The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation. Ophelia Field
of clubs where men went to escape their uneducated wives and what they regarded as the intellectual wasteland of the domestic dinner table.
The men seated around the tavern table in 1697 brought a variety of experiences, worries and needs to the Club. Montagu, now 36, had been appointed First Lord of the Treasury in May, following the removal of the Tory-leaning Sidney Godolphin (known to his contemporaries and throughout this book as Lord Godolphin). Montagu had received this post only after managing, by the skin of his teeth, to save the country from financial mismanagement. In 1695, he and Somers had hatched a plan for a national recoinage, intended to deal with the problem of clipped coins. The policy was a disaster, however, forcing the new-minted Bank of England to renege on contracts such that army paymasters could not obtain supplies. With troops and sailors on starvation rations and the verge of mass desertion, the Dutch had had to bail out the English for several months. Luckily, a parallel economic crisis broke in France, leading both sides to look with sudden favour upon peace talks. Montagu extended £5 million of debt for just long enough to conclude such talks at William's palace of Ryswick, near The Hague, where Prior acted as his eyes and ears, checking the draft treaty's translations and sending copies back to Montagu, alongside cases of duty-free wine. The Treaty of Ryswick was concluded in September 1697. Among its terms was the return of North America to its state of pre-war division between France and England.
The conclusion to the War of the League of Augsburg, however, left Montagu in an even more difficult economic position than before: peace did not immediately reduce the national debt, while making it harder to justify the taxation of landowners needed to service that debt. Physically and mentally exhausted, Montagu would therefore have come to the Kit-Cat that winter from his townhouse on Jermyn Street not only hoping to consolidate his political support but also to find solace in his old hobby of poetry and in his childhood friends.
This winter was the first time the Earl of Dorset and his three ‘Boys’ had been reunited in London for several years. Dorset, still at the Kit-Cat Club's ‘suckling centre’,6 had been sanguine when the King paid him off handsomely to resign as Lord Chamberlain in April, so that the place could be given to a Dutch royal favourite. Dorset was relieved, in fact, to relinquish a post that required him, against his nature (and ironically in light of his past indiscretions), to play state censor of the theatres. The resignation, however, left Dorset with fewer occasions to see his Privy Council friends and greater interest, like Somerset, in attending the Kit-Cat Club to hear Court and Commons gossip. By 1697, several of Dorset's other old friends from his days of youthful debauchery were also members. Most notable among these was John Vaughan, 3rd Earl of Carbery, described by Pepys as ‘one of the lewdest fellows of the age’7 and particularly notorious for having sold his Welsh servants into slavery in Jamaica.
Dorset's original ‘Boy’, Matt Prior, was now one of the most dominant, entertaining personalities at the table, said to leave ‘no elbow room for others’.8 He was in London only briefly, having returned from the Peace Congress at Ryswick and expecting to be sent next to a position in Ireland he had pulled several strings to obtain. He had pleaded with Montagu for a post lucrative enough that he could ‘come home again to dedicate the rest of his life amicitiae aeternae, and to the commands of my Master’.9 Clearly, Montagu's rapid rise had altered their relationship: they were no longer pretended equals, but master and servant. In January 1698, however, Prior went not to Dublin but to the English embassy in Paris. By the time he departed for France, he would be suffering from weak lungs, which smokefilled nights at the Kit-Cat had aggravated.
Stepney was also enjoying a brief sojourn in London, having returned in September after a series of postings in Hesse-Cassel, the Palatinate and Trier. By this time, Stepney was considered an expert on tumultuous central European affairs. He was, therefore, an important international informant to the Whig Junto, though his London bosses thought he cared too much about his own popularity in foreign Courts, to the possible detriment of England's interests. At the beginning of the year, travelling back and forth across central Europe between Anthonie Heinsius, Grand Pensionary of Holland, and the various German rulers (‘Electors’) within William's alliance, Stepney had told Montagu he could not take much more of ‘this vagabond life which is full of care and I fear will end in nothing but debts’.10 Such complaints, combined with the end of the war, provided an excuse to bring Stepney home and remind him of his native loyalties. There were few better places to do this than at the Kit-Cat Club.
Prior and Stepney had profited from Montagu's rise to power. Montagu ensured Stepney was admitted to the Commission for Trade and Plantations (or ‘Board of Trade’), which Somers had helped establish the previous year, and of which Montagu was an ex officio member. The Commission later became the administrative foundation of Britain's colonial empire. Stepney received his place in June 1697, with a £1,000 salary, and attended his first meeting after returning to London that September. It happened to be a historic meeting: the first time that independent statistics were presented to a government body with the intention of guiding economic policy along scientific lines.
Montagu also admitted Prior and Stepney as Fellows of the Royal Society, of which he was President. The Society had started as a private members' club, dedicated to furthering scientific knowledge, in a London tavern in 1660. After 1677, however, the Society had published no reports for nearly forty years, even though 1687–97 was a decade of high-voltage scientific and mathematical creativity following the publication of Newton's Principia. Though the Kit-Cat Club existed on the verge of the first mechanical-industrial age, none of its members were what we would consider scientists. Dorset and Somers were also Royal Society Fellows, but such Kit-Cats were so honoured because they had influence at Court, not because they were engaged in the work of empirical or experimental discovery.
Since 1695, Somers had been among the seven regents administering England during the King's absences, and his loyalty was rewarded in December 1697 when he finally accepted a barony, alongside valuable estates in Surrey to finance the expense of this peerage. Somers was by then Lord Chancellor, overseeing the appointment of all judges and Justices of the Peace. He had spent the summer in retirement at Clapham and Tunbridge, in poor health, but by the winter he was back at Powys House, in daily contact with Montagu and the two other Junto lords. The Kit-Cat Club was one of the key venues where three of the four Junto lords conferred outside Whitehall. Its congenial, alcohol-mellowed atmosphere no doubt minimized the risk of division while they argued policy and political strategy.
The third Junto Kit-Cat, attending this dinner besides Montagu and Somers, was Baron Wharton. A 49-year-old, large-souled man with a pock-scarred, open face that his contemporaries felt better suited to a tavern keeper than a baron, ‘Tom’ Wharton had composed a marching tune called ‘Lillibullero’ that became the popular anthem of the Glorious Revolution. Afterwards, it had been he who proposed that William and Mary should reign jointly, and, for the better part of the decade, Wharton was Somers' and Montagu's closest political ally and the Whig party's unofficial manager. Wharton and Montagu defined the Junto's tactics by leveraging their way into power through the collective strength of their followers in the Commons. Now, in 1697, Wharton remained a man to be reckoned with, thanks to extensive electoral influence derived from his estates and income (some £13,000 per annum, equivalent to around £1.2 million today).
His influence also derived from his leadership of the Dissenters' wing of the Whig party. Raised a Calvinist in the era of Charles II's anti-Dissenter Test Acts, young Wharton had been barred from attending Oxbridge, and educated at home by tutors and among the Huguenots in France. Throughout his career, promoting toleration of Dissent was his personal crusade, even as he embraced the apparent hypocrisy of ‘conforming’ to the Church of England in order to hold public office himself. Sitting at this Kit-Cat dinner, however, Wharton was not feeling at the top of his game; he had not won a place in the King's recently reshuffled ministry. Wharton was Comptroller of William's Household and was given various appointments in April—Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, Chief Justice of Eyre, and Warden of the royal forests south of the Trent—but these