In the summer months of the early eighteenth century, when the dust and stench of London became intolerable to men of refinement and political ambition, a remarkable company of Whig aristocrats, poets, playwrights, and publishers would make the journey north to Hampstead Heath. Their destination was the Upper Flask tavern, a substantial establishment that stood near the summit of the Heath, commanding views across the countryside to the distant spires of the city. Here, in rooms scented with pipe tobacco and warmed by claret, the Kit-Cat Club held its summer sessions, conducting the business of cultural patronage and political influence with a mixture of high seriousness and determined conviviality that was entirely characteristic of the age.
The Kit-Cat Club is one of the most fascinating institutions in English cultural history, a body that combined the functions of a literary salon, a political caucus, and a gentlemen's drinking club with a fluency that made its influence felt across the worlds of literature, art, and government simultaneously. Its membership included some of the most powerful and talented men of the early Georgian period, and its activities helped to define the character of the Whig ascendancy that dominated English politics for a generation. That this club chose Hampstead as the location for its summer gatherings is a fact of considerable significance for the village's history, linking this quiet hilltop settlement to the great currents of national life in ways that are still traceable in its streets and buildings today.
Jacob Tonson and the Origins of the Club
The Kit-Cat Club owed its existence and much of its character to one man: Jacob Tonson, the most important publisher of his generation. Tonson had established himself in the London book trade during the 1680s, and by the turn of the century he had built a publishing empire that included the works of Dryden, Milton, and Shakespeare. He was a man of formidable commercial acumen and genuine literary taste, and he understood that in the world of early eighteenth-century publishing, social connections were as important as editorial judgement.
The club began meeting in the 1690s at the shop of Christopher Cat, a pastry cook in Shire Lane near Temple Bar, whose mutton pies were sufficiently celebrated to give the club its name. The Kit-Cat was, in its earliest form, a meeting of Tonson's authors and their patrons, a place where writers could meet the aristocrats who subsidised their work and where aristocrats could enjoy the company of the wits whose books graced their libraries. But Tonson was also a committed Whig, and the club quickly acquired a political dimension that eventually overshadowed its literary origins.
As the club's membership grew and its ambitions expanded, Shire Lane became inadequate for its needs. Tonson, who had acquired a house in Hampstead, proposed that the club's summer meetings be held at the Upper Flask tavern on the Heath. The location offered several advantages: the air was cleaner than in London, the setting was agreeable, the tavern was large enough to accommodate the growing company, and the distance from Westminster provided a degree of privacy that was useful for men whose conversations frequently touched on matters of political sensitivity. From around 1700, the Kit-Cat Club's summer programme became a fixture of Hampstead's social calendar, bringing to the village a concentration of wealth, talent, and power that it had never previously experienced.
The Membership: Power and Talent Combined
The roster of Kit-Cat Club members reads like a catalogue of Augustan England's ruling class. On the political side, the club counted among its members the Duke of Marlborough, the greatest military commander of the age; the Duke of Somerset; the Earl of Halifax, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer had overseen the recoinage of 1696 and the establishment of the Bank of England; the Earl of Sunderland; and Robert Walpole, who would go on to become Britain's first de facto Prime Minister. These were not merely men of rank; they were the architects of the Whig settlement that had emerged from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the political establishment that would dominate English government for the first half of the eighteenth century.
On the literary side, the membership was equally distinguished. Joseph Addison, whose essays in The Spectator would define the tone of English prose for a generation, was a prominent Kit-Cat. So was Richard Steele, Addison's friend and collaborator, who founded The Tatler and helped to create the modern periodical press. William Congreve, the supreme master of Restoration comedy, whose The Way of the World remains one of the great achievements of English drama, was another member. John Vanbrugh, who combined careers as a playwright and an architect of genius, designing Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, attended the club's meetings. The poet Matthew Prior, the dramatist Nicholas Rowe, and the physician and writer Samuel Garth completed a literary company of extraordinary distinction.
What made the Kit-Cat Club remarkable was not merely the individual eminence of its members but the way it brought together men of power and men of talent in a setting that encouraged genuine interaction. In the rooms of the Upper Flask tavern, a playwright could debate policy with a cabinet minister, a poet could secure the patronage of a duke, and a publisher could broker the relationships that would sustain his business for years to come. The club was, in effect, a prototype of the networks of influence and patronage that would characterise English cultural and political life for the next two centuries.
Kneller's Portraits: Art at the Service of Ambition
The most tangible surviving legacy of the Kit-Cat Club is the extraordinary series of portraits painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller, the leading portraitist of the age. Kneller, himself a member of the club, painted forty-two portraits of his fellow Kit-Cats over a period of about twenty years, creating a visual record of the club's membership that is unique in English art. These paintings, which now hang in the National Portrait Gallery, constitute the largest and most important series of portraits by a single artist in the collection, and they provide an invaluable record of the faces and personalities of early Georgian England's ruling elite.
