Читать книгу The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation - Ophelia Field - Страница 15

If eating or drinking be natural, herding is so too.

3RD EARL OF SHAFTESBURY, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)¹

IN EARLY 1703, Tonson acquired another summer home for the nomadic Kit-Cats. He leased a country house at Barn Elms, about seven miles west of London on the south side of the Thames, just west of Putney. The surrounding area was a picnic resort for Londoners, mentioned by Pepys as a place for strolls among the majestic elms and by Congreve as one of dubious morals. It was best reached by barge from Whitehall, rather than by the road (the original King's Road) that ran through the open country of ‘five fields’ and was notoriously plagued by highwaymen.

Elizabeth I had once stayed at Barn Elms' manor house. Tonson's property was a much more modest residence to the north of the manor, possibly its dairy. Taking the lease was nonetheless an expression of Tonson's social aspirations. The westerly migration from the stink of London into fresher air represented both his own and the Club's rising status since the 1690s. The proliferating villas of Twickenham and Clapham would soon become a clichéd image of new money's encroachment, as Whig ‘Cits’ (City citizens) imitated the rural idyll of the landed gentry but within commuting distance of the town. Like them, Tonson wanted to live within easy reach of London, but this Barn Elms property was unusual in being a status symbol not only for a private individual but also for a collective group.

Tonson may have been allowed to use the unspent Kit-Cat subscription monies, collected to build a Hampstead venue, to renovate the Barn Elms house instead. He hired Vanbrugh to fit up the house's interior. Like Vanbrugh's ‘Goose Pie’ house in Whitehall, Tonson's small property was good practice for the self-taught architect before working at Castle Howard, though in the latter case Vanbrugh would largely leave Hawksmoor to design the interior. Both houses, small and large, reflected their owners' desires to be judged more on how they spent their money than on how much money they had—in Tonson's case because he had more than was considered decent for an untitled merchant, and in Carlisle's case because he had less than his title suggested. As with membership of the Kit-Cat Club, the fad for architecture and interior design, and thereby the demonstration of one's taste, was a way to set oneself apart from an ever-increasing number of prosperous but perhaps less educated neighbours. A diverse range of luxury furnishings available at this date—thanks to the East India Company's imports of cotton, chintz and porcelain, for example—made it as easy for Tonson as for Carlisle to participate. As Defoe wrote when he saw a tradesman's house filled with velvet hangings, embroidered chairs and damask curtains, it was now common for such a man to own ‘Furniture equal to what, formerly, sufficed the greatest of our Nobility’.²

The first time Tonson took Vanbrugh down to Barnes to survey the property, the men shared a simple supper in the kitchen, which Vanbrugh would remember fondly some twenty years later as ‘the best meal I ever ate’.³ Tonson thus became Vanbrugh's second architectural patron, after Carlisle. By this date Tonson and Vanbrugh were also close personal friends. Tonson allocated a bedroom for Vanbrugh's permanent private use at Barn Elms, and a poem by a mutual friend contained a fictionalized dialogue in which the character of Tonson says of Vanbrugh: ‘…so much I dote on him, that I / If I were sure to go to Heaven, would die’.⁴

Tonson convened the Club in London in March 1703, telling the members it would be the last meeting for some time, as he would be travelling to Holland on book business. Stepney, who was in Vienna cajoling Emperor Leopold into devoting greater military resources to the Grand Alliance, sent his ‘hearty affections to the Kit-Cat; I often wish it were my fortune to make one with you at 3 in the morning’.⁵ This March 1703 meeting seems to have been a particularly late and lively one. A dangerously indecent poem by an unidentified Kit-Cat was recited, mocking Queen Anne for her phantom pregnancies. In the poem, Anne knights her doctor with her bare, gouty leg, in a fit of pleasure when he declares her pregnant. It is a nasty piece, reflecting the Junto Whigs' disgruntlement, out of office thanks to what they considered a woman's ignorant and irrational prejudices.

