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The Kit-Cat Club

The Kit-Cat Club (sometimes Kit-Kat Club) was an early 18th century English club in London with strong political and literary associations, committed to the furtherance of Whig objectives. It was founded ca. 1699 by the book seller Jacob Tonson and met at the Trumpet pub in London, and at Water Oakley in the Berkshire countryside. Before then, it may have been a secret society active in furthering the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Kit Kat was the keeper of the pie-house in Shire Lane, by Temple Bar, where the club originally met.

The club later moved to the Fountain Tavern on The Strand (now the site of Simpson's-in-the-Strand), and latterly into a room specially built for the purpose at Barn Elms, the home of the secretary Tonson. In summer the club met at the Upper Flask, Hampstead Heath.

The Kit-Cat Club is known today as an early 18th century social gathering-point in London for culturally and/or politically prominent Whigs: writers like William Congreve, John Vanbrugh, and Joseph Addison, and politicians including the Duke of Marlborough, Charles Seymour, the Earl of Burlington, Thomas Pelham-Holles, and Sir Robert Walpole.

Sir John Vanbrugh in Godfrey Kneller's Kit-cat portrait, considered one of Kneller's finest portraits.Other prominent members included Garth, Steele, and the Dukes of Grafton, Devonshire, Kingston, Richmond, and Newcastle, and Lords Dorset, Sunderland, Manchester, and Wharton. Two other members of some notoriety were Lord Mohun and the Earl of Berkeley. Another member was the artist Sir Godfrey Kneller whose 48 portraits in a standard 'kit-cat' format of 36 by 28 inches, painted over more than twenty years, form the most complete known members list of the club.

The name Kit-Cat Club is obscure in origin. The generally accepted version is that the originally met in a small house in Shire Lane, close to Temple Bar, London, then occupied by one Christopher ("Kit") Catling, who made and sold pies, and Mr Cat gave the name to the Club. In 1705 Hearne wrote:

The Kit Cat Club came to have it's Name from one Christopher Catling. [Note, a Pudding Pye man.] (Kit (= Christopher) Cat (= Catling), the keeper of the pie-house in Shire Lane, by Temple Bar, where the club originally met). On the other hand, one of his mutton pie recipies was known as a Kit-Kat, and the pie is thus itself sometimes regarded (e.g. by Addison in the Spectator) as the origin of the club's name.

It is possible that the Club began at the end of the 17th century as the so-called Order of the Toast. Indeed, a famous characteristic of the Kit-Kat was its toasting-glasses, used for drinking the healths of the reigning beauties of the day, on which were engraved verses in their praise. If so, one can place the date before 1699, when Elkanah Settle wrote a poem "To the most renowned the President and the rest of the Knights of the most Noble Order of the Toast." It was this very habit of 'toasting' that led Dr. Arbuthnot to produce the following epigram, which hints at yet another possible origin of the Club's name: "Whence deathless Kit-Kat took his name / Few critics can unriddle / Some say from pastrycook it came / And some from Cat and Fiddle. / From no trim beaus its name it boasts / Grey statesmen or green wits / But from the pell-mell pack of toasts / Of old Cats and young Kits."

However, John Vanbrugh's modern biographer Kerry Downes suggests that the club's origins go back to before the Glorious Revolution of 1689, and that its political importance for the promotion of Whig objectives was much greater before it became known. Those objectives were a strong Parliament, a limited monarchy, resistance to France, and the Protestant succession to the throne. On the possible role of an early Kit-Cat grouping in furthering these goals through armed invasion by William of Orange and through the Glorious Revolution itself, Downes cites Whig historian John Oldmixon, who knew many of those involved, and who wrote in 1735 of how some club members "before the Revolution [of 1689] met frequently in the Evening at a Tavern, near Temple Bar, to unbend themselves after Business, and have a little free and chearful Conversation in those dangerous Times". Horace Walpole, son of Kit-Cat Robert Walpole, refers to the respectable middle-aged 18th century Kit-Cat club as "generally mentioned as a set of wits, in reality the patriots that saved Britain", implying that the nexus was nothing less than the force behind the Glorious Revolution. Secret political groups with dangerous agendas tend of course to be poorly documented, and this sketch of the pre-history of the Kit-Cat Club can hardly be regarded as proven.

The toasts of the Kit-Kat Club were famous at the time, and drunk to the honour of a reigning beauty, or lady to whom the Club wished to do particular honour. We know by name some of those who were toasted: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Lady Godolphin, Lady Sunderland, Lady Bridgewater, and Lady Monthermer, all daughters of the Duke of Marlborough; the Duchess of Bolton, the Duchess of Beaufort, the Duchess of St. Albans; Mrs. Long, a friend of Dean Swift; Catherine Barton, Newton's niece and Charles Montagu's mistress; Mrs. Brudenell and Lady Wharton, Lady Carlisle and Mrs. Kirk and Mademoiselle Spanheim, among them.

The Kit Kat series of chocolate bars is believed to be named after the Kit-Cat Club. The musical Cabaret takes place at a fictional Berlin nightclub also called the Kit-Kat Klub.

The Kit-Cat club name was revived in London in the 1980s and is now used by an exclusive women's club which meets monthly at the Lanesborough Hotel.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Kit Cat Club".