Vanbrugh was already a London celebrity in 1699, not as an architect but as a playwright, when he won the commission. He wrote bawdy Restoration comedies, of which ”The Relapse” and “The Provok’d Wife” are still performed today. Success brought him into the fashionable Kit-Kat Club, where he met Charles Howard, Third Earl of Carlisle. Whatever brilliant dialogue he used to secure Howard’s patronage, it must rival that of his plays. His triumph bewildered his contemporaries, although Jonathan Swift found it enormously amusing: