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The Kit-Cat Club was an early 18th-century London, England club with strong political and literary associations, committed to the furtherance of Whig objectives. Before then, it may have been a secret society active in furthering the Glorious Revolution of 1689.
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 like the Duke of Marlborough, Charles Seymour, the Earl of Burlington, Thomas Pelham-Holles, and Sir Robert Walpole.
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.
One suggestion for the derivation of the name is from Christopher Cat, the owner of the pie-house in which the club met in Shire Lane, near Temple Bar, and his mutton pies, known as Kit-cats. 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.
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 KitKat series of chocolate bars is believed to be named after the Kit-Cat Club.
References
- Downes, Kerry (1987). Sir John Vanbrugh: A Biography. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
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