Читать книгу The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation - Ophelia Field - Страница 13

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

E. M. FORSTER, Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

THE KIT-CATS CONSIDERED themselves not only urbane but also cosmopolitan sophisticates, looking beyond England's shores culturally and politically, and defining themselves in comparison to other nationalities. Theirs was an outward-facing club, trying to build an outward-facing nation, and trying to stereotype their Tory rivals as old-fashioned, parochial isolationists (despite, paradoxically, the Jacobites' supranational loyalties to the Pope in Rome and the exiled Stuart Court in France). Being ruled by a Dutchman underscored the extent to which England's domestic politics were enmeshed with the struggles between the major Continental powers: France on the one hand and the Habsburg realms on the other. When this clash of empires was temporarily paused after the 1697 peace, several Kit-cats seized the opportunity to expand their education of European languages and politics through travel. Others—Lord Dorset's Boys —continued working on the Continent as a new breed of professional diplomat. For one of them, parliamentary debates about England's international relations would dramatically reveal his betrayal of his fellow Kit-Cats.

The culture wars raging in England at the turn of the century formed the backdrop to more straightforward political confrontations between parties. Spring 1698, for example, saw the Kit-Cats and other Court (Junto) Whigs preparing for a general election at a time when England's Protestants were feeling reprieved from the potential dangers of a Jacobite assassination plot against the King (the so-called Fenwick Affair of 1696) or the spectre of a French invasion (no longer an immediate risk during the peace). The Junto Whigs' power and influence disintegrated alongside this lessening level of public alarm, and the Tories' ambitions rose in inverse proportion. The Junto Whigs therefore knew they had an electoral fight on their hands, despite the fact that they now had the King's backing, William having been deeply angered by the 1697 opposition call for a Disbanding Bill. The Kit-Cat politicians took concerted actions across a number of marginal constituencies. Somers, for example, gifted legal title in Reigate burgages (freehold properties) to his friends, including Congreve, Tonson and several other Kit-Cats, so that they became propertied voters, able to win that seat to his interest. Despite such dubious tactics, however, the Junto lost control of the Commons in July to Harley's alliance of Country Whigs and Tories.

Montagu kept his seat representing the borough of Westminster only after an expensive campaign. On the same night as his embarrassingly narrow victory was announced, so too was the death of his elderly wife, Lady Manchester. This meant the loss of an annual £1,500 (today £142,000) jointure, which automatically transferred to Montagu's stepson. This stepson was another Kit-Cat, also named Charles Montagu, who was exactly the same age as his stepfather, cousin and namesake. He had inherited the title of 4th Earl (later 1st Duke) of Manchester, and is hereafter referred to as ‘Manchester’ to avoid confusion.¹

The King was losing patience with Montagu's inability to muster parliamentary support to defend the Court and defeat the Disbanding Bill. Before the election, Montagu had succeeded in raising revenue for the King and army by navigating through the Commons a £2 million flotation of a New East India Company. The Old East India Company, the only major London corporation run by Tories, was forced to invest in the New, which became a rich source of employment and dividends for Montagu's Kit-Cat friends. After the Whig election defeat, however, the Old East India Company took advantage of the King's impatience with Montagu and petitioned for a renewed right to trade. At the same time, a passionately argued pamphlet in favour of disbanding the army, A Short History of Standing Armies, seemed to win the press war over that issue in favour of Harley's opposition. Prior reported from Paris that the Jacobite Court-in-exile at Louis' chateau of St Germain-en-Laye was rejoicing at the prospect of the English army dismantling itself, and in January 1699, the Disbanding Bill passed, despite all Montagu's blocking efforts. To the King's outrage, England's army was required to reduce itself to 7,000 ‘native born’ men. Everything achieved by the Whigs in the first half of the 1690s seemed to be unravelling.

