Читать книгу The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation - Ophelia Field - Страница 9

[W]e very often contract such Friendships at School as are of Service to us all the following Part of our Lives.

The Spectator no. 313, 28 February 1712¹

THE SENSE of unbounded possibility felt by many individual Englishmen in the 1690s owed much to what one historian has dubbed the ‘educational revolution’ of the earlier seventeenth century.² A surprisingly high proportion of England's sons (though none of its daughters) attended grammar schools, dissenting academies or the liberally endowed foundation or charity schools, so that teaching was no longer the preserve of the clergy and private tutors in noble households. For the generations of boys who enjoyed this expansion in primary and higher education, there were lifelong side effects: the formation of friendships that felt as important to them as family bonds, and a lasting enthusiasm for all-male camaraderie that would express itself subsequently in all-male clubbing.

Westminster School, refounded by Elizabeth I, was a private London school that was now expanding its intake and supplying a new breed of gentleman to government offices and the professions. Jacob Tonson once explained that whereas Eton was ‘very much filled by the Sons of Quality & who are not to be much pressed to study’, Westminster produced ‘manly Orators, & the very air of London brings on the Improvement of Youth for any business of the world…’³ There, in around 1680–2, a gang of three schoolboys, known among themselves as ‘Matt’ (Matthew Prior), ‘Chamont’ (Charles Montagu) and ‘Cat’ (George Stepney), formed a bond of friendship that would not weaken for a full two decades, until the day when one of them dramatically betrayed another.

The three boys slept in a dilapidated former granary next to Westminster Abbey, where, in fireless rooms reeking of damp wool socks and cheap candles, they spent their evenings translating and memorizing passages from classical authors, preparing to be tested at six the next morning. Amid mild malnutrition, older boys could receive extra food from the table of the headmaster, Dr Busby, if they composed particularly well-turned Latin epigrams. The template was set: food in exchange for wit. ‘Chamont’ shared the scraps of meat his epigrams won with his two younger friends, and with his earnest little brother ‘Jemmy’, also at the school.

Enduring the hardships of Westminster's regime not only formed firm bonds of male friendship but also made the three boys mistake themselves for social equals, despite widely varying family backgrounds. Matt Prior had by far the humblest origins and was only at the school thanks to a fairytale stroke of good luck. One day in the 1680s, he had been working at the Rhenish Wine House, a fashionable Whitehall tavern owned by his vintner uncle, when the ageing Restoration rake, Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, came in with some friends and noticed that Matt was working behind the bar with a copy of Horace in his hand. To test whether the boy understood what he read, the noblemen asked him to translate one of Horace's odes into English, and they were impressed when he quickly returned with a translation in metric verse. No matter how many times they repeated the test, Matt delivered. Dorset learned that Matt's joiner father had sent him to Westminster School some years earlier, where he had been taught Latin, but then, when his father died, his uncle had withdrawn him ‘in the middle of the third form’ to work at the Rhenish.⁴ Dorset remedied this situation by asking the Dean of Westminster to readmit Matt to the school at the Earl's personal expense, thereby becoming Prior's first patron.

At the other extreme, Charles Montagu was the grandson of the 1st Earl of Manchester, whose London residence, Manchester House, stood imposingly across from the Rhenish Wine House. Despite his venerable family name, however, Montagu was a younger son of a younger son and knew his future would depend largely upon his own efforts. George Stepney (nicknamed ‘Cat’ because he always seemed to land on his feet) similarly had no expectation of a significant inheritance, while being acutely aware of his own intelligence. Stepney's father, though briefly a Groom of Charles II's Privy Chamber, had essentially been a grocer and died in debt. His widowed mother survived by renting out properties in Scotland Yard. Stepney's rank therefore fitted roughly equidistant between Prior's near-total obscurity and the ancient lineage of the Montagus.⁵

Montagu, Prior and Stepney resolved to stay together at university. As Westminster's top scholar, Stepney could afford to turn down a place at Christ Church, Oxford, to join Montagu at Trinity College, Cambridge, to which Montagu had been elected some years earlier. In 1683, Prior joined them in Cambridge, attending St John's, where he was able to gain a scholarship and so save Lord Dorset considerable expense. Matt's background would have been less unusual at Cambridge than at Westminster since the majority of Cambridge students were non-gentry by this date. Prior had several advantages over most of his ambitious fellow students: Dorset's vested interest in his future, a naturally magnetic wit, and epicene good looks, with bright blue eyes under a mop of dark hair.