The Kit-Cats' published propaganda was more restrained. Tonson's press, for example, published The Golden Age Restor'd (1703), which was a sarcastic call to arms, suggesting the Jacobites should oust the few remaining Whigs at Court as the prelude to a Franco-Jacobite invasion.⁶ Written by William Walsh, the poem was printed anonymously and its authorship mistakenly attributed to Arthur Maynwaring, who almost lost his commission at the Customs House as a result. Yet Maynwaring did not break ranks and betray the poem's true author. The Kit-Cats stood collectively behind the publication's anonymity, just as the Tories concealed the author of their reply, The Golden Age Revers'd (1703), which reviled the Kit-Cat Club as a gang of hubristic conspirators.⁷

Tonson departed for Holland soon after the March meeting. Now 47 and balding (‘spacious brow[ed]’, as one poet delicately put it⁸), he travelled this time with the youngest Kit-Cat: the indolent 19-yearold Charles Fitzroy, 2nd Duke of Grafton (grandson of Charles II and his mistress Barbara Villiers), who had joined the Club upon reaching his maturity. Vanbrugh thought Tonson would find it amusing to hear that the Tories suspected the bookseller of travelling as a Junto messenger destined for Hanover, and that his subscription list to a new edition of Ceasar's Commentaries was rumoured to be a sinister list of rebels plotting to overthrow Queen Anne. While Tonson's subscription lists were not without political subtext, there was no such undercover mission. It was simply a trip to acquire new texts, typeface and paper from the Continent.

Tonson left his nephew, Jacob Tonson Junior (brother to Elizabeth and uncle to Steele's illegitimate child; referred to hereafter as ‘Jacob Junior’ to avoid confusion) in charge of the publishing firm. This partnership would continue after Tonson's return, and from this date forward it is often unclear which of the two Tonsons was responsible for particular publications or business decisions. Despite the trust placed in Jacob Junior, however, there is evidence that he did not feel unalloyed affection for his domineering uncle.

Vanbrugh, trusted as closely as Tonson's nephew, was left in charge of the renovation work at Barn Elms. He travelled there to inspect the site amid unseasonably heavy rains in June 1703, and reported to Tonson that the carpenters had been neglecting the job for the past fortnight: ‘[E]very room is chips—up to your chin!’ The neighbours had also failed to steal the peas and beans from Tonson's kitchen garden, so that they hung rotting on the vine. Vanbrugh assured Tonson, with a gentle jibe at Tonson's aspirations for the modest property, that the house would soon be ready ‘for the reception of a king’.⁹

Other Kit-Cat Club members took an active interest in the Barn Elms works, supporting the theory that it was intended to become a Club venue. Congreve told Tonson in Amsterdam: ‘I believe Barn Elms wants you and I long to see it but don't care to satisfy my curiosity before you come.’¹⁰ Vanbrugh wrote, meanwhile, that ‘the Kit-Cat wants you much more than you ever can do them…Those who remain in town are in great desire of waiting on you at BarnElms.’¹¹

This last statement emphasizes how central Tonson remained as Club secretary and chairman, even now that the Club's membership had expanded to include more than a dozen peers of the realm. A month later, Vanbrugh complained again: ‘The Kit-Cat…will never meet without you, so you can see here's a general stagnation for want of you.’¹² The Duke of Somerset sent the same message, though in a more imperious tone: ‘Our Club is dissolved, till you revive it again; which we are impatient of.’¹³ Congreve, Vanbrugh and Halifax drank a toast to Tonson's quick return one day that summer at Hampton Court, ‘as we were sopping our Arses in the Fountain, for you must know we have got some warm weather at last’.¹⁴