During the long 1698–9 parliamentary session, therefore, the Kit-cat Club was an important forum for holding together the Junto Whig faction while it was under strain, and for monitoring the precarious international situation through its younger members' Continental travels and diplomatic postings. In this context, Montagu encouraged Addison, still a cloistered tutor at Magdalen College, not to enter the Church but instead seek a political or diplomatic career. ‘[H]is Arguments were founded upon the general [de]pravity and the Corruption of Men of Business [i.e. government], who wanted liberal Education,’ recalled Steele. ‘[M]y Lord ended with a Compliment that, however he might be represented as no Friend to the Church, he never would do it any other Injury than keeping Mr Addison out of it.’²

Addison at this time was struggling to reconcile his own worldly ambitions with his father's lessons in Christian humility. He wrote a draft sermon, published many years later as an essay on ‘The Folly of Seeking Fame’, asking whether God's purpose in giving us the ‘passion’ of ambition was to drive forward our ‘sedentary’ souls, and whether ambition is less sinful when it is commensurate with ability: ‘How few are there who are furnished with Abilities sufficient…to distinguish themselves from the rest of Mankind?’³ Ambition for fame, he wrote, is the same instinct that makes us vulnerable to criticism, and the pleasure of fame is inevitably ‘precarious’ because it rests on the fickle and fallible opinion of mortals, rather than God's judgement.

Addison seems to have reconciled his ambition with his conscience by his twenty-seventh birthday, which coincided with the 1699 May Day celebrations at Magdalen. The following morning, Addison caught a coach to London, quitting forever the university where he had lived and worked for over a decade. Through Montagu, Addison received a £200 (over £20,000 today) government stipend to travel and study French. Somers partnered Montagu in supporting Addison's European education, as a letter of thanks from Addison to Somers confirms: ‘I have now for some time lived on the Effect of your Lordship's patronage…The only Return I can make your L[or]d[shi]p will be to apply myself Entirely to my Business and to take such a care of my Conversation that your favours may not seem misplaced.’⁴

Addison's trip started, in August 1699, on a literal wrong foot, with a fall into the sea as he disembarked at Calais, a succession of ‘dismal Adventures’ (‘lame post-horses by Day and hard Beds at night’) and misunderstandings because of his feeble French. ‘I have encountered as many misfortunes as a Knight-Errant,’ Addison laughed in his first letter back to Congreve, adding that he liked French statues and paintings only because ‘they don't speak French’.⁵ Without the language, Addison was left to enjoy the sights of grand siècle Paris, with Louis XIV's magnificent, strictly regulated rebuilding projects making it appear unlike any city that had previously existed. The city's ramparts had only recently been dismantled to allow the building of the new boulevards, including the Grand Cours along the line of today's Champs Elysées, and the Place Vendôme was just about to be inaugurated.

Yet Paris, in contrast to London, did not feel like a city in its prime. The city's famous street life was increasingly policed out of sight, even in the Marais, and the social hierarchy had ossified around a limited number of titled families. The capital was also suffering from the absence of the Court, which had moved to the Palace of Versailles. Yet the Louvre and other royal buildings still stood, hollowly hogging land throughout the city's centre—a fact seen by another Protestant English visitor as symbolic of Louis' despotic disregard for his own people: ‘Here the palaces and convents have eat[en] up the People's dwellings and crowded them excessively together.’⁶

Addison soon sought familiarity and conversation among the expats at Paris' English embassy, which then had no fixed address but moved to each ambassador's private residence. At this date, Montagu's stepson Manchester had just been appointed ambassador, inheriting Prior as his secretary. The ‘docile’⁷ Beau Stanyan, who had already served as Manchester's secretary at the English embassy in Venice, arrived in Paris in June 1699 to replace Prior, but Prior remained for a period of handover. All three Kit-Cats—the ambassador and his two secretaries—were therefore working together at the Paris embassy when Addison arrived. Vanbrugh jokingly congratulated Manchester on fulfilling his ambition to host every English gentleman coming to France, but Addison would have been a particularly honoured guest as he carried introductions from Somers and the ambassador's stepfather, Montagu. Addison became good friends during this time with both Manchester and his wife. Lady Manchester was a beauty, reportedly toasted ‘with an Exemplary Constancy’ at the Kit-Cat Club by the Earl of Carbery.⁸ When Addison himself eventually joined the Kit-Cat, he would patriotically toast Lady Manchester's natural complexion in contrast to French ‘haughty Dames that Spread / O'er their pale cheeks an Artful red’.⁹

