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

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СКАЧАТЬ playhouse for one night, but theatre managers needed the plays to be uncontroversial to draw regular crowds. All this came to a head in the Kit-Cats' battle with clergyman Jeremy Collier.

      In April 1696, Collier, a middle-aged Cambridgeshire clergyman, attended the Tyburn execution of two men condemned for plotting to assassinate King William. Alongside his fellow ‘non-jurors’ (clergymen who had refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchy), Collier ascended the scaffold and, by laying on hands, offered the plotters absolution for their treachery. Since this was a serious crime under English law, Collier thereby condemned himself to living as an outlaw. Over the following months, he published, semianonymously and from hiding, views that challenged King William's ‘false’ authority and the Church of England's feeble acceptance of this authority. Collier portrayed post-Revolutionary England as in need of urgent salvation.

      Many non-Jacobites agreed with Collier on the last point. The first Society for the Reformation of Manners was established in the Strand roughly contemporaneously with the Kit-Cat Club's foundation in Gray's Inn. This society vowed to spy out and report offenders against the laws on immoral behaviour, and monitor which Officers of the Peace were effective or negligent in enforcing these laws.

      After Queen Mary's death in 1694 and the end of the War of the League of Augsburg in 1697, William needed a new way to legitimize his rule and was fearful of alienating or antagonizing the Society for the Reformation of Manners' army of grassroot Christian activists. He therefore deliberately set about becoming the leader (rather than target) of those seeking to reform the loose morals of the age. In December 1697, to offset the unwelcome news that peace with France would not bring a drop in taxes, he promised the Commons that he would commence a kind of Kulturkampf at home—a crusade against ‘Prophaneness and Immorality’.⁴ This encouraged certain zealous MPs to present an address to him in February 1698 concerning suppression of unchristian books and punishment of their authors, ultimately resulting in ‘An Act for the more effectual suppressing of Atheism, Blasphemy and Prophaneness’.

      The previous month, on a freezing day in January 1698, a fire destroyed most of Whitehall Palace. Certain Jacobite pamphleteers, including Collier, played upon people's Sodom-and-Gomorrah-ish superstition that God had frowned upon the Williamite Court. Some suggested William enjoyed sodomy with his male favourites. Vanbrugh faced a similar accusation of bisexuality in an anonymous poem alleging that the playwright did ‘Active and Passive, in both Sexes Lust’.⁵ Vanbrugh was specifically accused of sodomy with Peregrine Bertie, with whom he lodged in Whitehall, and therefore blamed for the fire that destroyed the Palace.⁶ While a manuscript of 1694 confirms Bertie and Vanbrugh were intimate friends, nothing more is known of their relationship.⁷

      Vanbrugh's sexuality was attacked because his satirical plays had made plenty of enemies in church pulpits. When The Relapse (1696) was first performed, with its comparison of church congregations to social clubs and its depiction of a careerist chaplain, Vanbrugh was saved from the Bishop of Gloucester's wrath only by his friends' ‘agility’.⁸ In the Preface to the first printed edition of The Relapse, Vanbrugh answered his attackers:

      As for the Saints (your thorough-paced ones I mean, with screwed Faces and wry Mouths) I despair of them, for they are Friends to nobody. They love nothing, but their Altars and Themselves. They have too much Zeal to have any Charity; they make Debauches in Piety, as Sinners do in Wine, and are quarrelsome in their Religion as other People are in their Drink: so I hope nobody will mind what they say.⁹

      Vanbrugh's scepticism about the moral conversion of the husband in The Relapse implied allegorical scepticism about the country's moral reformation, but it was a scepticism he could not afford to voice more openly.

      Immediately after the Whitehall Palace fire, capitalizing on London's fin de siècle mood, Collier published A Short View of the Immorality and Prophaness of the English Stage (1698). This book censured immorality and profanity in recent plays by the so-called ‘Orange Comedians’,¹⁰ foremost among whom were Congreve and Vanbrugh. It did so in a style of close textual analysis that would be highly influential on future critics, both Christian and secular. It opened with the premise that ‘The business of Plays is to recommend Virtue and discountenance Vice’, and ended with a section complaining that sinful characters were escaping dramatic justice. A Short View was rancorous, pugnacious and literal-minded, but also intelligent and biting. It was an instant bestseller.

      As an outsider, ostracized by Williamite society, Collier did not hesitate to attack the biggest literary names of the day, including Dryden, Congreve and Vanbrugh, whom he called ‘snakes and vipers’. Though Collier said he wanted only to reform the theatres, his Short View fanned the flames of a popular movement driven by an abolitionist impulse. It was not the first shot fired in the culture wars, but it was the loudest, and the one aimed most directly at the Kit-Cat Club's authors. The Club's own name was not yet, in 1698, well known enough for its members to be attacked as a collective entity, but the battle against Collierite attitudes was one of the struggles that helped bond the Club's friendships in these early years.

      Collier attacked the representation of women in the plays of Vanbrugh and Congreve as bold, libidinous and knowing creatures. He blamed the playwrights for allowing women to act these roles on stage, ‘to make Monsters of them, and throw them out of their kind’.¹¹ As early as 1693, when Congreve's Double Dealer was first performed, ladies were so outraged by the realism of his female characterization that, in ironic defence of their modesty, they shouted out protests during the performance and hurled things at the stage. Congreve responded that the ladies in his audiences could no more expect to be flattered by a satire than ‘to be tickled by a surgeon when he's letting 'em blood’.¹²

      Collier particularly criticized the Orange Comedians' disparaging view of marriage. In one sense, the Orange Comedians' attitude was simply an old joke inherited from Restoration drama, but they treated it with greater seriousness, bringing out the true dramatic tension of claustrophobic, bitter marriages. As one critic has observed, if today we are living through the death throes of the nuclear family, the Kit-Cat authors were living through its birth pangs,¹³ and Vanbrugh and Congreve explored their fears of this new social unit in their work while assiduously avoiding such commitment in their own private lives. In Congreve's Old Batchelor, Bellmour summed up the author's own attitude to the married state:

      Bellmour: Could'st thou be content to marry Araminta?

      Vainlove: Could you be content to go to heaven? Bellmour: Hum, not immediately, in my conscience, not heartily.

      Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife leaves its marital problems unresolved at the end of the play—a radical ending for a comedy but also a bitter truth in an age when divorce was a great rarity. Whether or not he was bisexual, Vanbrugh was certainly a confirmed bachelor in the 1690s, morbidly mocking his Kit-Cat friends whenever one of them became engaged. He gossiped to a fellow Kit-Cat, for example, that another Club member, Anthony Henley, was tying himself to ‘a mettled jade’¹⁴—this was, in fact, Mary Bertie, a cousin of Vanbrugh's friend Peregrine. Mary's chief attraction for Henley was probably her fortune of some £30,000 (well over £3.6 million today, and more than enough to cover Henley's debts of £10,000). Surrounded by mercenary matches, Vanbrugh's cynicism was understandable.

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