What really bothered several contemporary observers about this Whig-dominated event was the promiscuous mingling of England's social classes. As government ministers, dukes, earls and knights abandoned their carriages and liveried footmen in the Abbey's yard, they found themselves literally on an equal footing with tradesmen, actresses and lowly born ‘Playhouse Sparks’. Tom Browne, a satirist, mocked the impropriety of the motley congregation as ‘A Crowd so nauseous, so profusely lewd, / With all the Vices of the Times endued…’5
The procession was led through the Abbey by a figure whose runtish stature was undisguised by his high-crowned periwig and high-heeled shoes. This was Charles Montagu, King William III's former First Lord of the Treasury and another key Kit-Cat member. Tom Browne considered Montagu the epitome of what was loathsome about the new, affluent class of Whig politicians: ‘grown sleek and fat’, proud, corrupt and pretentious, flattering himself as the ‘Chief of Wits’.6 That Browne was able to publish such insults with impunity indicated, however, the reality of Montagu's situation in May 1700: he had fallen far enough from the King's favour that he would be openly attacked in the next parliamentary session. Montagu's Kit-Cat colleagues, who knew his virtues of generosity, loyalty and intelligence, probably granted him pride of place in the procession to demonstrate their support for him during this difficult time.
Hobbling behind Montagu, leading a ‘Troop of Stationers’, came Dryden's half-crippled publisher and the Kit-Cat Club's founding father, Jacob Tonson. Tonson was grieving for the loss of his most lucrative and prestigious author, whose poem Absalom and Achitophel had launched Tonson's publishing career two decades earlier. Dryden had recognized Tonson as a cut above the Grub Street printers who seemed to ‘live by selling titles, not books’,7 telling Tonson: ‘I find all of your trade are Sharpers & you not more than others; therefore I have not wholly left you,’ and signing a letter ‘not your Enemy & maybe your friend, John Dryden’.8 The longevity of the two men's collaboration, on numerous publications and as co-editors on a series of best-selling poetic Miscellanies, suggested an intellectual empathy greater than they had ever openly acknowledged to one another.
Next came Dryden's fellow authors, not yet recognized as a professional category and considered by many onlookers as even lower than the tradesmen: ‘such as under Mercury are born, / As Poets, Fiddlers, Cut-purses and Whores’.9 Pre-eminent among these was Kit-Cat playwright and poet, William Congreve. Congreve was an insouciant, cynical young Irishman, armoured by quiet confidence in his own talent. He had known Dryden since at least 1692, by which date Congreve had assisted the older poet with various Latin and Greek translations. Dryden quickly felt that in Congreve he had found a worthy literary heir, and, in begging Congreve to be ‘kind to my Remains’,10 Dryden had effectively designated the young man his literary executor.
After Congreve, Dr Garth was considered next in line to inherit Dryden's poetic mantle, having published The Dispensary the previous year: a much-applauded mock-epic poem about Garth's battle to persuade the Royal College to dispense free medicine to paupers. Congreve and Garth had been among Dryden's circle at Will's Coffee House, the social centre of London's literati before the Kit-Cat Club. The death of Dryden, ‘To whom the tribe of circling Wits, / As to an oracle submits’,11 was a blow from which Will's Coffee House's ‘Witty Club’ would never recover, clearing the way for the rise of the Kit-Cat Club.
Rather than Dryden's favourites, Congreve or Garth, however, another Kit-Cat author, John Vanbrugh—36 years old and with four plays under his belt—had been the one to offer practical assistance when Dryden lay dying. Vanbrugh organized a benefit performance, knowing Dryden would otherwise have little to leave his wife and children. Dryden's last dramatic work, his Secular Masque (1700), took new beginnings as its theme and was intended to be performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 25 March 1700: that is, on New Year's Day according to the Old English calendar—the first day of the new century. The production was not ready for this historic opening night, however, and the masque was probably not performed until after Dryden's death, when the third-night profits, which traditionally went to a play's author, would have been donated directly to Dryden's widow.
A number of other Kit-Cat members—including Members of Parliament, army officers and diplomats—accompanied Dorset, Montagu, Tonson, Garth, Vanbrugh and Congreve as they paced through the dimly lit Abbey to the solemn knelling of bells. When the mourners were all assembled under the Abbey's vast transept, a prebend began to read the service, and the choir sang an epicedium.
Several Tory eyewitnesses started the story, later repeated by Dr Johnson, that the funeral descended from a Christian solemnity into a kind of raucous party,12 the playwright George Farquhar concluding with a sigh: ‘And so much for Mr Dryden; whose burial was the same as his life: variety and not of a piece—the quality and mob, farce and heroics, the sublime and ridicule mixed in a piece—great Cleopatra in a hackney coach.’13 Whether touching or absurd, sublime or ridiculous, Dryden's funeral served several purposes for the Kit-Cat Club: it raised the Club's profile with the man in the street; it claimed a Whig share in Dryden's reputation; and it expressed gratitude to a man who had mentored many of those present. The event further demonstrated that the Club was not cowed by the religious censors who had recently attacked the morality of Dryden's plays in the same breath as Congreve's and Vanbrugh's.
One of the mourners, frail old Samuel Pepys, would surely have thought back to another Westminster Abbey funeral he had attended in the company of the 27-year-old Dryden in 1658: that of Oliver Cromwell. Since then, England had seen a royal restoration and a revolution, but the turmoil and bloodshed of the Civil War still felt like recent history. Families and communities torn apart by the previous century's conflicts were still healing these divisions. With the new century only a couple of months old by the terms of their calendar, a sense of excitement hung in the air that spring, but the nation still lacked confidence, and feared the possibility of slipping back into barbarity.
Dryden's death proved a turning point for the Kit-Cat Club, after which it self-consciously set about trying to direct the course of English civilization in the new century, particularly the course of the two arts most beloved of Dryden: literature and music. None of Dryden's admirers, or ‘Apollo's sons’,14 not even Congreve, felt up to carrying this torch alone, but together—through subscriptions and collaborations—the Kit-Cats assumed what they considered their patriotic duty: to guide and nurture native talent. No grouping before or since has worked towards such an ambitious vision of national reform, encompassing every high art form and seeking to dominate every aspect of Britain's social and intellectual life.
By compensating for the especially sizeable gaps in royal patronage of English poetry, theatre and music, the Club would contribute to a shift in authority from the Court to private citizens. More than their monarchs, they would fulfil the country's need for new role models, in fashions, manners and morals. This helped turn the Court into ‘the highly symbolic, sober, secluded, and slightly strange institution it has since become’,15 while at the same time laying the foundations for the exponential growth of cultural consumption that would occur in the later eighteenth century. The Kit-Cat founders were born into an age of plague, fire and civil strife; the younger members would live to see the self-consciously ‘civilized’ age of Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Robert Adam.
Similarly, when the Kit-Cat founders were born, most Britons would have said their monarch ruled them, but by the time the youngest members died, the majority would have said they were governed by an elected House of Commons. The Club was to be both