While he was at Cambridge, Prior maintained his connection with Dorset, sending an epistolary poem comparing the poor mutton at St John's with the ‘kindest entertainment’ he had enjoyed at his patron's table.⁶ Then, in February 1685, Montagu, Prior and Stepney decided to build on Lord Dorset's interest in Prior and bring themselves collectively to the Earl's notice. It was a good moment to apply to Dorset as he had recently inherited his family seat at Knole in Kent, and expected further enrichment through his second marriage to a 17-year-old heiress. Prior, Stepney and Montagu therefore each wrote Dorset a poem on the death of Charles II, criticizing the accession of his crypto-Catholic brother James. These poetic offerings led Dorset to invite Prior's two chums to London to receive the benefit of some high society introductions. Montagu accepted Dorset's invitation, but Stepney believed he could not afford to enter London society without an income. Montagu therefore used his family contacts to help Stepney find a diplomatic posting in Hamburg, to which he travelled directly from Cambridge. The pretence of the boys' social equality was already beginning to wear thin.

In 1687, Montagu and Prior sat over a bottle in the Middle Temple rooms of Montagu's brother Jemmy and composed a parody of a recent Dryden poem about the Catholic and Anglican churches. They correctly guessed that the Whiggish Lord Dorset would be pleased by such a parody, which they entitled The Hind and the Panther Transvers'd To the Story of The Country-Mouse and the City-Mouse. Dorset circulated the poem widely among his political allies who opposed James II's religious policies during the tense year preceding the Revolution. Prior later claimed he did nothing more than take dictation from Montagu when they collaborated on the Mouse poem, but it is hard to know whether this was just Prior's way of flattering his friend after the latter became a rich and powerful man. If true, it would be less unjust that Dorset's recompense for the poem was to promote Montagu but not the more needy Prior, prompting the wry observation that ‘one Mouse ran away with all the Bacon, whilst the other got Nothing but the empty Cupboard’.⁷ When William arrived in England the following year, the Dutchman already knew of the poem; Dorset introduced the impish 27-year-old Montagu as its author, ‘Mouse Montagu’, and the soon-to-be-crowned King gave ‘the Mouse’ £500 ‘to make a man of him’.⁸

From this point on, Montagu determined to follow Dorset's example and be more statesman than struggling poet.⁹ Montagu left a frank explanation of this choice, in which he is likeably without illusions:

I less affect to fiddle than to dance.

Business and Poetry do ill agree,

As the World says, and that's enough for me;

For some may laugh and swagger if they please,

But we must all conform that Love our Ease.¹⁰

Montagu also made an advantageous match in 1688 to a rich sexagenarian widow whose first marriage (six years before Montagu's birth) had been to his relation, the 3rd Earl of Manchester. When Prior heard the news, he composed a poem about how ‘Chamont’ would be elevated above his reach by the marriage, comparing the wedding to an apotheosis: ‘Pleased that the Friend was in the God improved.’¹¹ Montagu, however, sent his old school friends assurances that the married state would not lessen his desire for ‘a constant friendship and correspondence’ with them.¹²

In reward for having escorted James II's younger daughter, Princess Anne, in her midnight escape to join the rebel forces in 1688, Dorset was appointed King William's Lord Chamberlain, the Court's chief functionary. Montagu, Prior and Stepney became popularly known as ‘Lord Dorset's Boys’, though Stepney at first received favours and ‘protection’ from Dorset only indirectly, and may not have met the Earl in person until a visit home from the German states in 1693. Prior remembered ‘Sneaking…among the Crew’ of ‘Crowding Folks with strange ill Faces’ who came to beg favours from Dorset after his appointment.¹³

While Prior was ‘sneaking’, Montagu's career advanced at speed, thanks to brilliant performances in the Commons. By 1692, Montagu was a Privy Counsellor, alongside Somers and Dorset, a Lord of the Treasury, and the youngest addition to the Whig Junto. Montagu won the King's particular favour by loyally supporting the army supply Bills and promoting a Treasury plan to raise a million-pound loan for the government—a loan identified by the nineteenth-century historian Macaulay as the ‘origin’ of England's national debt, and still admired by recent historians, such as D. W. Jones, for its ingenuity.¹⁴ Montagu thereafter became a dispenser of patronage in his own right—someone to whom Prior addressed epistolary poems, seeking patronage, much as Montagu had addressed Dorset only a few years earlier.

