Saunders Gore (known as Lord Sudley), George Frederick Nugent (styled Lord Delvin), and the dashing revolutionary-to-be Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The dissolute life he threw himself into in the company of these gentlemen threatened to extinguish his political career ‘and every other serious and laudable application’. (W, 276)
***
‘Nothing can be so gay as Dublin is,’ a correspondent insisted in 1782. ‘The Castle twice a week, the opera twice a week, with plays, assemblies and suppers to fill up the time.’26 Certainly, if one had money the city had a lot to offer. There were two fashionable districts, one centred around Rutland Square (now Parnell Square) to the north of the Liffey, and the other around St Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square to the south. Both were known for their streets of fine terraced houses and their wealthy inhabitants, who enthusiastically pursued comfort, fashion and pleasure. Whaley resided in the house his father had built on St Stephen’s Green. Technically the property was owned by his mother, but he stood to inherit it and seems to have treated it like it was his own, at least while he was living there.27 Although he had not yet come into his legacy (and would not until 15 December 1786) he was known to be one of the city’s richest young gentlemen and he did not mind flaunting his wealth. Whaley maintained an extensive domestic staff, including a coachman, footmen, a groom, a nurse, a French cook and a sedan chair manned by two chairmen. He kept a pack of hunting dogs and a small pet dog, a black and yellow female terrier named Vixen.28 He must have been a reasonably decent master as his coachman, Denis Lennard, later declared that ‘there is no gentellman in Ir[e]land I would [serve] before my master as he was so good to me when I was with him’.29
Whaley’s pastimes, normal enough for a young upper-class male, included attending the theatre, music, drinking, gambling, hunting and yachting.30 The last of these became a passion. Like many other young gentlemen Whaley liked racing boats along the coast, especially when wagers were involved. Yet he also had a much grander project in mind. ‘I conceived the strange idea of performing, like [Captain] Cook, a voyage round the world; and no sooner had it got possession of my imagination, than I flew off at a tangent … in order to put my plan in execution.’ (W, 34) The impracticality of sailing around the globe must have been pointed out to Whaley and he modified his plan, but it remained an ambitious one. In August 1785 Anne Richardson caught wind that he, ‘tho’ he has not as yet told it to me himself’, was ‘on a very wild scheme of building a ship to take him up the Mediterranean’. He intended to sail ‘through the Straights of Gibraltar … visiting all the noted places bordering on the Mediterranean sea, whether in Europe, Africa, or Asia’.31 Of course, to realise this dream Whaley needed money and he decided he would borrow £1,500 from his mother or his sister Anne, who had by then inherited her share of the Whaley fortune. His mother urged Samuel Faulkner to ‘try to put him off and shew him the impossibility of his getting the cash from us … or … his sister’. Tom pressed ahead regardless and by October he had hired a shipbuilder on the Isle of Wight to start building a yacht.32 The money problem now became more pressing, as he found that the tradesmen working on the ship were ‘calling every minuet for the amount of their bills and how to pay them he knew not … he then exclaimed of his own doings and said he had no one to blame but himself’. Faulkner found the money to pay some of the men,33 but further demands would inevitably follow.
