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, which Tonson had published with an introduction by Addison. Dryden said the book was only for the ‘most Judicious’ audience. Though the 500 subscribers were both Whig and Tory, and Dryden, with his Jacobite sympathies, gave the work several Tory dedications, the publication still had a distinctly Whiggish colouring; the author was grimly amused, for example, to find Tonson had made an illustration of the hero Aeneas bear a marked resemblance to King William.
Subscription editions were a bargain way for the nobility to patronize writers: a hybrid solution at a time before the general public was literate and prosperous enough to act as the greatest patron of them all. By advertising their names as subscribers in the publications, aristocrats shifted from commissioning books towards being their celebrity promoters. This was Tonson's answer to issuing more specialist or scholarly works with high unit costs. In the case of Dryden's Virgil, besides the deluxe editions sent to the subscribers, Tonson also published a cheap edition, for the general public to buy from his shop. Dryden and Tonson's collaborations before the Kit-Cat's foundation had helped popularize classical translation in England, and Dryden and Congreve's translation of Juvenal and Persius in 1693 ushered in the notion of the translated author, as Dryden put it, ‘speak[ing] that kind of English, which he would have spoken had he lived in England, and Written to this Age’.14 Such accessible publications, with their attractive illustrations and lack of scholarly paraphernalia, were part of the Kit-Cat's patriotic agenda to better educate their literate countrymen and did much to pave the way for the neoclassical populism of the later eighteenth century.
One Kit-Cat subscriber to The Works of Virgil, whom Dryden described as ‘without flattery, the best Critic of our Nation’,15 was William Walsh. Walsh's reputation as a critic must have been based on his conversation at the Witty Club rather than his writing, since what little Walsh had published (through Tonson) was mostly amorous poetry and boasts of his exploits with women. Walsh was an object of ridicule for his excessive love of fine clothing and his wig containing over three pounds of powder that produced little puffs of cloud with every sharp movement of his head. In 1697, Walsh was in his mid-thirties and beginning to suspect his name would not become immortal. His estate, by this date, was reportedly ‘reduced to about £300 a year, of which his mother has the greatest part’.16 Though he had been seeking patronage from Somers since 1693, this winter marked a turning point, after which Somers' support was decisive in getting Walsh elected to a parliamentary seat for Worcestershire.
At Dryden's Witty Club, Walsh had drunk and quipped with Dr Samuel Garth, who was now also his fellow Kit-Cat. Garth attended that winter, eager to see Stepney and Prior after their long stints overseas. Garth had known ‘Lord Dorset's Boys’ at Cambridge and had written a poem praising Prior and Stepney as the best and brightest hopes of English literature. Like them, Garth had had to make his own way in the world after receiving a mere £10 legacy from his family. Now, at 37, he was a respected physician, but still writing poetry—largely revisions of his mock-epic Dispensary. He had subscribed five guineas (some £700 today) to Dryden's Virgil.
Though many Kit-Cat patrons dabbled in authorship, there was no real risk of confusing the bluebloods with the literary thoroughbreds at the Club's table. At this meeting of 1697, Congreve was the leading literary man. He was overseeing a new production at Inner Temple of his three-year-old hit, Love for Love (1694). This play, his third, was originally the debut production of a new theatre company that had splintered off from the United Company in 1695. The defection had been led by Bracey's mentors, the Bettertons, so she went with them, and her suitor Congreve devotedly followed, promising to write for the new company. More importantly, Congreve used his credit with Dorset to obtain an audience with the King for Bracey and the Bettertons, thereby gaining a royal charter for their new company. Congreve was offered shares in it by way of thanks.
Betterton's company set up in an old tennis court building at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the King himself was in the audience on the opening night. Bracey played the complex lead role of Angelica in Love for Love, and also spoke the Epilogue, in which Congreve had her complain of men who ‘wanting ready cash to pay for hearts, / They top their learning on us, and their parts.’ There may have been self-mockery in this, given the lewd pun in ‘parts’ and the fact that Congreve certainly remained short of ‘ready cash’ at that date.
Montagu