liked all she saw; with great pleasure she said she did. ‘Then, madam,’ he replied, ‘this house and all it contains is mine, and if you wish to make it yours also, you may have the house and the master of it;’ – making her a low bow. A marriage followed.9
O’Keeffe claimed to have had the story from Anne’s brother and it has the ring of truth, apart from one detail: Whaley had not yet started building the house with the lion over the door. When he met Anne he was living in ‘prince-like magnificence’ at No. 75 (now No. 85) St Stephen’s Green and this must have been the dwelling he showed her around. Designed by the German architect Richard Castle, this stone-fronted townhouse is now part of Newman House, an administrative centre of University College Dublin. It has been carefully restored and boasts a lavishly decorated interior. Its front parlour, the Apollo Room, has magnificent stucco ornamentation, while the Great Room or Saloon is regarded as one of Ireland’s finest eighteenth-century interiors.10 Whaley must have seemed a decidedly eligible widower and Anne was sufficiently impressed to overcome whatever reservations she had about marrying a man forty years her senior. For his part he was besotted with his bride-to-be, who he described as ‘my soul’s darling’. The marriage took place in February 1759, just three months after Catherine’s death, and Anne settled into the role of dutiful wife. Her son would later praise the ‘undeviating rectitude of her conduct towards my father, notwithstanding the disparity of their age, which would have been sufficient to have excited the malevolence of slander against her, had she given the least opening for it, by any levity in her behaviour’. (W, 9)
The marriage was certainly successful if judged by the number of offspring it produced. The year 1760 saw the birth of a daughter, Mary Susanna, followed two years later by a son, named Richard Chapel after his father. Whaley was reported to be so delighted at the birth of his son and heir that he made his wife a present of £10,000, sending his banker a note in the form of a piece of doggerel:
Good Mr. Latouche,
Prithee open your pouch,
and pay my soul’s darling
Ten thousand pounds sterling …11
With the arrival of a further two daughters, Anne and Frances Sophia in 1763 and 1764 respectively, Whaley decided that his present residence was too small to meet the needs of his growing family.12 He set about building a new house on an adjoining plot of land. It was to be a huge mansion with five bays and four storeys over a rusticated basement and when completed it would dwarf No. 75 (see Plate 1).13 Over the portico Whaley installed a lead statue of a lion by John Van Nost II (c.1710–1780), then Ireland’s leading sculptor. Seemingly just awoken from its slumber, it gazes sombrely across at St Stephen’s Green.14 The mansion was similar in design to another great Dublin townhouse, Charlemont House, although its exterior was not as elegant. The interior was a different matter. Whaley hired skilled artists to produce some of the finest stuccowork in eighteenth-century Dublin. The stucco decoration on the walls and ceiling of the main staircase is breathtaking (see Plate 3). Many of the rooms also feature fine stuccoed ceilings, and in the ground floor drawing room there are two small portrait heads above the central wall panels, possibly representations of Richard Chapel Whaley himself.15
When not busy overseeing the construction and decoration of his palace Whaley concerned himself with the management of his estates, for which he relied heavily on his ‘honest’ and ‘faithfull’ servant and land agent, Samuel Faulkner. At this time Faulkner and his wife Catherine were living with the Whaleys, but they would later move into a place of their own a few doors down at No. 84 (now No. 96).16 Born around 1721 near Cookstown, County Tyrone, Faulkner was a no-nonsense Ulsterman known for his blunt language. On one occasion, suffering from diarrhoea, he claimed to have been ‘not less than 13 times at stool … at night[.] this would kill an elephant’.17 Hard-working and meticulous, he also acted as agent for several other landowners and kept copies of all his correspondence.18 Though his life was marred by tragedy – his wife and one of his nephews predeceased him – he was kindly, generous and well-liked. But Faulkner must also have had a ruthless edge to him; otherwise he would not have been able to perform the work of a land agent: letting property, collecting rents and arrears and, occasionally, carrying out evictions. In March 1765 Whaley gave Faulkner power of attorney to ‘receive all moneys rents and arrears of rents’ that were due to him while also instructing him to recover some property belonging to him ‘by any means without blood shed or burning a house … do the thing with spiritt and I will support it’. The fact that Whaley referred to ‘blood shed’ and ‘burning’ at all suggests that he and Faulkner may have used these methods in the past.19 They had known one another a long time and their relationship was one of friends rather than employer and employee.20 For the Whaley children, who knew Faulkner from birth, he seemed more like an affectionate uncle than their father’s agent.
