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)
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).
 |
| Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford and Mortimer. Detail from portrait after John Richardson,1804 (Parliament of the United Kingdom). |
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:
(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)
John A. Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay (London: Taylor
& Francis, 2004)