Yet Tonson's position remained, at the same time, precarious. Though still the Club's convener and nominal host, he seems to have also been the butt of the Club's raillery during repeated rifts between the publisher and his Kit-Cat authors. A satirical advertisement was printed in January 1704, ostensibly composed by Tonson to deny that he was ‘infamously expelled a certain Society called the K-t C-t Club’ as a result of his ‘ill-timed freedom with some of the Principal Members at the Reading of a Late Satire upon his Parts and Person’ and also to deny he was ‘since Clapped up in a Madhouse’. To the contrary, the advertisement explained, Tonson had withdrawn himself voluntarily ‘in scorn of being their Jest any longer’ and ‘walks the public Streets without a Keeper’.¹⁵ The notice has the tone of an inside joke, meriting speculation about the incident behind it. What was the ‘Late Satire’? Was it Faction Display'd (1704), William Shippen's poem which incorporated three lines mocking Tonson's freckles and lameness? And what was Tonson's ‘ill-timed freedom’? Could it be, as the phrase suggests, that the tradesman had finally taken a liberty too far?

Another poem, The Kit-Cats, written sometime before June 1704, seems to refer to the same rift. Structured around an allegory in which the Club's literary members rebel against Tonson's authority (‘They cry he Sep'rate Interest Carries on, / Pretends their Profit, but designs his own’), the poem is the literary bruise remaining after a fight which history has forgotten.¹⁶ Again, two sources dating to 1705 refer to Tonson being so severely teased by the Club's members that he talked of leaving them: a poem referred to Tonson being ‘Sullen through his late ill-Usage’ at the Club,¹⁷ while a play called The Quacks showed ‘Stationer Freckle’ feeling aggrieved when his authors teased him in their verses. A private letter from Halifax to another Kit-Cat confirms Tonson bore the brunt of the Club's raillery, and was growing sick of it: ‘Our friend Jacob seems to have abdeclared [i.e. abdicated] his government of the Chit-Kat…[T]hey had teased him so unmercifully of late that I fancy he intends to leave them.’¹⁸

Another, later poem described Tonson as having ‘more Humours than a dancing Bear’ but ultimately being persuaded to reconcile with his Kit-Cat authors.¹⁹

As Vanbrugh helped Tonson realize his social aspirations at Barn Elms, so he continued to help Carlisle confirm his family's status—as well as Carlisle's personal educational and cultural status—at Castle Howard. With time on his hands since the Queen had relieved him of his Treasury office, Carlisle was able to personally oversee the construction site there. That summer of 1703, some 200 men were working on the Yorkshire house and gardens. When work had hardly begun, Carlisle took a party of friends, including Kit-Cats Kingston, Grafton, Wharton and William Cavendish, for an impromptu site inspection, demonstrating that the project was, from the start, distinctly Whiggish.

Carlisle's aesthetic, like Vanbrugh's, seems to have gained definition through exchanges at the Kit-Cat Club. Though the Kit-Cats published no manifesto, we can retrospectively discern an unwritten manifesto directing all their cultural projects, whether literary or architectural. This manifesto involved competing with French culture but not, as might be expected, rejecting it wholesale. The Kit-Cats drew from French comedies, architecture and gardening manuals, just as they imported other Continental models from Venice or Vienna, but they aimed to modify all these European imports and so establish a more ‘modern’ and distinctively English brand of neoclassicism. Vanbrugh tried to temper the baroque style, associated as it was with Europe's absolute monarchies, with historical English elements—for example, long Jacobean galleries—and with numerous visual allusions to the Roman republic that the Whigs considered the classical parallel to their constitutional monarchy.

The question of why the Kit-Cat Club felt such an urgent need to define England's national style is a complex one. There was a sense that pre-Revolutionary elites had been lapdogs to the French, a sense that the large number of immigrants in London and at Court during William's reign had further diluted English identity, a sense that European baroque architecture had left England lagging behind, and a wish, in light of England's rising commercial power, to hold their heads high and build properties exuding new-found national self-confidence. There was no English school of architecture to constrain Vanbrugh, and he was lucky that his Kit-Cat commissioners gave him great imaginative freedom during a time of stylistic transition. The Kit-Cat Club directed him only by endorsing his search for a new, distinctively English style. Perhaps his own sense of coming from a family of recent migrants sharpened his personal passion for this quest.