Prior likewise remarked on the overpainted Parisian women, with the result, he told Montagu, that French men ‘make love to each other to a degree that is incredible, for you can pick your boy at the Tuileries or at the play’.¹⁰ Prior seems to have preferred heterosexual flirtations with English ladies in Paris—a business as separate from his relationship with his live-in lover Jane, he told her, as love poetry is from prose:

What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows

The diff'rence there is betwixt nature and art.

I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose:

And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.¹¹

When a newspaper in London falsely reported that Prior was engaged to a certain Lady Falkland, Prior joked to Montagu that such a courtship was impracticable:

She is an old Troy that will not be taken in ten years, and though fifty strong fellows should get in to her by stratagem, they might even march out again at a large breach without being able to set her on fire; but one single sentinel as I am with a thin carcass and weak lungs might lie before her walls till I eat horse-hides and shoe-leather, unless you kindly sent me some refreshments from the Treasury.¹²

Prior thus used gossip about his own love life as an excuse to beg cash, and to all such requests Montagu remained a responsive friend: ‘Of all my correspondents,’ Prior told him, ‘you are certainly the best, for you never write to me, yet do always what I beg of you. I am extremely obliged to you for the two last hundred pounds.’¹³

On another occasion, not long before Addison's arrival, Prior begged Montagu: ‘For God's sake, will you think of a little money for me, for I have fluttered away the Devil and all in this monkey country, where the air is infected with vanity, and extravagance is as epidemical as the itch in Scotland.’¹⁴

Montagu never reproached Prior for these ‘dunning’ letters, though he once defined ‘men of honour’ as being those who asked no favours of their friends: ‘Free is their service, and unbought their love.’¹⁵ Prior required some finesse to keep the two relationships, of patronage and friendship, in balance; he signed off one letter: ‘Adieu, Master; Nobody respects the Chancellor of the Exchequer more, or loves dear Mr Montagu better, than his old friend and obliged humble servant, Matt.’¹⁶ Inversely, as Dorset moved into retirement, his relationship with Prior became more that of a friend than patron: ‘I could almost wish you out of all public affairs,’ Dorset told Prior, ‘that I might enjoy your good company oftener and share with you in that ease and lazy quiet which I propose to myself in this latter part of my life.’¹⁷

Steele once declared that a gentleman should travel ‘to get clear of national Prejudices, of which every Country has its share’,¹⁸yet Addison's time among the Kit-Cats in Paris only reinforced his pre judices. This experience underpinned Addison's lifelong patriotism and dedication to resisting the French model of unmediated and unlimited power, vested in a single monarch: ‘As a British Freeholder, I should not scruple taking [the] place of a French Marquis; and when I see one of my Countrymen amusing himself in his little Cabbage-Garden, I naturally look upon him as a greater Person than the Owner of the richest Vineyard in Champagne.’¹⁹

Addison adopted Prior's opinions on nearly everything they encountered in France, and most of those opinions were extremely critical. Prior complained to Montagu about the hypocritical pretence of cordial diplomatic relations with France during this lull before war was sure to resume: ‘We took our leave yesterday of this Court, from whom we had a great many compliments and a damned dinner…they are very obliging to us one day and the same to King James the next.’²⁰

Elsewhere he observed frankly: ‘These people are all the same: civil in appearance and hating us to hell at the bottom of their heart.’²¹ Prior described Louis XIV as living ‘like an Eastern monarch, making waterworks and planting melons’ while his nation starved.²²

He showed the elderly French king as a grotesque, vainly picking at his few remaining teeth, and described the exiled James II as ‘lean, worn and rivelled’²³—telling the English ministers, in other words, exactly what they wanted to hear: that their enemies were literally toothless and impotent. Addison, though wondering at the luxury of the French palaces, similarly criticized the disparity between rich and poor, and the displacement of whole villages at Louis' orders, just ‘for the bettering of a View’.²⁴