Montagu was also responsible for shepherding through Parliament the Act founding the Bank of England in 1694, in return for which he would gain the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Montagu personally pledged £2,000 (equivalent to some £235,000 today) to the Bank's first subscription, and was joined by many friends. Tonson, probably at the encouragement of Somers, subscribed £500. The new institution was closely tied to the interests of the Whig party, and to financing the Anglo-Dutch alliance. The Tories were less invested (literally and metaphorically) in finance capital. They felt increasingly insecure in the midst of this 1690s financial revolution, and Montagu was an easy figurehead for them to attack. His Tory enemies said Montagu was ‘a party-coloured, shallow, maggot-headed statesman’¹⁵ who caressed those who approached him with projects until he had all the details then mysteriously cooled towards them before stealing their ideas. Montagu thought of it merely as keeping an open door to proposals that might benefit the new nation.

While Montagu helped Stepney advance his diplomatic career, Dorset found a diplomatic posting for Prior in The Hague, the Anglo-Dutch allies' headquarters. Stepney often broke his journeys from Berlin back to England with a visit to Prior in The Hague, where the two would sit before ‘a good turf fire’,¹⁶ roasting chestnuts, getting drunk and offloading their professional and private problems. Prior's lover at the time, a cook-maid nicknamed ‘Flanders Jane’ whom Prior declared he loved ‘above Interest or lust’,¹⁷ would have refilled their glasses on these occasions. Stepney was meanwhile sowing his wild oats across central Europe during the early 1690s, writing frankly to a lady in Dresden who had romantic designs on him: ‘[T]o make love perfectly, methinks Body is as necessary an Ingredient as Brandy is in Punch. Your Wit and Friendship are very good sugar and nutmeg, but there must go something more to make the Dose complete.’¹⁸

At their sessions before the turf fire, Prior and Stepney also discussed the financial strain of living like gentleman-diplomats when they were entirely dependent upon the Treasury to reimburse their expenses. Both were aware that their humble births mattered more in Europe than at Westminster or Cambridge. Prior referred to himself as ‘Albion's meanest son’,¹⁹ while Stepney was hurt when someone told the Elector of Saxony he was not of noble birth, which prevented the Elector from inviting him to dine for a month. In answer, Montagu and Dorset had Stepney made a Gentleman of King William's Privy Chamber, and Montagu arranged an advance on Stepney's salary, for which Stepney thanked Montagu warmly, calling him his ‘good Angel at the Brink of the Pool’.²⁰

On another occasion, Stepney told his mother he had declined a £1,000 personal loan from Montagu for reasons that show the men remained, in the early 1690s, more old school friends than patron and client: ‘[I]t is the last use any man should make of his friend, & which I should be sorry to be reduced to,’ Stepney declared.²¹ Prior had less scruple about begging for cash from his old friend: ‘If you can get me any ready money, it would be more charity than to give alms to the poorest dog that ever gave you a petition; if not, patience is a virtue, and a scrap or two of Horace must be my consolation.’²²

Like Somers, Montagu believed in the Ciceronian ideal that literary endeavour was an essential qualification for being a great statesman, and if one was not writing oneself, then playing patron to poets was the next best thing. Montagu and Dorset therefore ensured that Tonson published the witty, self-mocking verses that both Prior and Stepney continued to write in between the ‘prose affairs’ of international diplomacy.²³ Pursuing identical courses, and consulting one another on their poems in manuscript, they would not have guessed that Stepney would be remembered as one of England's first modern diplomats, while Prior would be remembered primarily as a poet.

Montagu, Prior and Stepney all wrote elegies on the occasion of Queen Mary's death in December 1694, to demonstrate their loyalty to the widowed King. The Tories had always felt more at ease with Mary, as a Stuart daughter, than with her husband's largely parliamentary claim to the throne, and Mary's death now meant William had to renew his bid for popular support. William's childlessness also placed increased importance on Mary's sister Anne, now William's heir apparent, and on Anne's choice of friends. From The Hague, Prior observed the political upheavals consequent upon Mary's death in a letter to Montagu:

These matters will be decided before the King's coming over, so we must have a vigilant eye. I call it ‘we’, for you, Sir, have always regarded my interest as if it were your own; and when I consider that you have taken your poor neighbour and made a friend of him, and solicited for that friend as if he had been your brother, I doubt not but you will have the reward you deserve (though a good while hence) in the Court of Heaven; and I the credentials I do not deserve to some Court or Republic a little nearer.²⁴

Another writer to produce an elegy on Mary's death, published by Tonson, was a young Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, named Joseph Addison. Addison was, like Prior and Stepney, a product of the late seventeenth century's widening access to education. He had attended Charterhouse, a charitable school and hospital then located near to today's Barbican Centre that was considered one of the best grammar schools in England. It took in forty nominated scholars for free, alongside sixty fee-paying non-boarders or ‘town boys’.²⁵

Like Westminster, Charterhouse ran a long, spartan day from six in the morning to six in the evening in summer, with an hour's later start in winter, and taught the classics (mainly Cicero and Horace) with a heavier dose of stick than carrot.

