The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation. Ophelia Field

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 were far from the real power he coveted. Compared to his younger Junto colleague Montagu, Wharton felt underappreciated.

      To be a Kit-Cat now required more, in terms of political allegiance, than being a Whig: it required allegiance to the Junto (although the fourth Junto member, Lord Orford, was never a Kit-Cat). Accordingly, the six or so young MPs who belonged to the Club during these early years were each aligned to a Kit-Cat patron.¹¹ At this dinner, they would have tried to impress their patrons when the Club's conversation turned to politics and discussion of the war's end. Despite public celebrations around a temporary triumphal arch constructed in St James's Square, and celebratory poems on the new peace, insiders like Montagu and Somers understood that the peace of Ryswick was merely a breathing space in which to rearm. Louis XIV had recognized William III as lawful King of England, and promised not to aid any further Jacobite invasions like the attempt he had funded in 1692, but too much remained at stake for the peace to be more than an uneasy truce.

      The Treaty of Ryswick left unresolved the fundamental question of who would succeed the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, Carlos II, and so control the balance of power in Europe. William therefore wished to maintain a ‘standing army’ of over 24,000 men, but needed Parliament's consent. The Junto members supported this policy, and were therefore considered leaders of the ‘Court Whigs’, while a number of other ‘Country Whig’ MPs formed an opposition coalition with the Tories. The Country Whigs opposed the standing army, believing that the King might abuse it and turn it into a tool of domestic tyranny, while the Tory landowners opposed the tax burden of paying for it. The young MP Robert Harley headed this anti-Junto coalition, and exchanged fierce words with Montagu over the issue in the Commons that winter. Montagu argued ‘that the Nation was still unsettled, and not quite delivered from the Fear of King James; that the Adherents to that abdicated Prince were as bold and numerous as ever; and he himself [James II] still protected by the French King, who, having as yet dismissed none of his Troops, was still as formidable as before’.¹²

      Harley and his followers, who met at the Grecian tavern on the Strand, organized propaganda, calling for the army to be reduced to its 1680 levels. In response, Somers authored an anonymous pamphlet, in the form of a letter to the King, defending the royal policy. In it he argued that, in the end, ‘we must trust England to a House of Commons, that is to itself’.¹³ It was a debate about the balance between national security and civil liberties. The Kit-Cat Club was a place for Somers to run this pamphlet's arguments past his friends, and to encourage others to pick up a pen in service of Court policy. Prior supported Montagu and Somers with A New Answer to An Argument against a Standing Army (1697)—a poem that asked:

      Would they discreetly break that Sword,

      By which their Freedom was restored, And put their Trust in Louis' Word?

      It concluded that those opposing a standing army in the name of limiting William's powers would ironically find themselves responsible for the return of the more absolutist Stuarts. Organizing production of such propaganda was one of the Kit-Cat Club's earliest collective political activities.

      The standing army debate was the first face-off between Harley and the Junto—a foretaste of the rivalry that would flare over a decade later and almost destroy the Junto Whigs and the Kit-Cat Club. In 1697, Harley had triumphed: a Commons resolution was passed that a Disbanding Bill should be introduced. This crisis, and analysis of the Junto's tactics in the press and in the Commons, would therefore have carried the Kit-Cats' conversation through several courses.

      The literary conversation of the Club that winter is equally easy to deduce. Around half of the members had just subscribed to Dryden's new translation of the Works of Virgil, СКАЧАТЬ