Addison's only concession to the French was that they had the advantage over the English in good humour. In rural France, he wrote, ‘Everyone sings, laughs and starves.’²⁵ The French were also much more at ease in their conversation, especially compared to Addison, whose natural reticence in groups was accentuated by his poor French. Later, in his essays, Addison would try to convert his own self-conscious personality into the general image of English national character, in contrast to the French: ‘Modesty is our distinguishing Character, as Vivacity is theirs.’²⁶

Addison was caught in the middle of a certain tension between Prior and Manchester during Prior's final months in Paris. Prior described how even the servants there, including his girlfriend Jane, considered Manchester's manners too crude for a diplomat—blowing his nose into his napkin, spitting in the middle of the room, or laughing too loudly. A rude letter from Manchester, complaining how Prior wasted money and left his post with tasks half-done, suggests the dislike was mutual. Though Prior had proved himself useful at Ryswick, Lord Manchester's diplomatic record in Venice had been less impressive—he was assessed as being ‘of greater application than capacity’ and ‘of good address but no elocution’.²⁷ Manchester's noble birth, however, protected him from explicit criticism, while Prior grew resentful at how little remuneration or simple thanks he received after compensating for the failings of his nobly born superior. When Prior returned to London, he travelled the last leg of the journey from The Hague in the company of both King William himself and the Tory Earl of Jersey, who had been Prior's boss at the Paris embassy before Manchester and was now allied to William's rising Dutch favourite, Arnold van Keppel. Prior not only caught a chill while crossing the Channel but also sensed which way England's political wind was blowing: away from the Junto Whigs. From this point onwards, Jersey, though in opposition to Prior's Kit-cat friends, superseded Montagu and Dorset as Prior's leading patron.

Addison lodged at the Paris embassy until October 1699, then retreated to study French at a remote abbey at Blois, in the Loire, for a year. Stanyan kept Addison supplied from Paris with updates on international developments, though it is likely neither man was informed of the most important but top secret development—the signing by France and England, in October 1699, of a ‘Partition Treaty’ to peaceably divide the Spanish Empire, including the Americas, after Carlos II's death. Earlier in the summer, Somers had used his power as Lord Chancellor to permit the King to negotiate such a treaty without informing Parliament. It was not illegal for Somers to do this, but it would create severe problems for Somers when the Treaty, and its successor, the second Partition Treaty signed in March 1700, were later discovered by Parliament.

Addison was in Blois when he belatedly heard news that, thanks to sustained pressure from Harley's opposition, his patron Montagu had resigned from the Treasury and hence as the King's chief minister. Montagu's resignation and move to a less powerful but more lucrative post (as Auditor of the Receipts of the Exchequer) was a blow to his friends and followers. It confirmed Prior in his decision to shift patrons, discarding the bonds of friendship formed by school, university and, latterly, by the Kit-Cat Club.

Prior said that after Montagu's resignation he expected Somers, the only Kit-Cat and Junto member remaining in the King's inner circle, to be next ‘fallen upon’ by the Tories, ‘though God knows what crime he is guilty of, but that of being a very great man and a wise and upright judge’.²⁸ Prior was prescient: when a Commons vote against Somers' probity was very narrowly defeated in April 1700, the King was reluctantly forced to dismiss Somers. Montagu's outrage at this decision showed his deep personal loyalty to Somers, yet neither he nor other politico Kit-Cats resigned en bloc to protest their friend's martyrdom. It would hardly help Somers if all his political allies fell on their swords and thereby left the King wholly in other hands: ‘You may easily think Lord Somers cannot but have a great many friends, but they may show their friendship and yet continue their duty to the King,’ Manchester advised Prior.²⁹ The Club instead showed its solidarity with both Montagu and Somers in more subtle ways—its members' show of public unity at the Falstaff theatre outing and at Dryden's funeral had this as specific political motive, alongside defiance of Jeremy Collier.

