after he reviewed the plans for Castle Howard, the King granted Vanbrugh permission for what would be the first of a series of private houses on the burnt-out ruins of Whitehall Palace. Private property was replacing royal property in much the same way that privatized aristocratic patronage was replacing royal patronage.

Vanbrugh's townhouse was built quickly during 1701. When complete, it served as a life-sized demonstration model and advertisement for his skills. Jonathan Swift (by this time a clergyman and published author, ambiguously seeking Court Whig favour in London while writing anonymous lampoons against the same Whigs) described it as ‘resembling a Goose Pie’ and sneered at Vanbrugh turning to architecture ‘without Thought or Lecture’. He suggested Vanbrugh had been inspired by watching children build houses of cards and mud. Swift also emphasized, enviously, that the architect of the ‘Goose Pie’ house had enjoyed a meteoric professional and social ascent, thanks solely to whom he knew in London high society: ‘No wonder, since wise Authors know, / That Best Foundations must be Low.’⁷⁹

At least Vanbrugh was finding that his architectural designs, no matter how lusty, were not, like his plays, subject to accusations of blasphemy and immorality. Neither Vanbrugh nor Congreve stopped writing as abruptly as sometimes portrayed, but both lost interest in dramatic writing at the height of their literary careers thanks in part to unrelenting pressure from the Collierite censors. When Betterton's company revived Congreve's 1695 hit Love for Love in Easter 1701, a legal action was brought against the players for ‘licentiousness’,⁸⁰ despite the fact that the production had been staged for a Christian charity (for ‘the Redemption of the English now in Slavery…in Barbary’⁸¹). Similarly, when Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife was revived, both the author and the players (including Bracey) were charged with using indecent expressions and sentenced to fines of £5 (almost £700 today) each.⁸² The old fear of the semi-illiterate audience acting as judge and jury was becoming a sinister reality.

As Vanbrugh shifted his energies to architecture, Congreve likewise turned after 1700 to art forms less scrutinized in terms of morality: music and lyric poetry.⁸³ Both men's diverted careers, however, continued to be bound closely to the political fates of their patrons in the Kit-Cat Club; in the political situation of 1700, those fates seemed extremely uncertain.