One of the most radical, innovative aspects of Castle Howard was its location—that someone should build such a palatial home on a windswept hillside in Yorkshire. Carlisle saw himself as extending the reach of civilization by importing Continental styles he had seen on his travels into the depths of the English countryside, for his neighbours' edification. The project brought direct economic benefits to the local craftsmen it employed, and the emulation of such great Whig houses by more minor nobility and gentry—such as the building of Beningborough by John Bourchier in Yorkshire in 1716—was to have trickle-down economic benefits.

Castle Howard was also a Whiggish project in the sense that its contents boasted of English trade and manufacture. Its interior was started after 1706, though interior designs had been a part of the house's overall plan from the beginning, with Vanbrugh commissioning Hawksmoor to design the ‘Eating Room’ interior, for example. This was a new way of working, reflecting the fact that a private citizen's private rooms could now make public statements, as only royal palaces' interiors had previously done. Carlisle engaged several London merchants to do the upholstering and make the furniture for his rooms, and collected delftware and other exotic decorative items from the London importers. The house's bedchambers were hung with oriental silk damasks, its dressing rooms with India wallpapers, and the Earl's Grand Cabinet with angora mohair imported by the Turkey Company. The whole house, in other words, became a receptacle for the luxuries of British trade, but with its owner constantly aiming to emphasize that he was a collector and connoisseur, not just a greedy shopper.

The magnificent building, as it rose, provoked the ire of some smaller Yorkshire landowners, resentful of raised wartime tax ation and of peers like Carlisle who were aligned to the City of London's interests. Had they known the extent to which Carlisle's income had dwindled, and how watchful he had to be of expenditure on building a house financed largely through credit and card winnings, they might have felt less aggrieved.

Carlisle had the power to bestow heraldic rewards through the College of Arms, and therefore was able to pay Vanbrugh for building Castle Howard by making him a ‘Carlisle Herald’ in June 1703, an appointment from which Vanbrugh was then promoted to the lucrative place of ‘Clarenceux King of Arms’. This required only that Vanbrugh occasionally appear at the College of Arms in ornate costume. A contemporary's reaction to news of the appointment was pragmatic: ‘Now Van can build houses.’²⁰ Suspicions that Carlisle and Vanbrugh were treating the heralds' internal hierarchy with cynical disrespect, however, were confirmed when Vanbrugh later referred to this appointment as ‘a Place I got in jest’.²¹ To Tonson in Amsterdam, Vanbrugh confided that several Kit-Cats had ridiculed his heraldic investiture with their own drunken ceremony. Carlisle's brother-inlaw, neighbour and fellow Kit-Cat, Algernon Capel, 2nd Earl of Essex, had done the honours, said Vanbrugh, ‘with a whole Bowl of wine about my ears instead of half a Spoonful’.²²

In Amsterdam, Tonson was missing Vanbrugh's company, being stuck instead with that of Addison, recently returned to Holland after his tour of the German Courts. Since Addison would never support himself outside academia solely on the proceeds of Latin translations, Tonson tried to think of a day-job for his author. Reviewing his portfolio of Kit-Cat patrons, Tonson knew that only Somerset was flourishing politically under Anne's Tory-led ministry, and so enquired whether Addison might become an escort and tutor for Somerset's son. When Somerset replied positively, offering a salary of 100 guineas (some £14,000 today), Addison wrote back: ‘As for the Recompense that is proposed to me, I must take the Liberty to assure your Grace that I should not see my account in it but in the hopes that I have to recommend myself to your Grace's favour and approbation.’²³

Somerset took offence at this hint that he would owe Addison future patronage and that the salary was ungenerous; he withdrew the offer. Addison, never one to offend the rich and powerful intentionally, hurriedly apologized, but it was too late. Tonson, having stuck his neck out for Addison in seeking the favour from Somerset, was unimpressed by how it had been handled. While he appreciated Addison's intellect, Tonson never warmed to Addison as to Congreve and Vanbrugh, and incidents like this help explain why.²⁴