The ship was not the only drain on Whaley’s finances. On one of his periodic trips to London he had visited a brothel and fallen for one of the girls, ‘a fille de chambre, who had not only the character of being chaste, but had actually remained so during three years service with her mistress’. Apparently Whaley had had to resort to ‘the assistance of a bank note and gold watch [to] beat her virtue out of the field … a circumstance which has made many believe, that she never before was offered what she esteemed an adequate price for it’.34 This girl was later depicted alongside Whaley in the Town and Country Magazine, a London society publication (see Plate 6). She may have been the woman he brought from London to Dublin to be his lady companion, as described in his memoirs. Her name was Harriet Heydon, and it is unlikely that she was ‘chaste’ as she was, or had been, a married woman. Though she was ‘neither distinguished for wit or beauty,’ she was not as aggressively greedy as other courtesans he had visited. (W, 33) Perhaps this was what attracted him. He lodged Harriet in a house he had rented on Holles Street and spent lavishly on her.35 This was also where Whaley ‘kept my midnight orgies, and saw my friends, according to the fashionable acceptation of the word’. (W, 34)36
Alarmed at the rate with which Whaley’s expenses and debts were piling up, his mother urged him to join her at Somerset (or Summerseat), a country house near Coleraine that her husband had inherited. ‘When we get him here we will not part with him again if we can possibly keep him here,’ she insisted. ‘I wish I knew how much money he has got or drawn for, in short how much he has expended … a very great deal I fear.’37 Whaley seems to have been reluctant to go, as this meant leaving Harriet in Dublin, but his mother was insistent and around the middle of November he arrived at Somerset. He would stay there for several weeks while the Richardsons distracted him with various amusements such as hunting and theatre.38 ‘We shall keep down his expenses as much as possible,’ Anne resolved, while admitting that it was ‘very hard to accomplish it for the money vanishes without my being able to find out how it goes’.39 This was not surprising: Whaley was secretly sending money to Harriet.40 By the New Year (1786) he was unable to stay away from her any longer and he returned to Dublin. Almost resignedly, Anne wrote to Faulkner asking him to ‘manage him as well as you can till I come’.41 While she knew he would continue spending money on Harriet she was probably more concerned about the cost of his ship and the wagers it would inevitably give rise to. By the summer of 1786 the vessel was ready to sail. She was commodious enough, with space below decks to accommodate a cabin and a ‘state room’,42 but how would she bear up on a lengthy sea voyage, namely the planned expedition to the Mediterranean? To try her out Whaley decided to sail to Milford Haven in Wales before pressing on to Brighton and Le Havre. Harriet, his brother John and his fellow MP Lord Sudley agreed to accompany him.43
Before they departed Faulkner’s nephew and clerk William Norwood sat down with Whaley to go through his accounts with ‘his boatmen, tradesmen &c I mean those that have done any work for the boat’. Unsurprisingly he had not kept track of his outgoings and Norwood estimated that he had paid the tradesmen £200 more than was owed. ‘I showed him clearly how much he was cheated. he seemed something troubled. and was satisfied it was so. but all that he said … was not to let on to Faulkner his mother or anyone for fear it should be knowen.’ No doubt they knew already and harboured serious misgivings about the mooted voyage to Le Havre. Whaley was down to his last 150 guineas, and Norwood did not believe there was ‘a farthing more remaining’ of £1,000 he had received ‘the other day’ – probably an advance of funds from his inheritance, secured through Faulkner.44 Anne was unwell and had reached the end of her patience with her son’s continual spending. ‘Her little fitt of sickness has altered her for the worse very much,’ Norwood observed. ‘She says she never will whilst she is Mr. Whaley’s guardian [i.e. the guardian of his inheritance] accept a bill of his that may be on acc[oun]t of his house or girl.’45
Norwood, for his part, could only dream of the kind of money Whaley was splurging. His father Jack had worked at the Faulkners’ linen bleaching yard near Cookstown, County Tyrone, where he lived in ‘a house built of mud … 42 feet long’.46 This was where William had grown up, a far cry from the magnificence of St Stephen’s Green. He knew that he and Whaley had little in common (‘moderate and immoderate youth are no companions’) and he was inclined to be sanctimonious, stating confidently that if he moved in ‘a higher sphere’ he would not be seduced into extravagance or do anything to ‘hurt and shame’ himself: ‘folly and disapation [dissipation] is a lesson I realy do not wish to learn’.47 Meanwhile he dismissed Harriet as Whaley’s ‘whore’. Yet it is not hard to feel some sympathy for Norwood. All he hoped was to someday improve his circumstances by obtaining a lease on a small farm, and he insisted that no one wished Whaley better than he did. The latter, for his part, did not look down on the humble clerk and invited him to dine with him on several occasions. ‘I did not wish to go oftimes as he has always such great folks with him,’ Norwood confessed, ‘but realy he made no distinction between any one that was there and me.’48 Whaley had his faults, but snobbery does not seem