Stupefied with wine, the members said their loud farewells, leaving the exhausted servants of the Cat and Fiddle to deal with the feast's debris. Linkmen carrying lanterns were waiting outside to escort those who did not have carriages. From the overheated tavern, the Kit-Cats emerged into the damp, foggy night air in the labyrinthine alleys south of Gray's Inn. Wharton headed back to Gerrard Street, Somers to Powys House, Somerset to Northumberland House on the Strand, Carlisle to King's Square, Vanbrugh to his lodgings next to the Banqueting House in Whitehall, and Congreve and Tonson returned together to their shared house on Fleet Street. Unified by their Whig beliefs and an implied promise of mutual support, they had fortified themselves against the political risks that the final years of the 1690s would throw at them.
There the dread phalanx of reformers come,
Sworn foes to wit, as Carthage was to Rome, Their ears so sanctified, no scenes can please, But heavy hymns or pensive homilies.
DR SAMUEL GARTH,
Prologue to Squire Trelooby (1704)1
THE KIT-CAT MEMBERS' relaxed attitudes to religion and morality were both ahead of their time, predicting later Georgian rationalism, and a remnant of the Restoration rakes' godless cynicism. As opinion-makers, the Kit-Cats tried to promote religious tolerance and moderation, in reaction to the ‘enthusiasm’ (fanaticism) they felt had inflamed the Civil War, the persecution they associated with Catholicism, and, as Voltaire noted when he saw the crowds in the Royal Exchange, because toleration was good for business. Although there was ‘less Appearance of Religion in [England], than any other neighbouring State or Kingdom’,2 many of the ‘middling sort’ who were profiting most from the growth of trade and commerce in the 1690s were devout Protestant churchgoers who felt they were clinging to the remnants of Christian morality amid a ‘debauched age’.3
The beginning of a correlation between one's faith and social position showed itself in the theatres where there was a mismatch between the censorious bourgeois audiences after 1688, on whom the permanently near-bankrupt theatres were dependent, and the authors who were still writing for a small, elite intelligentsia of morally and religiously liberal patrons. The Kit-Cats and their friends could support a 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