Entering as a scholarship boy in 1686, the 14-year-old Addison formed a close friendship with another scholar the same age, who would become his lifelong companion and collaborator. This boy, Richard (or ‘Dick’) Steele, had already been at the school for two years when Addison arrived.

Steele's father, an Anglo-Irish gentleman from Dublin, died in his early childhood, a fact Steele believed left him calamitously hypersensitive forever after. Steele dramatized the event in a later essay:

I remember I went into the Room where his Body lay, and my Mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my Battledore [a toy] in my Hand, and fell a-beating the Coffin, and calling Papa; for I know not how I had some slight Idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her Arms, and transported beyond all Patience of the silent Grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her Embrace, and told me in a Flood of Tears, Papa could not hear me and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under Ground, when he could never come to us again.²⁶

Steele's mother—whom he remembered as ‘a very beautiful Woman, of a Noble Spirit’²⁷—sent him away from Ireland, to live with his wealthier, childless aunt and uncle in England, and it was they who entered him at Charterhouse in 1684. His mother died that same year, orphaning him fully.

Steele's uncle was private secretary to the 1st Duke of Ormonde, the same Lord Lieutenant of Ireland served by Congreve's father, and it was Ormonde who, as a governor of Charterhouse, arranged for Steele's admittance. One letter from the schoolboy Steele to his patroness-aunt survives. It includes a formal apology for not writing more often, mixed with a pained awareness of his dependency, expressed with less than complete humility: ‘Madam, should I express my gratitude for every benefit I receive at Your Ladyship's and my good Uncle, I should never sit down to meat but I must write a letter when I rise from table.’²⁸ Steele addressed successive patrons with similarly mixed feelings throughout his life.

Their intellects, and the loss of their mothers when they were 12, were what Addison and Steele had in common; the rest was all contrast. Steele was short and square-bodied, with a ‘dusky’ complexion that, combined with his fading Irish accent, would have been interpreted by contemporaries as indicating lowly birth;²⁹

Addison was tall for his age, with pale blue eyes and the pallor of a bookworm. Soon the advantage of Steele's previous years at the school was erased as he came to idolize his new friend.

Addison invited Steele home for the holidays. Addison's father was Dean of Lichfield, having settled there after an exotic life as chaplain to the British garrisons at Dunkirk and Tangier. Addison had immense respect for his father, who imbued him with a profound belief in selfcontrol. In 1686, the Dean was raising four children alone—three boys and a girl, of whom Joseph was the oldest. Steele admired how the Dean taught his sons to vie for his favour and called it ‘an unspeakable Pleasure to visit or sit at a Meal in that Family’.³⁰ Steele was warmly welcomed into the Lichfield deanery that school holiday, and recalled how Addison's father ‘loved me like one of them’.³¹

Addison only stayed at Charterhouse for a year before being elected to his father's former Oxford college, Queen's, at the age of 15. This confirmed Steele's belief in Addison's superiority; Steele remained ever after several steps behind his friend academically. Steele entered Christ Church, Oxford, in December 1689, by which time Addison had been elected to one of the ‘demyships’ (scholarships offering free lodging) at Magdalen College. Christ Church, to which Steele was sent thanks to his uncle's connections, did not suit him well. It had stood on the losing side of the previous year's Revolutionary politics (in contrast to Magdalen, which had resisted James II's demands) and contained more nobly born students than the rest of Oxford's colleges. When Steele went up, his aunt gave him a pair of gloves and a sword to help him fit in.