The Kit-Cat portraits are notable for their unusual format. They are painted on canvases measuring 36 by 28 inches, a size that was not standard at the time and that has since become known as the "kit-cat" format. The dimensions were determined by the height of the room in Tonson's house where the portraits were originally hung: the ceiling was too low for full-length portraits and too high for simple head-and-shoulders, so Kneller devised a compromise that showed the sitter to just below the waist, including one or both hands. This format proved ideally suited to portraits of men of affairs, allowing Kneller to convey not just the face but something of the bearing and gesture of each sitter, lending each portrait a vitality and sense of personality that more conventional formats sometimes lack.
The portraits themselves vary in quality, as one might expect from a series painted over two decades, but the best of them are among the finest works of English portraiture. Kneller's portrait of Jacob Tonson shows the publisher in his prime, prosperous and self-assured, his expression combining shrewdness with genuine warmth. The portrait of Congreve captures the playwright's celebrated beauty and his air of languid intelligence. Addison is shown as a man of grave authority, Steele as one of genial vivacity. Together, the series creates a composite portrait of the Whig establishment at the height of its confidence, a group of men who believed they had secured the liberties of England and who saw no reason why their settlement should not endure indefinitely.
The commission of these portraits was itself an act of political and cultural assertion. By having its members painted by the foremost artist of the day, the Kit-Cat Club was making a statement about its own importance, creating a visual monument to its collective identity that would outlast any individual member. Tonson, who commissioned and paid for many of the portraits, understood that art could serve as a form of propaganda, and the Kit-Cat series was, among other things, an advertisement for the Whig cause, presenting its adherents as men of taste, judgement, and natural authority.
The Toasting of Beauties
No account of the Kit-Cat Club would be complete without mention of its most notorious custom: the toasting of beauties. At each meeting, members would propose toasts to the most beautiful women of the day, inscribing the name of the chosen lady on a drinking glass with a diamond. The glass would then be passed around the table, and each member would drink to the lady's health before the glass was ceremonially smashed. This ritual, which combined gallantry with destruction in a manner entirely characteristic of the age, was one of the club's most celebrated and most controversial practices.
The toasting of beauties was, on one level, a harmless exercise in aristocratic flirtation, a form of compliment that placed the chosen ladies in a flattering spotlight without necessarily implying any improper relationship. The women toasted by the Kit-Cat Club included some of the most prominent figures in London society: the Duchess of Marlborough, the Countess of Sunderland, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu among them. To be toasted by the Kit-Cat Club was a mark of social distinction, a public acknowledgement of beauty and charm that carried real prestige in a society obsessed with both.
But the practice also had a more scandalous dimension. Some of the women toasted were very young, scarcely more than girls, and the verses that accompanied the toasts were sometimes more suggestive than gallant. The Duke of Somerset's daughter, Lady Henrietta, was toasted when she was only eight years old, a fact that even by the standards of the time raised eyebrows. The verses written for some of the toasts by Addison, Congreve, and other literary members of the club were exercises in elaborate double entendre, their surface meaning chaste and complimentary, their undertone decidedly less so. Contemporary satirists were quick to point out the incongruity of elderly politicians and portly publishers composing love poetry to debutantes, and the Kit-Cat toasting tradition became a regular target for Tory pamphleteers who wished to portray the Whig establishment as morally dissolute.
The truth, as usual, was more nuanced than either the club's defenders or its critics suggested. The toasting of beauties was a social ritual with deep roots in English aristocratic culture, and its sexual implications were largely performative. The Kit-Cat members were, for the most part, married men with conventional domestic arrangements, and the toasts were understood by all parties as a form of social theatre rather than a declaration of amorous intent. But the custom did reveal something about the power dynamics of the age, the casual assumption that beautiful women existed to be celebrated, catalogued, and competed over by powerful men, an assumption that subsequent centuries would come to view with increasing discomfort.
Political Influence and the Hanover Succession
Behind the conviviality and the toasting and the literary conversation, the Kit-Cat Club conducted serious political business. The club was, in effect, the social wing of the Whig party, the informal network through which policy was discussed, alliances were formed, and patronage was distributed. Its members occupied the highest offices of state, and the decisions made over dinner at the Upper Flask tavern could shape the direction of national policy in ways that the formal mechanisms of government sometimes could not.
The club's most significant political contribution was its role in securing the Hanoverian succession. When it became clear in the early 1700s that Queen Anne would die without a surviving heir, the question of who would succeed her became the most important political issue of the age. The Tories, or at least a significant faction among them, favoured the restoration of the Stuart line through the Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart. The Whigs, committed to the Protestant succession established by the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement, championed the claim of the Elector of Hanover, the future George I.