All three Lord Dorset's Boys were reunited in London at the time Somers was forced to surrender the Great Seal. Stepney was working on the Commission of Trade and Plantations, where in June 1700 he formed a sub-commission to negotiate the boundaries of Hudson's Bay in Canada with the French. Soon after, Prior, who had given little outward sign of his shift towards Jersey's patronage, was appointed to the same Commission of Trade, replacing the retiring Commissioner (and famous Enlightenment philosopher) John Locke. With Montagu a member of the same Commission, this was possibly the only time the three old friends worked side by side.

With his Commission income, Prior bought a large townhouse on Duke Street, overlooking the promenades and dairy fields of St James's Park, and he entertained there in a manner consistently beyond his means. He invited Dorset, Montagu and Stepney to dinners there of ‘Bacon-Ham and Mutton-shin’.³⁰ Such hospitality disguised Prior's deepening involvement with the Tories, and allowed him to gather information from his old Whig friends to pass on to the rival party.

That same summer of 1700, Montagu flexed the strained muscles of his remaining influence to procure another sinecure for Congreve: the post of Customer of the Poole Port—a post Congreve held for just over two years. Congreve's portfolio of sinecures, totalling just under £200 a year, now gave him some degree of financial security. He (and his beloved dog ‘Sappho’) moved out of Tonson's house, but he continued to live as a rent-paying lodger, this time with a married couple named the Porters who lived on Arundel Street. Mrs Frances Porter was Bracey's sister.

Congreve's move from Fleet Street did not signify any falling out with his publisher, as shown by the fact that the playwright accompanied Tonson to Europe in the summer of 1700. Congreve let his friends know of their safe arrival in Calais, after which he travelled to Het Loo (William's palace and hunting lodge in Guelderland), then Rotterdam. Congreve would have been quizzed by the Dutch courtiers about the latest news from England, which was causing disquiet among Europe's Protestants. Princess Anne's only son and heir, the 11-year-old Duke of Gloucester, had just died unexpectedly in July. This threw the English Crown's Protestant succession back into doubt, making the Whigs fear that the post-Revolutionary regime, under which, for all their present problems, they had generally thrived, could yet be reversed. In August, the Junto lords stayed together at a country house near Hampton Court, and they there decided that Stepney should take advantage of his good standing with Sophia, Electress Dowager of the German state of Hanover and the Protestant granddaughter of England's James I, to ask informally whether she and her heirs would accept the English succession. This letter, in Stepney's own humble name, was sent from London in late August or early September 1700.³¹

October 1700 saw another pivotal royal death: that of Carlos II of Spain. Carlos, it emerged, had bequeathed his Spanish Habsburg Empire, including its lucrative Spanish American trade, to Louis XIV's grandson, Philippe Duc d'Anjou, rather than to the Austrian Habsburgs. When Louis XIV decided to defend his grandson's inheritance, thereby disregarding the two Partition Treaties signed with England, the stage was set for a new European war. The English and Dutch saw that a merger of the French and Spanish empires would upset the balance of world power. The Junto Whigs in particular, being most closely allied with the Dutch and Dissenting interests, advocated mounting a new defensive war against Louis XIV. As the Tory Charles Davenant put it, the mood of the Junto Whigs in 1700 was all ‘“To your tents, O Israel!”’³²

Tipped that war would soon break out, Congreve and Addison accelerated their European travels. Addison gave up improving his French, ‘which has been a Rock in my way harder to get over than the Alps,’³³ and sailed for Italy. He travelled with a former Oxford pupil, named George Dashwood, son of the Lord Mayor of London and ‘un bon gros et gras bourgeois‘,³⁴ as well as Edward Wortley, a nephew of Montagu's, and former Middle Temple chum of Congreve's and Stanyan's. By chaperoning these two young men through Italy, Addison was paid enough to cover his own expenses. In Rome, Addison watched Pope Clement XI officiate for two hours at St Peter's, and purchased twenty volumes of European manuscripts for Somers.

