Volume I Part 4 (2/2)

Read, the landlord, was captured on the following day, and tried for the wilful murder of Vaughan; he was, however, acquitted of the capital charge, and found guilty of manslaughter only. The five rioters were also brought to trial, and met with a harder fate. They were all found guilty of riot and rebellion, and sentenced to death at Tyburn.

This example damped the courage of the rioters, and alarmed all parties; so that we hear no more of the Mug-house riots, until a few months later, a pamphlet appeared with the t.i.tle, _Down with the Mug; or Reasons for suppressing the Mug-houses_, by an author who only gave the initials Sir H---- M----, but who seems to have so much of what was thought to be a Jacobite spirit, that it provoked a reply, ent.i.tled the _Mug Vindicated_.

The account of 1722 states that many an encounter they had, and many were the riots, till at last the Government was obliged by an Act of Parliament to put an end to this strife, which had this good effect, that upon pulling down of the Mug-house in Salisbury Court, for which some boys were hanged on this Act, the city has not been troubled with them since.

There is some doubt as to the first use of the term ”Mug-house.” In a scarce _Collection of One Hundred and Eighty Loyal Songs_, all written since 1678, Fourth Edition, 1694, is a song in praise of the ”Mug,”

which shows that Mug-houses had that name previous to the Mug-house riots. It has also been stated that the beer-mugs were originally fas.h.i.+oned into a grotesque resemblance of Lord Shaftesbury's face, or ”ugly mug,” as it was called, and that this is the derivation of the word.

THE KIT-KAT CLUB.

This famous Club was a threefold celebrity--political, literary, and artistic. It was the great Society of Whig leaders, formed about the year 1700, _temp._ William III., consisting of thirty-nine n.o.blemen and gentlemen zealously attached to the House of Hanover; among whom the Dukes of Somerset, Richmond, Grafton, Devons.h.i.+re, and Marlborough, and (after the accession of George I.) the Duke of Newcastle; the Earls of Dorset, Sunderland, Manchester, Wharton, and Kingston; Lords Halifax and Somers; Sir Robert Walpole, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Granville, Addison, Garth, Maynwaring, Stepney, and Walsh. They are said to have first met at an obscure house in s.h.i.+re-lane, by Temple Bar, at the house of a noted mutton-pieman, one Christopher Katt; from whom the Club, and the pies that formed a standing dish at the Club suppers, both took their name of Kit-Kat. In the _Spectator_, No. 9, however, they are said to have derived their t.i.tle not from the maker of the pie, but from the pie itself, which was called a Kit-Kat, as we now say a Sandwich; thus, in a prologue to a comedy of 1700:

”A Kit-Kat is a supper for a lord;”

but Dr. King, in his _Art of Cookery_, is for the pieman:

”Immortal made, as Kit-Kat by his pies.”

The origin and early history of the Kit-Kat Club is obscure. Elkanah Settle addressed, in 1699, a ma.n.u.script poem ”To the most renowned the President and the rest of the Knights of the most n.o.ble Order of the Toast,” in which verses is a.s.serted the dignity of the Society; and Malone supposes the Order of the Toast to have been identical with the Kit-Kat Club: this was in 1699. The toasting-gla.s.ses, which we shall presently mention, may have something to do with this presumed ident.i.ty.

Ned Ward, in his _Secret History of Clubs_, at once connects the Kit-Kat Club with Jacob Tonson, ”an amphibious mortal, chief merchant to the Muses.” Yet this is evidently a caricature. The maker of the mutton-pies, Ward maintains to be a person named Christopher, who lived at the sign of the Cat and Fiddle, in Gray's Inn-lane, whence he removed to keep a pudding-pye shop, near the Fountain Tavern, in the Strand. Ward commends his mutton-pies, cheese-cakes, and custards, and the pieman's interest in the sons of Parna.s.sus; and his inviting ”a new set of Authors to a collation of oven trumpery at his friend's house, where they were n.o.bly entertained with as curious a batch of pastry delicacies as ever were seen at the winding-up of a Lord Mayor's feast;” adding that ”there was not a mathematical figure in all Euclid's Elements but what was presented to the table in baked wares, whose cavities were filled with fine eatable varieties fit for the G.o.ds or poets.” Mr. Charles Knight, in the _s.h.i.+lling Magazine_, No. 2, maintains that by the above is meant, that Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, was the pieman's ”friend,” and that to the customary ”whet” to his authors he added the pastry entertainment. Ward adds, that this grew into a weekly meeting, provided his, the bookseller's friends would give him the refusal of their juvenile productions. This ”generous proposal was very readily agreed to by the whole poetic cla.s.s, and the cook's name being Christopher, for brevity called Kit, and his sign being the Cat and Fiddle, they very merrily derived a quaint denomination from puss and her master, and from thence called themselves of the Kit-Cat Club.”

A writer in the _Book of Days_, however, states, that Christopher Cat, the pastry-cook, of King-street, Westminster, was the keeper of the tavern, where the Club met; but s.h.i.+re-lane was, upon more direct authority, the pieman's abode.

We agree with the _National Review_, that ”it is hard to believe, as we pick our way along the narrow and filthy pathway of s.h.i.+re-lane, that in this blind alley [?], some hundred and fifty years ago, used to meet many of the finest gentlemen and choicest wits of the days of Queen Anne and the first George. Inside one of those frowsy and low-ceiled rooms, now tenanted by abandoned women or devoted to the sale of greengroceries and small coal,--Halifax has conversed and Somers unbent, Addison mellowed over a bottle, Congreve flashed his wit, Vanbrugh let loose his easy humour, Garth talked and rhymed.”

The Club was literary and gallant as well as political. The members subscribed 400 guineas for the encouragement of good comedies in 1709.

The Club had its toasting-gla.s.ses, inscribed with a verse, or _toast_, to some reigning beauty; among whom were the four s.h.i.+ning daughters of the Duke of Marlborough--Lady G.o.dolphin, Lady Sunderland, Lady Bridgewater, and Lady Monthermer; Swift's friends, Mrs. Long and Mrs.

Barton, the latter the lovely and witty niece of Sir Isaac Newton; the d.u.c.h.ess of Bolton, Mrs. Brudenell, and Lady Carlisle, Mrs. Di. Kirk, and Lady Wharton.

Dr. Arbuthnot, in the following epigram, seems to derive the name of the Club from this custom of toasting ladies after dinner, rather than from the renowned maker of mutton-pies:--

”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 this pell-mell pack of toasts Of old Cats and young Kits.”

Lord Halifax wrote for the toasting-gla.s.ses the following verses in 1703:--

_The d.u.c.h.ess of St. Albans._

The line of Vere, so long renown'd in arms, Concludes with l.u.s.tre in St. Albans' charms.

Her conquering eyes have made their race complete: They rose in valour, and in beauty set.

_The d.u.c.h.ess of Beaufort._

Offspring of a tuneful sire, Blest with more than mortal fire; Likeness of a Mother's face, Blest with more than mortal grace: You with double charms surprise, With his wit, and with her eyes.

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