The Hanover Club
The Hanover Club was a society of prominent and active Whigs dedicated in particular to championing support for the Hanoverian succession, and for the Whig cause generally, both in Parliament and the constituencies. The club had come into existence by the spring of 1712, though there is evidence that its proceedings had begun by late 1711. It met weekly at Jenny Man’s coffee house at Charing Cross during the remaining years of Queen Anne’s reign and the first months of George I’s.
According to John Oldmixon’s History of England (1735), the club was ‘very instrumental in keeping up the Whig spirit in London and Westminster, and consequently throughout the whole kingdom’. A list of the club as it stood early in November 1713 shows a membership of 31, four of whom were members of the House of Lords, and 23 who were MPs. Its secretary was the wit and versifier Ambrose Phillips who later became an MP in the Irish Parliament. Through several of its members, such as William Pulteney, Horace Walpole, the young duke of Montagu and Richard Steele, the club enjoyed links with the other main London-based Whig fraternity, the Kit-Cat Club, while several more Hanover men were firm followers of the Junto: George Montagu, Paul Methuen, William Strickland, Robert Furnese, Thomas Frankland and Lord Castlecomer.
Steele, in his Memoirs of Lord Wharton (1715), noted that the club was much more than just a wining and dining circle and perfected tactics that enabled members to raise against Tories and Jacobites ‘all the opposition they could in their several stations, and every member … to take his part in the Upper or Lower House’. One ploy, known as ‘close marking’, was for individual members to target particular Tory opponents during parliamentary debates on a regular basis. The club also pursued its political message out-of-doors by staging elaborate ‘pope burning’ processions in which effigies of the Pope, the Devil and the Pretender were paraded around the City’s main streets before being returned to Charing Cross for committal to a huge bonfire. These political spectacles were timed to celebrate key anniversary dates in the year with which the Whigs were keen to be identified, such as the queen’s birthday (6 February) and the anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth I (17 November).
