One of the bedrooms looked out onto the back yard and stables and beyond that a green area known as Lord Clonmell’s Lawn (now the Iveagh Gardens). This may have been where Tom slept as a child. Over a hundred years later it was the bedchamber of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.27
It was unlikely that Anne would stay a widow. She was still young, attractive and fashionable and, as befitting a lady of her station, turned herself out in fine gowns and dresses, among them a Latin gown which she wore with a blond stomacher and ‘sleeve knots with French flowers’.28 More than a few gentlemen must have had their heads turned by this beautiful and wealthy widow and it was only a matter of time before she settled on a new husband. He turned out to be John Richardson, the son of a County Derry rector and a member of the Royal Dublin Society. A kind-hearted and affable man who would later enter politics as MP for Newtown Limavady, Richardson was the same age as Anne and seemed disposed to be a good stepfather to her children. They married at the end of 1770. It was a joyful union. ‘You have no notion how happy I am,’ Anne wrote to Faulkner a few years later, ‘and it is not at all extraordinary that it shou[l]d be so, I am blest with the very best husband upon earth’.29
Yet she also suffered tragedy. On 12 August 1772 her eldest son, Richard Chapel Whaley Junior, died. He was 10 years old. We do not know what occasioned his passing but it must have caused his mother and siblings great sorrow. Yet for the next oldest brother, Tom, the event had special significance. Under the terms of his father’s will, he had only stood to inherit leasehold lands in County Armagh. But now that he was the eldest surviving son he was also entitled to the extensive Carlow estates and the Dublin properties including, if he outlived Anne, the house on Stephen’s Green.30 The annual rental income from the Whaley estates came to £6,876 and Tom also stood to inherit the lion’s share of his father’s personal fortune of £43,630, which earned over £2,500 per annum in interest.31 His mother and grandfather did not tell him the amount of his inheritance but he knew it was very large and henceforth he would wait impatiently for the day when this wealth would pass into his hands. This certainly spurred some of the extravagance and recklessness he manifested during his teens. We will never know if he would have led a more prudent life had his brother survived – what we know of his temperament suggests he would not have – but if nothing else he would have had less wealth to squander.
Around the middle of 1773 Anne went to live with Richardson in Ulster. She seems to have brought her daughters with her, leaving her three surviving sons in the Faulkners’ care. Even though Richard junior’s death the previous year must still have been on her mind, this was a blissful time for Anne and her new husband. For most of the ten years that she had been married to Richard Chapel Whaley her days had been consumed with bearing and raising children. Now, happily married to Richardson, she was enjoying new-found freedom and ‘better health … than I have done for several years’. One suspects that she was also enjoying a break from rearing her boys. Tom, John and William were now aged 7, 6 and 5 respectively and must have been a handful. At the same time she missed them and at the end of the year she wrote to Sam Faulkner asking him to bring them to spend a month with her the following April or May.32 During the summer months she and Richardson again took up residence at the house on St Stephen’s Green, which was reportedly ‘frequented by the first people in the kingdom … the proprietors are not only very rich, but have great interest [i.e. influence]’.33 When Anne and her husband were absent, Faulkner had to keep the Whaley boys amused. Tom had a particular interest in exotic animals and Faulkner found himself bringing him to see the ‘wild beasts’: probably a private menagerie, as there were no zoological gardens in Dublin at the time.34 Luckily, he did not have to keep him entertained indefinitely. The time had come for him to be sent away to school.
Portarlington in the Queen’s County had been renowned for its boarding schools since the early eighteenth century. Most of them were run by Huguenots who had come to Ireland fleeing persecution in France. A large community of these immigrants had settled in the small town in the Irish midlands, where they filled a gap in the market for the education of upper-class Protestant children. By the middle of the century the number of schools in Portarlington ran well into double figures, with nobility and gentry from all over the country sending their children there to be educated. Tom probably attended Robert Hood’s school, a boarding school where students learned writing, grammar, arithmetic, English, French, classics and dancing; or the Rev. Richard Baggs’s public Latin school, ‘from which many gentlemen of rank and fortune have entered the College [i.e. Trinity College Dublin] with particular credit’. Baggs’s school taught writing, arithmetic, mathematics, geography, drawing, music and dancing.35
The writing master trained his pupils well, as is evident from the large neat calligraphy of a letter Tom wrote to Faulkner from Portarlington on 21 October 1775. By then his brothers had joined him at school, but he missed his mother and asked Faulkner ‘please to let me know’ when he expected her to arrive in Dublin as ‘she told me in her last letter, that she would send for us then’.36 But Tom was no shrinking violet, homesick and longing to be reunited with his loving mother. His thoughts wandered far beyond the bounds of home or school. Richard Baggs’s school taught ‘geography both antient and modern, as also the use of the globes’37 and if he did go there, Tom would have paid attention during geography class as he had started drawing maps of exotic foreign regions. Earlier that year he had completed a map of southern Africa which he presented to his grandfather on 25 June (‘dedicated to Mr. Ward by his dutiful gd. son Thomas Whaley’). Neatly and fairly accurately drawn, it is an impressive piece of cartography for a child of his age and was probably copied from a map by the London cartographer Herman Moll, which it closely resembles.38 Tom planned to have ‘a good many maps’ ready to show to his mother and prepared several others, including ‘a very large map of Spain and Portugal and the Mediterranean Sea’.39 It was a formative time for the young boy. As he approached his tenth birthday he felt the stirring of an adventurous spirit and a burning curiosity about the wider world. Doubtless he hoped to visit at least some of the places he mapped, and while he would never make it as far as Africa, his early understanding of the geography of the Mediterranean would serve him well later in life.
Tom may still have been at his cartographic efforts over two years later: early in 1778 he wrote to Faulkner asking him to send him ‘a couple of small pencil[s] and two or three brushes’. By this stage he and his brothers had moved to a new school, possibly in Armagh. Tom also asked after Faulkner’s nephew Sam, who had been unwell.40 It did not bode well. The Faulkner boy’s health seems to have been poor and in September 1782 he died. The list of expenses for his funeral makes for poignant reading: a shroud sheet and cap, an oak coffin covered with black cloth, a hearse and horses to bring the body to St Peter’s Church in Dublin, followed by a mourning coach. Tom later wrote to Faulkner to commiserate: ‘one could not say but he [had] as good a life as I [I’ll] drop this subject … excuse me for calling to your mind a thing that must have distressed you very much but as he is happy I hope a manly firmness has reconsiled you’.41 Having witnessed his own brother’s passing ten years before Tom was well acquainted with the inescapable reality of death. Now, as he entered his late teens, he himself was starting to make his first moves towards manhood. His schooldays were over, and he was about to get his first taste of the wider world he had imagined so often while carefully marking out his maps.
***
‘When I had attained my sixteenth year, my mother thought proper to send me to France in order to finish my education.’ (W, 10–11) With this nonchalant statement Tom recalled the most formative and turbulent period of his early life: his grand tour. Travel on the continent was reckoned an indispensable part of the education of the sons of wealthy gentlemen. It was intended to broaden their minds, enhance their social accomplishments and enable them to acquire a range of useful contacts. But they did not always behave like the gentlemen they aspired to be.42 Critics of the grand tour argued that the young men who went on it were too immature to appreciate its benefits and had too many opportunities for drinking, gambling and self-indulgence. Yet most felt that the benefits outweighed the dangers and hoped that under the guidance of their travelling tutors, known as ‘bearleaders’, grand tourists could avoid these pitfalls. As Tom Whaley’s seventeenth birthday approached, his mother, assisted by his grandfather Bernard Ward, made arrangements to dispatch him to France.
It was around this time that Whaley sat