Addison was tiring of expat society in Holland, focused as it was on purely material, mercantile and military concerns. He complained of being forced to become conversant with the market price for nutmeg and pepper because, ‘since the coming in of the East India fleet, our conversation here runs altogether on Spice’.²⁵ By September 1703, he was back in London after five years of travel. Tonson probably returned on the same ship, bringing a supply of Dutch type that was to improve the appearance of English printed books dramatically, as well as various purchases on behalf of his favourite Kit-Cats: a copy of Palladio's architectural plans for Vanbrugh, ivory mathematical instruments for Halifax, and a set of new linen for Congreve.

Following Addison's return to London, he rented a garret on the street today known as the Haymarket (thanks to then being the location of one of London's largest stables and hay markets). It neighboured Dr Garth's handsome, fully staffed townhouse on the street's eastern side. Addison's despondency and anxiety about his career and income at this date were understandable. He had given up a safe path in the Church for the ambition of becoming a government servant and writer, but neither of his recent prose publications on Italian tourism or Roman medals was attracting much interest beyond his friends. Somers, Halifax and Manchester remained Addison's nominal patrons, having invested in his European education, but there was no fresh idea of how to employ him since he had blown his chance with Somerset. Addison lived off his small inheritance, conscious of being the eldest yet least settled of his siblings, at 32 the walking embodiment of unfulfilled intellectual potential.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (who had high standards) declared Addison the best company in the world, and Steele, always Addison's biggest fan, asked Congreve to agree that an evening alone with Addison was like ‘the Pleasure of conversing with an intimate Acquaintance of Terence and Catullus, who had all their Wit and Nature heightened with Humour, more exquisite and delightful than any other Man ever possessed’.²⁶ Yet Addison had a natural aversion to large gatherings, saying there was ‘no such thing as real conversation between more than two persons’.²⁷ It was less a matter of principle than personality. He described himself, using a metaphor from Congreve's Double Dealer, as a man who could draw a bill for a thousand pounds but had not one guinea in his pocket, meaning that he could express himself with perfect fluency on paper but then grew tight-lipped and tongue-tied in public. He felt this was a disability partly because he shared the widespread belief that a writer would produce better work if part of a stimulating literary circle—that dinner parties and drinking friendships were essential ingredients in highbrow creativity, as for the Roman Augustans.²⁸ Addison saw the Kit-Cat Club as a place where writers' ‘Conversation fed their mutual Flame’²⁹ and so, against the grain of his own personality, he forced himself to join the Club, to which so many of his friends and patrons had long belonged, in 1704.

Ironically, the practical result of Addison's reticence when at a Kit-cat Club dinner was that he had to get quickly drunk to relax. Addison was especially fond of Canary wine and ‘Barbadoes water’ (an alcoholic cordial flavoured with citrus),³⁰ and Steele was almost certainly thinking of Addison when he described a friend whom you could seldom get into a tavern, but ‘once he is arrived to his pint and begins to look about and like his company, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay buried’.³¹

The amount usually drunk at the Kit-Cat Club is disputed. One contemporary said they ‘refresh themselves with a glass of wine, but with great moderation’.³² Individual members' household alcohol bills, however, suggest that they were often well soaked,³³ and a Tory poet described the Club as inspired by intoxication: ‘Oft do they in high Flights and Raptures swell, / Drunk with the Waters of our Jacob's Well.’³⁴

Vanbrugh's personal punch recipe also suggests that there were some lethally strong cocktails besides the wine on offer at the Club: ‘water or small beer; mead, port—two glasses each; rum, saffron—a very little of each; nutmeg, poker [i.e. warmed by inserting a hot poker], orange or lemon peel in winter; balm etc in summer’.³⁵

Addison's travel book on Italy had reviewed the wine in every place he visited, and this wine connoisseurship was something he shared with other Kit-Cat members. In 1704, when Congreve noted ‘Good wine scarcer than ever’,³⁶ Addison joined the Kit-Cat Club partly because it was one of the few places where one would have been served the finest, lighter French wines. Imports of French wine were heavily taxed during the war, and though the Kit-Cat lords and MPs supported this protectionism in Parliament, they privately made full use of the privilege allowed to the Privy Counsellors among them to import large quantities of duty-free wine. In 1706, Congreve complained London ‘affords not one drop of wine out of a private house’.³⁷ His distinction between what they were drinking in public and private is telling.