***
On 15 December 1765, several months after work had begun on the new house, Anne gave birth to her fifth child. Thomas Chapel Whaley was baptised exactly two months later at St Peter’s Church on Aungier Street.21 Known to his family as Tom, this fair-haired blue-eyed boy captured his mother’s heart, more so perhaps than any of his siblings, but she had little notion of the extraordinary life that lay ahead of him or the worry he would cause her. Nor was he the last child she would bear. Over the next couple of years a further two boys, John and William, arrived. Perhaps sensing that his family was now complete, Richard Chapel Whaley commissioned a sculptor, Patrick Cunningham, to commemorate them in an unusual portrait: a wax bas-relief intended for display on a chimneypiece in the new house (see Plate 2).22 Here the ageing father appears as a kindly patriarch surrounded by his loving wife and children. He gazes devotedly at Anne as she tends to the seventh and youngest child, William, seated on her knee. To the left the eldest daughter, Susanna, sits seemingly preoccupied at a small desk, while to the right the eldest son, Richard, tugs at his father’s sleeve, eager to show him something or involve him in a game. Beside him the second daughter Anne is dancing, anticipating her later career as a socialite. At the extreme right the third daughter, Sophia, plays with some fruit. Beside her the toddlers, 2-year-old Tom and 1-year-old John, play on the floor. Both are attired as girls: whether male or female, infants were dressed in floor-length gowns worn over stiffened bodices or stays. It was not until between the ages of 4 and 7 that boys were ‘breeched’, i.e. given male clothing. Tom holds a rattle in his hands, an inauspicious symbol of the ‘play’ he would devote himself to in later years: gambling.
Richard Chapel Whaley took great joy in the beautiful wife and children that came to him so late in life, but he did not enjoy their company for more than a few years. By the end of 1768 he had fallen ill and the following February he died.23 After he had been buried in the Whaley family vault in Syddan, County Meath, his widow returned to St Stephen’s Green. Not long afterwards the new house was completed under Faulkner’s direction and the family moved into it. Now aged around 28, Anne faced bringing up her seven children without the support of a husband. Yet she was better placed than most widows to do so. She could rely on the help of the Faulkners (Catherine Faulkner acted as her maid) and her father, the Rev. Bernard Ward, who was guardian of the fortunes of the Whaley children. She also had the money to employ as many servants as she needed.24 Many years later, Tom commended her for bringing her children up ‘in the paths of religion and virtue … whatever follies any of us may have committed, the cause could never be imputed to her’. (W, 9)
Populated by a large family and a considerable staff of servants, the newly built mansion on St Stephen’s Green must have been a lively place. The children would have played in the stately rooms and corridors, causing mischief and getting in the servants’ way, while their mother or one of the Faulkners watched over and perhaps chided them. Over a century later, in his autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce hinted at feeling Tom Whaley’s presence in these hallways: ‘The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful … was it because he had heard that in Buck Whaley’s time there was a secret staircase there?’25 In the dining room, a large chamber with a richly stuccoed ceiling at the rear of the house, the family were served by a posse of attendants. French cuisine was in vogue and Anne and the older children may have tucked into a variety of exotic dishes such as lambs’ ears ragoût, fricassée of frogs and badger flambé.26 If so this influenced Tom’s culinary tastes as he employed a number