'An Extempore Invitation to the Earl of Oxford, Lord High Treasurer. 1712.' - Matthew Prior

‘If weary’d with the great Affairs,

Which Britain trusts to Harley’s Cares,

Thou, humble Statesman, may’st descend,

Thy Mind one Moment to unbend.’

 

‘An Extempore Invitation to the Earl of Oxford, Lord High Treasurer. 1712.’

Matthew Prior (1664-1721)

 




Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford
and Mortimer. Detail from portrait
after John Richardson,1804
(Parliament of the United Kingdom).

In 1712, British politics was in the grip of competing factions, all bitterly struggling to direct the future of the country: not altogether unlike today. Back then, the question was all to do with who should succeed the ailing Queen Anne (whom some of you might have recently made acquaintance with through Olivia Colman’s Oscar winning-portrayal in the film The Favourite). Questions of religion intermingled with those of politics, with some seeking to continue the bloodline of the Stuart family by inviting Anne’s Catholic half-brother James Edward Stuart to be king after her, whilst others wanted to secure the monarchy for the Queen’s Protestant Hanoverian cousins. The competing interests of the two main political parties, Whigs and Tories, led to the formation of social clubs including the Kit-Cat Club (most probably named after the owner of the establishment where they met and nothing to do with chocolate bars), and the Tory Brothers’ Club (so-called because the members called each other ‘Brothers’: women were not admitted as members). Back then, the post of ‘Prime Minister’ didn’t really exist yet, but the broadly equivalent role of Lord Treasurer was held by Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford and Mortimer. Having started out as a Whig, Harley later shifted to the Tory side but appears to have remained committed to acting in the best interests of his country and monarch. He is very far from being an unproblematic figure though: he masterminded and was Governor of the South Sea Company, which was set up with the aim of reducing British national debt via the transportation and trade of people as slaves across the Atlantic (for more info on this, see John A. Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay, 2004).

 

This was not the reason why he wasn’t ever admitted to join the Tory Brothers’ Club though: they actually seem to have just though he was powerful enough already. But that didn’t stop them inviting him to join a meeting in 1712, and rather than sending a tired little RSVP the invitation was written in verse by one of the leading British poet of the day, Matthew Prior. This was not altogether an unusual choice – poems would often be written and circulated between friends in manuscript form, and the later Scriblerus Club sent multiple verse invitations to Harley. Prior’s invitation begins with the practicalities, stating when and where the meeting is to take place, followed by the object of the evening:

 

‘Our Weekly Friends To-morrow meet

At Matthew’s Palace, in Duke-street;

To try for once, if They can ine

On Bacon-Ham, and Mutton-chine:’

 

Then, having tempted Harley with talk of food, the poem suggests that if he is ‘weary’d with the great Affairs’ of statesmanship, he ‘may’st descend, / Thy Mind one Moment to unbend’. It’s an eighteenth-century way of asking him to leave work at the office to come and chill for a bit. The poem then becomes even more deferential, as Harley is invited so that he might ‘see Thy Servant from his Soul / Crown with Thy Health the sprightly Bowl’ – in other words, Prior is proposing to toast him in his presence. This, Prior goes on to claim, would be the most ‘Honor’ that ‘e’er [his] House / Receiv’d’.

 

You can find this poem:

https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/pmp18-w0940.shtml

(a fantastic website with heaps of eighteenth-century poems all superbly curated and free to all!)

 

You can find more about eighteenth-century British club culture, Robert Harley, and the Succession Crisis in these excellent books:

 

Anne Somerset, Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (London: Harper Collins, 2012)

 

Ophelia Field, The Kit-Cat Club (London: Harper Collins, 2008, repr. 2009)

 

Sources used in writing this blogpost:

 

John A. Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay (London: Taylor & Francis, 2004)