the memoirs and they lay in obscurity for the next hundred years. Around 1900 the antiquarian Sir Edward Sullivan acquired the original manuscript, along with a copy which he claimed was ‘to all intents and purposes a duplicate’ of the original. Working from these volumes he published a version of the text in 1906 as Buck Whaley’s Memoirs. This book has long been regarded as the best source for Whaley’s life, but it is not the only one. The current whereabouts of the original manuscript are unknown10 but the copy is now held in the London Library. It contains a fair amount of material, some of it risqué, that Sullivan saw fit to leave out of his published version. There is also an independent account of the Jerusalem expedition: a journal kept by Whaley’s travelling companion Captain Hugh Moore. Now kept in a private collection in Istanbul, Moore’s journal confirms most of Whaley’s account while acting as an invaluable corrective to many of the latter’s exaggerations. It also contains a great number of additional details and anecdotes.
The above sources focus mainly on the Jerusalem expedition. We would know comparatively little about the rest of Whaley’s life were it not for one man: his land agent Samuel Faulkner, who carefully filed away virtually every letter he received concerning Whaley’s estates, finances, expenses, near-continual gambling losses, and desperate attempts to clear or evade his debts. The correspondence includes many letters from Whaley’s associates, friends and family members, not to mention the man himself. Although it is in private possession, the owners kindly allowed me to consult it while researching this book. Also, copies of many of the letters are held on microfilm in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the National Library of Ireland. This material fills in many of the gaps in Whaley’s life story while revealing a human side rarely glimpsed in the memoirs: the 17-year-old boy who thought he could replace missing teeth with substitutes purchased from a peasant, the hot-headed young gentleman ready to fight duels at the slightest provocation, the benevolent master who was kind to his servants, and the despairing fugitive on the run from yet another catastrophic gambling loss. Whaley was a human being like any other, and he freely admitted his own flaws, weaknesses and shortcomings. For his entire life he struggled with these deep human frailties, even as he hurled himself into one of the greatest adventures of the age. It is this, more than anything, that makes his story so appealing.
PART ONE
EARLY LIFE
1
MAKING A BUCK
I was born with strong passions, a lively imagination and a spirit that could brook no restraint. I possessed a restlessness and activity of mind that directed me to the most extravagant pursuits; and the ardour of my disposition never abated till satiety had weakened the power of enjoyment … In the warmth of my imagination I formed schemes of the wildest and most eccentric kind; and in the execution of them no danger could intimidate, no difficulty deter me. (W, 335)
So wrote Thomas ‘Buck’ Whaley towards the end of his short life, evoking the powerful and wayward spirit that set his days ablaze, from the follies of his youth to the hare-brained schemes, remarkable adventures and crushing disasters of his adulthood. It was his sheer heedlessness, his willingness to do the unthinkable in the face of all sense and advice to the contrary, that made Whaley such an attractive character, not only to his contemporaries but also to us today, over 200 years after his demise. The same volatile and adventurous disposition that ignited his spectacular expedition to Jerusalem also set him on the road of calamity and financial disaster, a path he struggled on until his untimely death at the age of 34.
When Whaley was born in 17651 there was little to suggest that he was destined for such a reckless and dissipated life. His father, Richard Chapel Whaley, was a prominent Anglo-Irish landowner who had carefully consolidated and augmented the extensive landed wealth he had inherited from his forebears. Richard’s great grandfather Henry Whalley had been a first cousin of Oliver Cromwell and a firm supporter of the parliamentarians during the English Civil Wars between King and Parliament in the 1640s. In 1649 Henry Whalley’s brother Edward, along with Cromwell and others, signed Charles I’s death warrant. Later that year Cromwell embarked on his conquest of Ireland, crushing and dispossessing the Irish Catholics who had sided with the king during the conflict. Many parliamentarians received grants of the confiscated estates and Henry came into substantial property in the Galway area.2
Over the generations that followed his descendants added to this landed fortune. In 1725 his great grandson Richard Chapel Whaley inherited the Galway lands, and some years later his uncle bequeathed him property in Armagh and Fermanagh.3 Richard was a canny entrepreneur and in 1755 he invested ‘to very great advantage’ in a copper mine near Whaley Abbey, his home in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains.4 The money amassed from investments like this enabled him to acquire further estates in Dublin, Wicklow, Carlow and Louth. By this time he and his fellow upper-class Protestants had become a powerful elite in Ireland. Their victory in the Williamite War (1688–91) had enabled them to seize yet more property from the Irish Catholics and in the early-eighteenth-century Protestants, though a minority, owned some 80 per cent of the land in Ireland. They also controlled the Irish Parliament and the legislature. Determined to keep Catholics in a subordinate position, they introduced penal laws prohibiting them from practising their religion, owning land, voting or holding public office. The laws were only sporadically enforced but Richard Chapel Whaley was one of their firmest advocates, partly because he used them for his personal gain. When engaged in his mining venture he seems to have defrauded his business partner, a Catholic named Bolger: ‘Whaley took advantage of the penal laws to rob him and prospered on the ill-gotten plunder.’5
Unsurprisingly given that he was the descendant of a Cromwellian, Whaley was also keen to enforce the penal laws for their own sake. The aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 saw the laws ‘revived in Ireland without cause, and pursued by a few weak bigots with avidity; rewards were offered for apprehending priests, and the fellows who pursued this infamous avocation were termed priest catchers’. Whaley was said to be an ardent priest-catcher, leading expeditions into the countryside in search of his prey. At some point he became known as ‘Burn-Chapel’ Whaley: according to one tradition, he got the nickname when he fired his pistol at a Catholic chapel and set its thatched roof alight, burning it to the ground.6 It seems the attack was motivated by Whaley’s animosity towards a Father Byrne, a Catholic priest who lived at Greenan Beg near Whaley Abbey. Byrne’s sister was married to a Protestant named Willis or Wills, and while dining with her one day the priest had given ‘umbrage to a Protestant of the party by stating that Protestants would be lost’. In retaliation for this, and no doubt keen to deal with the Romish cleric in his midst, Whaley recruited a pair of thugs named Collins and Quinsey and set fire to the Catholic chapel at Greenan. The three men are said to have used a picture of the Virgin Mary for target practice, with Whaley exclaiming ‘I shot the wh[or]e through the heart and she did not bleed.’ Whatever the truth of the story, the ‘Burn-Chapel’ moniker stuck and would endure long after his death.7
It was not the only legacy he had to worry about. As the owner of estates scattered over seven counties – Dublin, Wicklow, Carlow, Galway, Armagh, Louth and Fermanagh – he needed to produce an heir who could carry on his name and property, but his first marriage, to Catherine Armitage, had been childless. When Catherine died in November 1758 Whaley, now in his late fifties, decided to remarry. Youth and good looks must have been among the qualities he sought in his new bride because she turned out to be Anne Ward, the 18-year-old daughter of the Rev. Bernard Ward, Rector of Knockbreda in County Down.8 With her lustrous dark hair and prominent nose Anne was arrestingly beautiful. She also possessed ‘captivating manners, a well-cultivated mind and the most incorruptible virtue’. (W, 9) The dramatist John O’Keeffe (1747–1833) described how she and Whaley met:
[She] went to Dublin, on a visit, and with some female friends was one day walking about to see the fine buildings, as she had never been in town before. On viewing Stephen’s Green, they stopped before a house, with a large carved stone dormant lion over the door; as they were admiring this, a person standing near, asked them to walk in and look at the house; they consented, and he led them all over the apartments, which were furnished in the first style, but they saw no one but their polite guide. They were much pleased, and, expressing great admiration, were thanking