The Kit-Cat Club threw its collective weight behind the Hanoverian cause with a determination and effectiveness that contributed materially to the outcome. Its members used their influence in Parliament, in the press, and in the salons of London society to build support for the Hanoverian succession, and when Anne died in 1714, the transition was achieved without the civil war that many had feared. The Kit-Cat members were rewarded with offices and honours under the new regime, confirming the club's position as the most effective political network of its era. The celebrations at the Upper Flask that summer, one imagines, must have been particularly spirited.
The club's political activities were not without controversy. Its critics accused it of operating as a secret cabal, using social connections and literary patronage as instruments of political manipulation. There was some justice in this charge. The Kit-Cat Club did function as a kind of shadow government, a space where policy was formulated and decisions were taken outside the formal structures of parliamentary democracy. Its members saw nothing improper in this; they regarded themselves as the natural rulers of England, men whose wealth, education, and talent entitled them to exercise influence in whatever way they saw fit. The idea that political power should be constrained by formal rules and transparent processes was, to the Kit-Cat mindset, both naive and dangerous.
The Hampstead Connection: Upper Flask and Beyond
The Upper Flask tavern, where the Kit-Cat Club held its summer gatherings, occupied a prominent position on Hampstead Heath, near what is now the junction of Heath Street and the Whitestone Pond. The tavern was a substantial building, considerably larger than most Hampstead hostelries of the period, with rooms capable of accommodating the club's full membership and grounds that offered space for the outdoor entertainments that supplemented the formal dinners. Its location at the summit of the Heath provided views that were considered among the finest near London, and the clean air at this elevation was a powerful attraction for men who spent most of their year breathing the miasma of the city.
The Upper Flask's connection with the Kit-Cat Club brought Hampstead to the attention of London's social and political elite in a way that had lasting consequences for the village's development. The aristocrats and literary men who travelled to Hampstead for the club's summer meetings discovered a place of exceptional natural beauty, convenient to London yet sufficiently remote to feel like genuine countryside. Some of them liked what they found enough to acquire property in the village, and the building boom that transformed Hampstead from a rural settlement into a fashionable suburb during the eighteenth century owed something to the reputation that the Kit-Cat connection had established.
The Upper Flask itself did not survive into the modern era. The building was demolished in the late eighteenth century, and no trace of it remains above ground. Its approximate location is commemorated by a plaque, but the site is now occupied by later buildings that give no indication of the extraordinary conversations that once took place there. This is, perhaps, fitting. The Kit-Cat Club was an institution that operated through personal connection and oral communication, and its legacy was always going to be intangible, a matter of influence and atmosphere rather than bricks and mortar.
Other Hampstead buildings retain more visible connections to the Kit-Cat era. Several of the grand houses built along the east side of the Heath during the early eighteenth century were constructed for men who had first encountered Hampstead through the club's summer gatherings. The architectural style of these houses, with their confident classical proportions and their carefully designed relationships with the landscape, reflects the taste and ambition of the Kit-Cat generation, men who believed that building well was both a personal pleasure and a public duty.
Decline and Legacy
The Kit-Cat Club did not survive long beyond its political triumph. The death of several key members, the political complications of the early Hanoverian period, and the simple passage of time combined to weaken the bonds that had held the club together. By the 1720s, the regular meetings had ceased, and the club existed only in the memories of its surviving members and in the portraits that Tonson had accumulated at his country house. The great publisher himself died in 1736, and with him went the animating spirit of the institution he had created.
The club's decline was also a consequence of its success. The Whig settlement had been secured, the Hanoverian succession was established, and the political urgency that had given the Kit-Cat Club its purpose had dissipated. A new generation of Whig politicians, led by Walpole, had little need of a literary dining club to maintain their grip on power; they had the machinery of the state itself. The informal, personal politics of the Kit-Cat era gave way to the more systematic patronage networks of the Walpolean system, and the club's particular combination of literary culture and political engagement fell out of fashion.
But the Kit-Cat Club's legacy extended far beyond its institutional life. It established the model of the English gentlemen's club that would flourish in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, institutions like White's, Brooks's, and the Athenaeum that combined social exclusivity with political influence in ways that the Kit-Cat members would have recognised immediately. It demonstrated the power of cultural patronage as a political tool, a lesson that successive generations of politicians have applied with varying degrees of sophistication. And it left, in Kneller's portraits, a visual record of early Georgian England's ruling class that remains one of the most important documents of the period.
For Hampstead, the Kit-Cat Club's legacy is woven into the fabric of the village itself. The Upper Flask may be gone, but the tradition of intellectual and social gathering that the club established on the Heath has never entirely disappeared. The coffee houses, the literary societies, the political discussion groups, and the artistic circles that have characterised Hampstead's cultural life for three centuries all owe something, however indirect, to the precedent set by Tonson and his friends in the opening years of the eighteenth century. When Hampstead's residents gather today to discuss, debate, and disagree over good food and drink, they are continuing a tradition that the Kit-Cat Club helped to establish, a tradition of civilised engagement that is, perhaps, the most valuable thing the Whig grandees left behind.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*