Congreve was back in London by December 1700, at which time he gave an Irish friend advance notice of Montagu's elevation to the House of Lords as ‘Baron Halifax’. The patent for Montagu's title, drawn up by Prior, referred to Montagu having provided the ‘sinews of war’ by establishing the Bank of England and generally restructuring English commerce in the 1690s, which was no more than the truth.³⁵ The peerage, however, was less royal thanks for services rendered than acknowledgement of Montagu's growing impotence in the Commons since the last election.

It was said Lord Halifax (as Montagu shall henceforth be called) ‘brought up a familiar style’ to the House of Lords, which made the tone of debates there far more informal.³⁶ While the Kit-Cats admired this style, just as they admired Wharton's rumbustious colloquialisms whenever he spoke in the upper house, a Tory critic snobbishly described it as ‘Billingsgate rhetoric’, unfit for a peer.³⁷ Such remarks point to the close relationship between the conversational style of the Kit-Cat Club, which increasingly behaved like a mock-parliament in its meetings,³⁸ and the tone of actual parliamentary debate—one elite talking-shop echoing another.

Dickens famously remarked that the House of Commons was ‘the best club in London’.³⁹ With its nepotism, cronyism and oligarchic management, government at the beginning of the eighteenth century was indeed a giant club—MPs were not called ‘members’ for nothing, and those who held government places, voting with the Court in the Commons, were sometimes known as ‘the Club Men’.⁴⁰ Kit-Cat spirit translated to wider Whig party loyalty, which magnified itself into national patriotism, and collective identities forged in a tavern's backroom evolved into national identities. Such collective identity was formed most deeply during periods of political adversity, as during the winter of 1700–1.

The King was back to relying, against his own inclinations, on Tories like Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, and the Treasury management of Lord Godolphin. This necessity was confirmed by another Tory-dominated Parliament returned after the election in January 1701.

The Kit-Cat Club's lifespan was characterized by unusually frequent and highly contested elections, averaging one every second year. Individual Junto members' electoral influence, through direct patronage, but also through circular letters and regional party whips, was therefore key to the Club's wider influence. In particular, England saw a notable rise in ‘carpet-bagging’ and boroughs ‘succumb[ing] to affluent, absentee candidates in preference to indigenous minor gentry or merchants’.⁴¹ The Kit-Cat Club contributed to this, in so far as it established bonds between the nobility and London gentlemen who were not their kinsmen, which were then imported into Parliament.⁴² Not all MPs who were handed seats without contest failed to serve their constituents honourably, but nor was such an MP likely to challenge his patron's instructions. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, despite her personal fondness for the Club, remarked that its members were ‘dupes to their leaders’.⁴³

As in 1698, the Kit-Cats had tried to influence voters in 1701 in ways considered unconstitutional by many at the time: letters from Lord Carlisle to rally support for Whig candidates around the country, for example, led to a Commons vote against peers meddling in elections beyond the counties where they owned property. Halifax and Wharton so aggressively used their interests in Wiltshire to secure election of New East India Company supporters that the Tories afterwards sent the unlucky Whig election agents to the Tower.

After the 1701 election defeat of the Junto Whigs, Robert Harley's supporters nominated him for the Commons' Speakership. It is telling that the Junto did not organize its resistance to this move via the Kit-Cat Club but rather via another Whig club that ran in parallel—the Whig Rose Club, which met at the Rose tavern in Covent Garden. The Rose Club was a far less exclusive and yet more narrowly focused society than the Kit-Cat, founded at around the same time and used by Halifax and Wharton as a place to whip underling Whig MPs into line. Over seventy-five such MPs met at the Rose to co-ordinate their opposition to Harley's appointment as Speaker, but were defeated at the vote in February 1701.

