reaction to this bolt from the blue is not hard to imagine. Whaley’s evident naïveté and recklessness was not so surprising; after all he was still only 18. Much more worrying was the news that he was heavily in debt, dangerously ill and at the mercy of a ruthless swindler. As if his massive loss in France was not bad enough, he had also embroiled himself in a crazy scheme to abduct an heiress. Richardson knew he had no option but to leave for London at once and drag him back from the edge of the precipice.
When Richardson received the letter his wife was away in the spa town of Swanlinbar, County Cavan, attempting to cure an upset stomach and a dose of gout. When her son was in France he had written to her regularly, mentioning some of the debts he had racked up, but thus far this had caused her only mild concern. She informed Faulkner that ‘Toms demands will I fear be much higher now than we coud wish and yet what can you or I do.’ He had assured her he would not gamble again until he came of age and she blithely trusted that this would be the case: ‘God grant he may keep his resolution.’13 She then wore her pen ‘to an actual stump’ writing him a nine-page letter, the contents of which leave little doubt that he was her favourite son: ‘it is very good of you my dearest boy to write so constantly to me, your letters are the delight of my heart’. She urged him to ‘keep but your resolution with respect to play, and my anxietys about you will from this moment be at an end, except those which a doating mother must always feel when the darling of her heart is at such a distance’.14 Instead, Anne’s anxieties were about to increase. Soon she would discover not only that Whaley’s ‘demands’ were far greater than she thought, but also that he was dangerously ill.
Leslie Grove’s Paris mission did not go as hoped. When he and the lawyer arrived at the convent they presented the letter Whaley had received to the heiress and her governess. They, however, knew nothing about it: it was, unsurprisingly, a complete forgery. Miss Duthrey ‘burst into a violent fit of laughter in which she was joined by her companion, to the manifest confusion of the two adventurers, who … slunk away and made the best of their way back to London’. (W, 30) It later transpired that John Ryan and his associates had cooked up the whole story. Since Whaley had failed to raise any money in London, they had hoped to lure him back to France to get him arrested for the bill his banker had returned protested and ‘pursue their further operations and schemes on me with greater security’. (W, 31)
Whaley’s illness had saved him from this fate but it threatened to consign him to a worse one. With his condition deteriorating rapidly he had no option but to seek medical advice, even though the likely treatment was far from appealing. Many doctors treated syphilis using a method known as ‘salivation’, whereby sufferers took doses of mercury that not only poisoned them but also produced large amounts of black saliva.15 It is not known if Whaley’s physician, Cuthbert Potts of Pall Mall, used this method: he was after all said to be ‘skilful and humane in his profession’.16 But whatever treatment he employed, it was not to his patient’s liking and Whaley informed him that he would be seeking a second opinion. Offended, Potts replied that he was as well qualified as any physician in London to treat him ‘and had you treated me with the respect due to a gentleman who is in the practice of a liberal profession, surely I could never object to your consulting whome you pleased’.17 By this time Whaley was probably not in an entirely reasonable frame of mind. He would have found salivation, if he underwent it, both mentally and physically debilitating.18 Meanwhile he was still fending off the avaricious Ryan, who by now had been weaving webs around him for several weeks. Alone, vulnerable and lacking even Wray’s feeble guidance, he was in sore need of a friend. Richardson could not come soon enough.
Whaley had a high opinion of his stepfather, commending him as an ‘incomparable man … at once the tender husband, the warm friend and generous benefactor’. (W, 31) In a surviving portrait Richardson looks kindly and good-natured (see Plate 5) and indeed he seems to have been universally liked.19 The man that Anne esteemed as ‘the very best husband upon earth’ had proven himself a true friend to his stepchildren and she assured Tom that ‘were you his own son I am confident he coud not be more anxious for your welfare’.20 When Richardson finally reached London early in July, he and his stepson had not seen one another for over a year and a half and their reunion was an emotional one. ‘I was much afflicted at the sight of this sincere friend,’ Whaley confessed. Richardson’s first action was to bring him ‘to his lodging, where I should be better accommodated than at a public Hotel, and at the same time be at some distance from a society to whom I might impute the greatest part of my misfortunes’. (W, 32) As soon as he had lodged his stepson in a safer place, Richardson set about dealing with his troublesome creditor.
The failure of the Duthrey ploy and Richardson’s presence in London meant that John Ryan’s chances of getting money out of Whaley were fast diminishing. In a last-ditch effort he seems to have reduced his demand to £1,000 but found he could not obtain even this. On 13 July he wrote requesting the money urgently as he had ‘occasion for it immediately and conceives it must be very easy for Mr Whaley to get it from Mr Richardson’.21 Richardson, however, refused to give him a penny and took him to task ‘for the atrociousness of his conduct in pillaging a young man and enticing him away from his tutor’. (W, 32) Though the criticism was well warranted, Ryan saw fit to call Richardson to account for it and a duel might have ensued had some unknown third parties not made peace between the antagonists. Whaley, meanwhile, slowly recovered. By the end of July he was well enough to set out for Ireland.
***
On 30 July Whaley set out for Holyhead22 and soon afterwards he reached Dublin, pox-scarred and all but penniless. On the whole it was not surprising that his grand tour had turned out thus. He had been barely 3 years old when his father died and had lacked a firm hand to instil discipline and responsibility. His mother doted on him and neither she, Richardson nor his grandfather Bernard Ward (who died before he returned) seems to have done much to rein him in. While Samuel Faulkner had taken care of Whaley as a child, he was not his guardian and he lacked the authority to refuse his demands or check his wilder impulses. William Wray had been vested with this authority but had been incapable of exerting it. As a result, Whaley had all but gone off the rails during his grand tour and was lucky to survive it. He had shown himself to be volatile, careless and irresponsible, but after all he was still only 18 and perhaps he had learned something from the experience.
On his return Whaley was ‘received and treated like the Prodigal Son’ (W, 33), no great surprise given his mother’s partiality to him. She hoped he would open a new leaf and ‘let unnecessary superfluitys alone, not only now but during your whole life … prove your self a man of sound principles and good sense, setting such a value on every thing, as a man of success ought, and not letting your self be carried away by fashion or the very natural love of pleasure inherent almost in every young breast’.23 No doubt such advice filled Whaley with good intentions, but only time would show if he would take the lessons of his grand tour to heart and henceforth live a responsible life. The events of early 1785 seemed to suggest he would. Like many other young men he was attracted by the idea of a political career and the prestige and opportunities that went with it. In February 1785 he stood for election to Parliament and was returned as MP for Newcastle, County Dublin.24 This encouraged him ‘to apply myself, for some time, to the study of the constitution, laws and commerce of the country, with that degree of attention and assiduity, which so important and arduous a pursuit required’. (W, 276) Standing on the cusp of manhood, he seemed to have acquired a new sense of purpose and responsibility.
Whaley had chosen an exciting time to enter politics. Dublin was the administrative and parliamentary capital of Ireland, boasting a parliament house that was architecturally far more impressive than that at Westminster.25 For a long time the Irish Parliament had been technically subordinate to the British and its legislation had had to be approved in Westminster before it could be enacted, but in 1782 the Irish Parliament had won a degree of legislative independence and over the years that followed various groups clamoured for further political change. Political reformers known as ‘patriots’ angled for greater political independence, while Catholics, having seen some of the penal laws repealed, pursued further concessions. Whaley, like his future brother-in-law, the Attorney General John Fitzgibbon, was more concerned with preserving the British connection and the authority of the Crown. But his fledgling career in parliament never took off because he, like a number of other