Since the Methuen Treaty of 1703, Portuguese wine could be imported at a third less duty than French. Port was ‘patriotic and Whig and woollen; claret was Francophile and Jacobite’.³⁸ Kit-Cat Anthony Henley quipped that the Tories were unpatriotic because ‘they are for bringing in French claret and will not sup-Port’.³⁹ Among the Whigs, champagne and claret became truly guilty pleasures, and much black-market French wine was labelled as port to get it through customs. Between 1705 and 1714, Congreve was one of five Commissioners for licensing wine, which, combined with his job at the Customs House, placed him perfectly—alongside Maynwaring—to assist his patrons with defrauding the system.

In the early 1700s, when heavy drinking had not yet exploded into the epidemic depicted in Hogarth's ‘Gin Lane’ but rather remained the preserve of the upper classes (as in the phrase ‘drunk as a lord’), alcoholism was not regarded as a serious issue. Even the Collierites and Societies for the Reformation of Manners never focused on temperance. However, Addison, self-critical of what he must have known was a personal weakness, lectured young men never to boast of drunkenness, since it distorts the intelligence and ‘displays every little Spot of the Soul in its utmost Deformity’.⁴⁰ He published an essay advising his readers to drink as follows: ‘the first Glass for myself, the second for my Friends, the third for good Humour and the fourth for mine Enemies’.⁴¹ One reader, possibly a teasing friend, commented that ‘there was certainly an Error in the Print, and that the Word Glass should be Bottle‘.⁴²

Addison was far more abstemious about food than alcohol, having too delicate a digestion for the richer dishes at the Kit-Cat feasts. The Kit-Cat Club remained a dining club, even as it assumed its range of other identities as cultural institution, literary clique and political think-tank. It was imitated as a dining and toasting club by the ‘Beefsteak Club’, another Whig club that started sometime before 1705.⁴³ But, though many Kit-Cats were dedicated food lovers, only one member's admission rested primarily on his reputation as a gourmand. Charles Dartiquenave (or ‘Dartineuf’), known to his friends as ‘Darty’, was a member when Addison joined. Darty was rumoured to be a bastard son of Charles II, but in fact his father was a Huguenot refugee. Darty had written a volume of poems in Greek and Latin while a boy, and as an adult became known as a great punster. He was appointed an Agent of Taxes in 1706 and later Paymaster of the Royal Works, being described by one contemporary as ‘the man that knows everything and that everybody knows’.⁴⁴ Anecdotes about Darty, however, focused on only one thing: his obsessive love of food.⁴⁵ Pope wrote an epigram: ‘Each mortal has his pleasure: none deny / Scarsdale his bottle, Darty his Ham Pie.’⁴⁶

It is unsurprising that a man who became known as ‘a most celebrated sensualist and glutton’⁴⁷ should have sought admission to a club founded upon pie-eating.

Addison's indifference to good food was shown by Edward Wortley Montagu's explicit refusal to share lodgings with Addison unless he hired a better cook. In a famous essay on the ‘Gluttony of a modern Meal’, Addison imagined each rich dish on the table as a dish of gout, dropsy or fever. Addison said his prescriptive diet would be one dish per meal, with simple sauces—closer to our modern norm. He recommended that if one must eat a large dinner, one should balance it with some days of abstinence.