After a year, Steele asked his uncle to pull strings with the Dean of Christ Church to get him a scholarship, reporting that though he had gained his tutor's respect, ‘these places are not given by merit but are secured by friends’.³² When his uncle's efforts failed to produce the scholarship, Steele moved to Merton College to accept one there instead. Steele left Merton in May 1692 and enlisted in the army as a ‘wretched common Trooper’,³³ since he lacked the funds to buy an officer's commission. Years later, Steele recalled Oxford students who window-shopped, played billiards and bowls, and who were ‘seized all over with a general Inability, Indolence and Weariness, and a certain Impatience of the Place they are in’.³⁴ Steele sounds as though he was well acquainted with these ‘loungers’, but he probably left university voluntarily, out of patriotic duty, rather than because he was expelled, as Jonathan Swift later hinted. Steele would have watched the fireworks in Oxford celebrating the Treaty of Limerick after William's victory in Ireland, and the troops returning from the Irish wars. Though Steele missed his chance to participate in this Protestant victory in his homeland, he could still serve the Protestant cause on the Continent. Since the regiment he joined belonged to his uncle's patron's son, enlisting may also have been a direct order from his uncle that Steele could not refuse.

Addison did not feel a similar pull towards the adventure of war. He remained to wander the water walks and gardens of Magdalen, translating and composing Latin poetry to the acclaim of his fellow academics. These pastimes between teaching duties sound more plausible from what we know of Addison than his later confessional lines referring to his ‘heedless steps’ upon ‘the slippery paths of youth’.³⁵

One thing Addison never let himself be was heedless, and his decision not to enlist was decidedly careful of his own person.

When Addison sent a poem flattering Dryden's talent to the poet in London, Dryden and Tonson included it in the Miscellany Poems they co-edited in 1693.³⁶ Addison's 1694 poem, ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets’, then summarized the history of English poetry, culminating—implausibly to modern judgement—with Charles Montagu at its pinnacle. Addison immediately found a flattered benefactor in the 33-year-old Chancellor of the Exchequer. Steele later recalled that Congreve was the instrument of Addison's ‘becoming acquainted with’ Montagu.³⁷ How Congreve and Addison first met, however, is uncertain. Most likely it was through Dryden and/or Tonson, following Addison's inclusion in the Miscellany, or perhaps Tonson invited Addison home to the Fleet Street house the publisher then shared with Congreve. Either way, there was soon mutual respect between Addison and Congreve, whose respective specializations in Latin and Greek literature spared them direct rivalry.

By 1695, Addison was studying to take orders, though he increasingly wished neither to follow his father into the Church nor to remain a university tutor. Addison therefore sought to add a further patron to his portfolio and did so in the traditional way: by poetic tribute. His verse ‘On His Majesty, Presented to the Lord Keeper [Somers]’ was a bold move on the young academic's part, since he had never met Somers, and had no family connection to justify the presentation. Somers must not have minded, since he let Tonson and Congreve bring the poem's author to meet him. Until now, Addison had been not so much a Whig as Whig-leaning, but these two poems, courting Montagu and Somers, marked his first clear declaration of political allegiance.

Addison's friend Steele had more enthusiasm but less opportunity to serve William's government. Steele too wrote an elegy for Queen Mary: ‘The Procession: A Poem on Her Majesties Funeral, By a Gentleman of the Army’. Steele's, however, was not printed by Tonson, but by a lesser firm, probably at Steele's own expense. If Addison and Steele corresponded during these years while following such starkly divergent paths, the letters are lost. Addison seems not to have shared any of his impressive new literary contacts with his former school friend.

Steele had by this time seen active military service in Flanders during 1692–4, for a salary of about 4 shillings (now around £20) a day. Steele had thereby ‘wiped off the Rust of Education’,³⁸ and depended, as a soldier puts it in one of Congreve's plays, ‘upon the outside of his head [rather] than the lining’.³⁹ Nonetheless, in the army as in international diplomacy, promotion could be secured by demonstrating literary wit in flattery. As a result of dedicating his elegy on Queen Mary to Baron Cutts, a war hero turned governor of the Isle of Wight, Steele was permitted to switch to the Coldstream Guards, a more elite regiment that provided security at the royal palaces. Steele was made a captain, and, though Cutts was the Guards' nominal commander, much of the actual commanding was left to Steele, especially in early 1697 when he served as Cutts' private secretary. The prospect of a peace to end the War of the League of Augsburg spelled an end, however, to further army promotion for Steele.

Dick Steele would soon prove himself, like Tonson and Prior, an extremely enterprising man, in tune with this enterprising period of British history. This was the legacy of each of these three men's childhood struggles, in contrast to the more complacent confidence of Congreve and Addison—both of whom, despite the forced migrations of the Congreve family and the early death of Addison's mother, came from relatively stable and financially secure homes. Belonging to a club (or a political party) would always be a more primal need for Prior and Steele, both parentless, than for Congreve or Addison. Kindred spirits become far more important than kin if you have fewer kin to begin with.