On 14 April 1701, Somers delivered a half-hour speech in his own defence to the Commons, ‘with great plainness and presence of mind’, explaining he had only been following the King's orders.47 He then withdrew before the House voted on his case.
Prior was one of the MPs sitting in the Commons that evening. He had obtained his East Grinstead seat three months earlier through the influence of his childhood patron, Dorset. Though he had written to Dorset in 1698 complimenting William's wisdom in concluding the first Partition Treaty (in which Prior himself had had a significant hand), Prior now took the extraordinary step of voting with Harley and the Tories in favour of impeaching Somers for ‘a high Crime and Misdemeanour’ in the Lords. If the Kit-Cats had not suspected the shift in Prior's loyalties before, it was now made dramatically evident. As Prior voted, he must have avoided the eye of fellow Kit-Cat William Walsh, acting as teller. Though there was often the odd deviancy on a division list, such outright defection away from a political party and its patrons was observed with shock. Prior further voted with the majority, 198 to 188, to bring impeachment charges against two other Junto lords: Orford and—incredibly, in light of their long friendship—Halifax.48
Afterwards, the Kit-Cats unanimously denounced Prior as an ungrateful Judas, concerned only with keeping his place. One remarked that Dorset had not raised Prior from tavern-sweeping obscurity for disloyalty such as this. Halifax's brother Jemmy, now the eminent jurist Sir James Montagu, struggled as only a lawyer could to excuse their old school friend, explaining that Prior must have felt voting otherwise would have turned the guilt for the two Treaties upon the King himself. The Kit-Cat Club was unconvinced, and though Prior was not expelled from the Club straight away, he was unwelcome at its meetings from this date onwards.
A little lament, written by Prior in 1701, may suggest he regretted the price paid for his political choices that year:
Reading ends in Melancholy;
Wine breeds Vices and Diseases; Wealth is but Care, and Love but Folly; Only Friendship truly pleases. My Wealth, my Books, my Flask, my Molly, Farewell all, if FRIENDSHIP Ceases!49
At the same time, another Prior verse conveys his overriding pragmatism, which had led him to act as he did:
For conscience, like a fiery horse,
Will stumble, if you check his course; But ride him with an easy rein, And rub him down with worldly gain, He'll carry you through thick and thin, Safe, although dirty, to your inn.50
Stepney, the third Lord Dorset's Boy, could not easily forgive Prior's betrayal. That summer, he told Halifax that the second ‘mouse’ had been ‘nibbling towards drawing me into a correspondence with him, but I waived it in as cold a manner as I could’.51 What Halifax's own feelings were when he learned that his friend of almost twenty years was among those who voted for his impeachment can only be guessed.
Somers and Halifax coordinated a press campaign against the impeachment charges, using the Kit-Cat Club to liaise with Whig writers in their defence. A Tory complained that those who were ‘solicitous for the nation’ were being libelled as Papists, Jacobites and French spies, as ‘given out in a certain printed ballad, said to be written by a certain club of great men, which was then held not far from the King's Head tavern in Holborn [on Chancery Lane, hence plausibly the Kit-Cat Club at Gray's Inn]…The mob took the hint…and gave it out for gospel in an instant.’52
Jonathan Swift, who had watched with envy as Congreve received favours from the Kit-Cat patrons, contributed an anonymous pamphlet in defence of the impeached lords. Somers and Halifax sought the acquaintance of the pamphlet's author via its printer, and were, boasted Swift, ‘very liberal in promising me the greatest preferments I could hope for, if ever it came in their power’. Swift claimed he ‘grew domestic’ with Halifax during 1701, and was ‘as often with Lord Somers as the formality of his nature (the only unconversable fault he has) made it agreeable to me’.53 Nonetheless, Swift was not invited to join the Kit-Cat Club.
Congreve turned his legally trained eye to the various charges against Somers and concluded, in June 1701, that the impeachment would never go through, ‘for there is neither matter nor proof’.54 After a tussle between the lower and upper houses, his fellow peers acquitted Somers and dismissed the other charges against Halifax and Orford. This was a crucial political moment, at which a Whigdominated Lords overrode a Tory-dominated Commons, allowing the Tories to thereafter cast the Whig Junto as an anti-democratic force, for all their talk of English liberties. It was a crisis that polarized the parties and set the terms for heated Whig/Tory debates throughout the decade to follow. As one Tory muttered, these impeachment proceedings had launched ‘a feud that I fear will not die’.55
[T]o say ‘these are my friends’ implies ‘those are not’.
C. S. LEWIS, The Four Loves (1960)
SOMERS AND HALIFAX had to advise the King ‘behind the curtain’, as the contemporary phrase went, after their narrow escape from impeachment. In the summer of 1701, they also encouraged less prominent Kit-Cat friends who sat on Grand Juries throughout the country to petition the King and so make it appear as though the nation was crying out to resume war with France, and for another general election that might return a more Whiggish House of Commons. The Kit-Cat patrons simultaneously commissioned prowar propaganda, such as Stepney's Essay upon the Present Interest of England (1701), arguing that Louis' record of breaking international treaties made another war a necessary evil.
William needed no persuading. He had every intention of taking the country back to war, and had sent John Churchill, then the Earl of Marlborough, to The Hague as a plenipotentiary, to negotiate a new ‘Grand Alliance’ between the Austrian Habsburgs, the United Provinces and England. This confirmed the political rehabilitation of Marlborough, previously out of favour with the King, and the start of a vital alignment between the international objectives of Marlborough and those of the Kit-Cat Club. Stepney, who had finally been appointed Envoy to the Imperial Court in March, did what he could from Vienna to assist Marlborough with the negotiations.
The second Treaty of Grand Alliance was signed in August 1701. Soon after, when James II died in exile, Louis XIV took the decisive step of recognizing the deposed king's son, James Edward Stuart (known to the Whigs who alleged he was illegitimate as ‘The Pretender’ and then later as ‘The Old Pretender’), as James III of England and James VIII of Scotland. France and Spain also imposed an embargo on English goods. These actions persuaded many previously reluctant Tories to support the coming war and resupply the army they had so recently pressed to disband. Even so, the Tories believed England's only hope of victory was at sea, since the French army comprised between a quarter and half a million men and was considered invulnerable on land, especially if allied with the Spanish forces. The King, who favoured fighting on his home turf in Flanders, therefore dissolved Parliament as a prelude to a new election, just ten months after the last, in the hope that more Whigs, who would back his war strategy, might be returned. At the election, the Kit-cat lords once again emptied their purses and pulled strings on behalf of their candidates, Wharton influencing the return of some twenty-five MPs to the Commons. A Tory poem accused the Kit-cat Club of disseminating libellous election propaganda via street hawkers who were hired by ‘Trusty Secretary Jacob’1