few weeks’ of nervous anticipation as his family and associates waited for news of the voyage. Almost on a daily basis, Norwood reported to Faulkner that he had received no word.49 Finally, on 4 September a letter arrived. Whaley had reached Plymouth, where he was staying with John Macbride, a captain in the Royal Navy. Macbride was ‘an exceedingly troublesome, busy, violent man’ but it seems that he and Whaley were on friendly terms. The young adventurer was ‘much pleased with the part of England he has seen’ and planned to continue his voyage.50
Norwood passed the news on to Faulkner, but the land agent was about to receive a devastating blow. A few days later his wife Catherine died at the age of 76. They had no children and her passing hit him hard: ‘Lov’d in they Life Lamented in they End,/The Loving Wife and Faithful Friend’ read part of the headstone inscription he drafted.51 His friends and family rallied round. ‘I hope that your verey greate distress has not impeared your health as I much dread it’, wrote one, but Faulkner was made of stern stuff. In the course of a voyage from Dublin to Holyhead just over a month later the pain of his loss seemed not to trouble him as much as the tempestuous crossing: ‘I dont ever remember to have felt such a rowl and swell in the sea,’ he exclaimed. ‘All the pasangers were most monsterously sick I never was so sick in all my life I streained and reached [retched] so much that the discharge from my stomack was tinctured with blood.’52 Hard-bitten and resilient, Faulkner battled through his grief and would continue to manage Whaley’s affairs for almost another decade. But the Irish Sea had not done with him.
Whaley, meanwhile, resumed his voyage but like Faulkner he ran into bad weather and cancelled his plans to sail to Brighton and Le Havre. In early October he reached Bristol and decided to return to Ireland from there. Around the middle of the month he landed at Waterford and headed north, planning to join his mother at Somerset House.53 Thus far he had not managed to undertake his voyage to the Mediterranean and it seemed unlikely that it would happen. After all, he had failed to even make it as far as Brighton in his yacht. But within a few days he would find himself embroiled in an affair that threatened to put an end not only to the planned expedition, but to his very life.
4
JERUSALEM SYNDROME
On the evening of 21 October 1786 Tom Whaley entered the Phoenix Park near Dublin with feelings of excitement, indignation and fear churning in his stomach. He and an attorney, identified in reports only as a Mr O—r, had agreed to meet near the Castleknock Gate at the park’s north-western fringe to settle a quarrel. This was to be Whaley’s first duel, and although such encounters rarely ended in fatalities, there were exceptions. Just five days before two gentlemen, Robert Keon and George Nugent Reynolds, had kept a rendezvous in Sheemore, County Leitrim. Before the duel had formally commenced – ‘the seconds had neither measured the ground … nor requested the principals to take their positions’ – Keon had shot Reynolds in the head, killing him instantly.1 This murderous act was a flagrant breach of the code of honour, but it showed how tempers could flare during duels and how easy it was for them to end fatally, adding to the tension that surrounded Whaley’s encounter. However, on this occasion the proper formalities were observed and the two antagonists ‘behaved with the greatest honour and coolness at the ground’. With the seconds having agreed that the principals should discharge their pistols simultaneously on a ‘word of command’, Whaley and O—r took up their positions and prepared to fire.2
The incident that occasioned the meeting had happened only that morning, when Whaley was approaching Dublin in his carriage. On the road near Chapelizod a chaise – a two-wheeled, one-horse carriage – overtook him and while it is unclear what exactly happened, it seems the two vehicles either collided or narrowly missed one another. The mishap was sufficient to provoke an outburst of road rage, a phenomenon that has existed for as long as there have been roads. Fiery words passed between Whaley and the chaise’s occupant, Mr O—r. The two men met again that afternoon at Daly’s Chocolate House in Dublin where they tried and failed to make up the quarrel. Agreeing to settle their differences in another manner, they appointed seconds and arranged to meet that same day in the Phoenix Park.3
Although duelling was illegal, for decades gentlemen had resorted to it to settle even trivial and imagined slights. By the late eighteenth century the idea that one’s honour could only be defended by sword or pistol had become extraordinarily popular and there were many earnest advocates of the practice. In 1777 a number of self-proclaimed experts drew up a list of twenty-seven rules designed to ensure that duels were fought fairly and with some level of regulation. In the years that followed, several high-profile encounters between prominent politicians gave the practice increased respectability and legitimacy and a new breed of aggressive gentlemen known as the ‘fire-eaters’ emerged. Whaley was about to join their ranks.