The following month, the Commons passed the Act of Settlement, ensuring the English Crown would pass to the House of Hanover (Electress Sophia, followed by her son George) should both William and Princess Anne die childless. The ministry, including Lord Godolphin and Robert Harley, supported this crucial constitutional measure, and the Act was voted through ‘without any dispute’,⁴⁴ since no MP of either party could openly oppose the Protestant succession and hope to retain a career in Williamite government. Behind the scenes, however, certain Tories tried to obstruct the clauses intended to consolidate the Whig model of limited parliamentary monarchy, such as limits on any future monarch's power to dictate foreign affairs. The Junto argued to retain such limitations and so believed themselves the true defenders of English liberties (even against William, if need be). The Act also sounded the death knell for the old Stuart idea of the monarch as God's Anointed, ruling by Divine Right. The succession was explicitly being determined, after all, by an Act of Parliament, not by God. After 1701, allegiance to the Hanoverian succession became an inviolable tenet of the Kit-Cat Club, as for most Whigs—a tenet the Kit-Cats would need to defend with all their energy in future. The Act of Settlement had secured the succession on paper, but it was a long way from being secure in practice.

The inseparability of the Kit-Cat Club's cultural and political pursuits is well demonstrated by the relationship between the parliamentary debate over ‘election’ of England's royal heir and the debate then raging between subjective (Lockean) and objective (classical) theories of criticism. Congreve dramatized the subjectivists' viewpoint in March 1701, just as the Act of Settlement was being passed, in a new musical masque entitled The Judgment of Paris. Congreve turned this piece—about goddesses competing in a kind of beauty pageant—into an actual competition for English composers, with the London Gazette advertising for new songs, the best of which, as voted by the audience, would win £200 (over £26,000 today). Tonson administered the competition. As with the Falstaff performance and Dryden's funeral, the event was a way for the Club to reassert itself culturally during a time of political difficulty, while making a case among intellectuals for a particularly Whiggish theory of critical judgement. They wished to show that, whether choosing one's leaders or one's entertainment, the same enlightened exercise of reason and good taste was required.

Only four musicians entered the competition because it was unfairly believed that the event, like a parliamentary election, would be fixed. A good audience, however, attended to hear the four alternative performances at the Dorset Garden Theatre, which had been lined with tin to improve its acoustics, and prettily decorated with extra candles. ‘The boxes and the pit were all thrown into one; so that all sat in common,’ wrote Congreve, ‘and the whole was crammed with beauties and beaux, not one scrub being admitted.’⁴⁵ Free hot chocolate and cool drinks, including ‘ratafia’ (liqueur flavoured with almond or fruit kernels) and white wine, were served between the pit and the stage. Bracey, or ‘Our friend Venus’ as Congreve fondly called her, ‘performed to a miracle’. She and the other actresses playing the goddesses judged by Paris were at one point in the masque ordered to disrobe and partially did so, making it an extremely erotic performance for its day.

The Kit-Cat patrons dominated the all-Whig subscription supporting this production and competition, with Halifax being its prime sponsor, and Somerset lobbying for his favourite contestant to win. Ironically, as in the last two parliamentary elections, it was not the Kit-Cat candidates who triumphed, however, but another young man, John Weldon, who later became the King's organist.

There was soon little time for such cultural contests, as another parliamentary crisis erupted around the ‘discovery’ of the two secret Partition Treaties. Harley, who only wanted an excuse to further decapitate the Junto Whigs, promptly led his coalition of Tories and radical Country Whigs (who feared William's secret diplomacy as a return to the autocratic ways of Charles II) to attack the Treaties' makers. Declaring passionately that Somers had to be punished or ‘our posterity will curse us’,⁴⁶ Harley tried to persuade his fellow MPs to impeach Somers.

On 14 April 1701, Somers delivered a half-hour speech in his own defence to the Commons, ‘with great plainness and presence of mind’, explaining he had only been following the King's orders.⁴⁷ He then withdrew before the House voted on his case.