Addison's arrival coincided with the Kit-Cat Club's move after 1704 to Barn Elms, where there was fresher produce to enjoy besides the stodgy pies. Following a summer visit to the property, Vanbrugh told Tonson there were a ‘hundred thousand apricocks [sic]’ in the orchards, along with strawberries, redcurrants ‘red as blood’, gooseberries, peaches, pears, apples and plums sufficient ‘to gripe the guts of a nation’.⁴⁸ Addison would later take great pride in his own kitchen garden, full of cabbages, ‘coleworts’ (half-grown cabbages) and herbs,⁴⁹ so he would have taken a keen interest in Tonson's kitchen garden and orchards at Barn Elms, but more as a gardener than gourmand.

A Swiss visitor in 1719 observed many people in England ‘never eat any bread, and universally they eat very little: they nibble a few crumbs, while they chew the meat by whole mouthfuls’.⁵⁰ Meat was a status food and a taste for it (in pies or as roasts) was considered manly, but people also ate more fruit and vegetables than is sometimes supposed. The Kit-Cats would have disdained Italian cookery for its relative scarcity of meat, though Carlisle—with a taste for Continental imports in food as in architecture—once ordered, from an Italian warehouse on London's Suffolk Street, ‘some choice figs’, parmesan cheese and four or five pounds of ‘French raisins’.⁵¹ The Kit-Cat diet was, in other words, not as unvaried as one might think. Addison described a dinner conversation about gastronomic antipathies like eels and parsnips, which proceeded ‘till we had worked up ourselves to such a Pitch of Complaisance that when the Dinner was to come in, we enquired the Name of every Dish and hoped it would be no Offence to any in Company’.⁵²

The balancing of the Club's meat with more fruit and vegetables in the summer paralleled, symbolically, a balancing of the Club's masculinity with more ‘polite’, feminine tastes. After the Barn Elms renovations were completed, Vanbrugh, Carlisle and Garth hosted a ‘Barns Expedition’ by barge to show the house off to a party consisting of Marlborough's wife Sarah and other noble Whig ladies. And it was after the Club settled at Barn Elms (and the Fountain tavern) that the Kit-Cats added a larger dash of delicacy to their meetings with bespoke drinking glasses and decorative silverware.⁵³ Vanbrugh always referred to the Barn Elms house by the feminine pronoun and, in one letter to Tonson, personified it as Tonson's mistress. This was an allusion to a quip in Wycherley's play The Country Wife,⁵⁴ but also a way of countering accusations that an interest in interior design was in any way effeminate.

The metaphor of ‘appetite’ versus ‘taste’ was used in relation to all forms of connoisseurship, with the idea that ‘consumption’ should be refined and one's palate exercised: ‘Conversation with Men of a Polite Genius is another Method for improving our Natural Taste,’ Addison wrote.⁵⁵ At the dinner table, the expectation of conversational pleasures to be served by one's fellow diners was equal to the expectation of good food. Every dinner party in London was said to need at least one Kit-Cat guest, or ‘Flat was the Wine and tasteless was the Cheer.’⁵⁶

Addison had joined the Club, however, not for its wine or conversation, but to remedy his unemployment. Resisting lethargy, he helped select the poems for another edition of Tonson's Miscellany, but this took only a little of his time and attention. Nothing could have come as more of a relief, in these circumstances, than an unexpected visitor bearing good news in the late summer. Harry Boyle, the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the stinking wigs, personally climbed the three flights of stairs to Addison's garret to deliver an important message directly from Lord Treasurer Godolphin. Boyle was possibly selected, or volunteered, as messenger because he was a Kit-Cat and this was a Kit-Cat-inspired business.

Halifax had suggested to Godolphin that Addison be commissioned to write a poem for the government, in exchange for a post as Commissioner for Appeals and Regulating the Excise (a virtual sinecure, worth £200 a year or some £26,500 today). Godolphin himself was ‘not a reading man’,⁵⁷ but the three Kit-Cat Junto leaders had persuaded him that the war effort needed a patriotic poem to celebrate Marlborough's great victory against Louis XIV and the Bavarians in August 1704 at the battle of Blenheim.