The word was given and the pistol shots rang out in the evening air. Whaley’s shot missed, but ‘the ball of Mr. O—r’s pistol … entered the thick part of his antagonist’s thigh and lodged in the other’.4 A surgeon who was present attended the stricken duellist and ‘probed the muscular part to a considerable depth, but the ball … eluded his search’. Despite the excruciating pain Whaley managed to keep his composure and even shake hands with his opponent. The ball was successfully removed the next day and a few days later Whaley was said to be ‘in a fair way of recovery’.5 Samuel Faulkner’s brother Hugh, perhaps with the Keon–Reynolds encounter in mind, believed that Whaley was fortunate to escape with his life. In his opinion he had been most to blame for the duel: ‘I am astonished that a gentleman who has seen so much of the world and good company would behave in such a manner that he must quarrel with a man because his chaise drove past him on the publick road,’ he expostulated. ‘Sure he can’t think that because he has got more money than another, that he has a liberty to insult all who has less than himself.’6
Whether this was true or not, for the next few weeks Whaley was laid up and in no position to quarrel with anyone. For his mother and stepfather this was a silver lining: now they had an opportunity to try and talk some sense into him and dissuade him from further dangerous escapades. They were also anxious to somehow stem his financial excesses: on 15 December Whaley would turn 21, at which time he would have full control over his inheritance. By late November he was well enough to travel and Anne was expecting him at Somerset. ‘I am sure the country will be of service to him after his long confinement,’ she anticipated, ‘and will soon restore him to his strength and flesh, and I am in hopes that his presence will be of use to Mr Richardson.’ Her husband was in bad health and low spirits, probably partly as a result of worry over his stepson’s antics.7 He had not rescued him from a hazardous situation in 1784 to watch him throw his life away two years later and he resolved to act.
Samuel Faulkner had calculated the total amount of Whaley’s fortune at £48,674, eighteen shillings and ten pence halfpenny, in addition to the annual rental income from the estates.8 On paper the young man was due to come into this impressive inheritance on 15 December 1786, but for years he had been borrowing heavily on the strength of it, even selling one of his Carlow properties, Castletown House, to Faulkner earlier that year to raise money.9 Richardson insisted that Whaley examine the state of his fortune and when he did he ‘found it still more diminished by the variety of my dissipation and extravagance’. (W, 35) Even more worrying, it seemed that the money that remained was insufficient to clear his outstanding debts. Richardson now made a valiant attempt to rein in Whaley’s spending, warning him that ‘the way of life in which I was engaged, must inevitably lead me to ruin … and that at the rate I proceeded, I must in a short time be reduced to indigence’. (W, 35) ‘With tears in his eyes’ he urged his stepson to relinquish his two greatest indulgences: Harriet, on whom he was spending an ‘extraordinary, not to say scandalous’ (W, 35) amount, and the yacht. Each was costing him in the region of £5,000 a year.10 Though genuinely touched by his stepfather’s concerns, Whaley found it impossible to give up both of his ‘favourite hobby-horses’. Eventually he agreed to sell the ship rather than part ways with Harriet, to whom he was ‘now really attached’. (W, 37) He later confided to Faulkner that he would ‘rather have her happy than any other woman in the world’.11
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Offloading the yacht meant that Whaley’s planned voyage to the Mediterranean would be put on hold,