Prior was one of the MPs sitting in the Commons that evening. He had obtained his East Grinstead seat three months earlier through the influence of his childhood patron, Dorset. Though he had written to Dorset in 1698 complimenting William's wisdom in concluding the first Partition Treaty (in which Prior himself had had a significant hand), Prior now took the extraordinary step of voting with Harley and the Tories in favour of impeaching Somers for ‘a high Crime and Misdemeanour’ in the Lords. If the Kit-Cats had not suspected the shift in Prior's loyalties before, it was now made dramatically evident. As Prior voted, he must have avoided the eye of fellow Kit-Cat William Walsh, acting as teller. Though there was often the odd deviancy on a division list, such outright defection away from a political party and its patrons was observed with shock. Prior further voted with the majority, 198 to 188, to bring impeachment charges against two other Junto lords: Orford and—incredibly, in light of their long friendship—Halifax.⁴⁸

Afterwards, the Kit-Cats unanimously denounced Prior as an ungrateful Judas, concerned only with keeping his place. One remarked that Dorset had not raised Prior from tavern-sweeping obscurity for disloyalty such as this. Halifax's brother Jemmy, now the eminent jurist Sir James Montagu, struggled as only a lawyer could to excuse their old school friend, explaining that Prior must have felt voting otherwise would have turned the guilt for the two Treaties upon the King himself. The Kit-Cat Club was unconvinced, and though Prior was not expelled from the Club straight away, he was unwelcome at its meetings from this date onwards.

A little lament, written by Prior in 1701, may suggest he regretted the price paid for his political choices that year:

Reading ends in Melancholy;

Wine breeds Vices and Diseases;

Wealth is but Care, and Love but Folly;

Only Friendship truly pleases.

My Wealth, my Books, my Flask, my Molly,

Farewell all, if FRIENDSHIP Ceases!⁴⁹

At the same time, another Prior verse conveys his overriding pragmatism, which had led him to act as he did:

For conscience, like a fiery horse,

Will stumble, if you check his course;

But ride him with an easy rein,

And rub him down with worldly gain,

He'll carry you through thick and thin,

Safe, although dirty, to your inn.⁵⁰

Stepney, the third Lord Dorset's Boy, could not easily forgive Prior's betrayal. That summer, he told Halifax that the second ‘mouse’ had been ‘nibbling towards drawing me into a correspondence with him, but I waived it in as cold a manner as I could’.⁵¹ What Halifax's own feelings were when he learned that his friend of almost twenty years was among those who voted for his impeachment can only be guessed.

Somers and Halifax coordinated a press campaign against the impeachment charges, using the Kit-Cat Club to liaise with Whig writers in their defence. A Tory complained that those who were ‘solicitous for the nation’ were being libelled as Papists, Jacobites and French spies, as ‘given out in a certain printed ballad, said to be written by a certain club of great men, which was then held not far from the King's Head tavern in Holborn [on Chancery Lane, hence plausibly the Kit-Cat Club at Gray's Inn]…The mob took the hint…and gave it out for gospel in an instant.’⁵²

Jonathan Swift, who had watched with envy as Congreve received favours from the Kit-Cat patrons, contributed an anonymous pamphlet in defence of the impeached lords. Somers and Halifax sought the acquaintance of the pamphlet's author via its printer, and were, boasted Swift, ‘very liberal in promising me the greatest preferments I could hope for, if ever it came in their power’. Swift claimed he ‘grew domestic’ with Halifax during 1701, and was ‘as often with Lord Somers as the formality of his nature (the only unconversable fault he has) made it agreeable to me’.⁵³ Nonetheless, Swift was not invited to join the Kit-Cat Club.

Congreve turned his legally trained eye to the various charges against Somers and concluded, in June 1701, that the impeachment would never go through, ‘for there is neither matter nor proof’.⁵⁴ After a tussle between the lower and upper houses, his fellow peers acquitted Somers and dismissed the other charges against Halifax and Orford. This was a crucial political moment, at which a Whigdominated Lords overrode a Tory-dominated Commons, allowing the Tories to thereafter cast the Whig Junto as an anti-democratic force, for all their talk of English liberties. It was a crisis that polarized the parties and set the terms for heated Whig/Tory debates throughout the decade to follow. As one Tory muttered, these impeachment proceedings had launched ‘a feud that I fear will not die’.⁵⁵