The Kit-Cat Club by Ophelia Field

Author:Ophelia Field [Field, Ophelia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00-728730-7
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1861-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Kit-Cats also rallied direct parliamentary opposition to the Tories' peace terms, and their spirits were raised briefly when they succeeded in securing the defection of the High Church Tory Lord Nottingham. Nottingham agreed to oppose the peace in the House of Lords in exchange for the Junto's agreement to vote through a new Occasional Conformity Bill, barring Dissenters from public office. Wharton was persuaded to accept this horse-trading on the basis that nothing was more important than preventing a bad peace with France. Even the less politically active Kit-Cats were mobilized to persuade the Whig rank and file to accept this surprising, apparently hypocritical tactic: Vanbrugh advised one doubting young MP ‘the matter was neither a point of honour nor Conscience, but purely political and discretional’.21

Kit-Cat Robert Walpole also introduced a motion in December 1711 against making any peace that would leave the Spanish throne in Bourbon hands. Walpole was backed by City men like Furnese who viewed money loaned to fund the war as investment in Britain's future trade with the Spanish Empire and did not intend to give up their investment without a fight. By focusing on trade, and by selling the Dissenters up the river, the Whigs increasingly appeared to oppose the peace for reasons of private profit. Charges of peculation were published against Marlborough before the Christmas parliamentary recess and, on 31 December 1711, the long-expected blow fell: Oxford dismissed Marlborough from all his posts, including supreme command of the Allied armies. Anne created twelve new Tory peers, the so-called ‘Tory Dozen’, in order to construct the narrow Tory majority in the Lords needed to vote through the peace terms. The Whigs' last power base was undermined by this action, which they viewed as unconstitutional and absolutist.

Addison's Spectator essay of 29 January, in this context, quivered with patriotism, saying if he could choose to live anywhere in the world, it would be in Britain: ‘a Prejudice that arises from Love of my Country, and therefore such a one as I will always indulge’.22

Being a Whig, he said, arose naturally from being proud of the 1689 constitutional balance, which Addison praised in answer to the creation of the ‘Tory Dozen’ and in defiance of the Tory preachers who were sure to denounce the Whigs as crypto-republicans on the following day's anniversary of Charles I's execution.23

In March 1712, a Tory faction with an even more anti-Court agenda than the October Club founded the ‘March Club’. It started with thirty-five members, and soon rose to around fifty. This in turn prompted the Junto Whigs to inaugurate the ‘Hanover Club’ (or ‘Hanover Society’) later that year. This Club is best characterized as ‘an adjunct to’,24 or satellite of, the Kit-Cat Club, with overlapping but not identical memberships and goals. Halifax and Walpole, for example, did not join the Hanover Club, and, though the Hanover Club toasted Whig ladies,25 it never concerned itself with the Kit-cat Club's broader cultural agenda. Instead, the thirty-plus Hanover Club members, who met weekly near

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