4). Finely attired in a red coat and pink waistcoat, he stands with one hand on his hip, staring resolutely from the canvas. His face is well-nourished, slightly pudgy even, with the expression of a confident young gentleman readily embracing his life of wealth and privilege. But there is also a certain wildness in his blue-eyed gaze, as if he were liable to do something unwarranted and unpredictable at any time. Like the excitable adolescent he was, Whaley was enthusiastic about the new prospects and experiences that foreign travel would offer him. His grandfather proposed to send him off with a yearly allowance of £500, later increased to £600. This sum would have been sufficient to maintain a prudent tourist, but not a young man eager to be let loose on the world.
His mother trusted that his bearleader would provide wise and strict supervision. For this role she settled on an army veteran named William Wray, ‘who had been recommended to her by some persons of distinction in Ireland’. (W, 11) The son of a County Donegal landowner, Wray had served as a lieutenant captain in the Thirty-ninth Foot, an Irish regiment that spent long periods stationed abroad. This old soldier with a penchant for books and smelling salts had spent much of his life on the continent and seemed a suitable individual to oversee Whaley’s tour.43 But had Anne looked more closely into his past she might have had second thoughts. Wray was a good-natured man but he was not good at managing money. In the army he had found his officer’s salary insufficient to support his lifestyle and had had to sell his commission to pay off his debts. As well, he was in bad health – the result of youthful overindulgence – and he lacked the ‘firmness of character necessary to superintend the conduct of a young man’. (W, 11) Wray hardly seemed a model of prudence and discretion. As a contemporary writer put it, he ‘was supposed to be a fit person to undertake the direction of young Whaley’s studies. It soon however appeared that the tutor had not the ability.’44
It was arranged that Bernard Ward would accompany Whaley to Bath, where they would rendezvous with Wray. The young grand tourist and his bearleader would then leave for Paris, where the grand tour would commence. But neither Anne nor Ward nor Wray could have anticipated the series of disasters that would unfold in the course of Whaley’s travels. He set out brimming with energy and optimism, but he would return a year and a half later distressed and disarrayed, having abandoned his tutor and endured a remarkable series of misfortunes that left him physically shattered and thousands of pounds in debt.
2
THE GRAND TOUR
Ward and his grandson arrived in Bath sometime in November or early December 1782. This was one of Whaley’s first trips out of Ireland and while he had little time to admire the famous spa town’s elegant streets and ancient remains, he knew he would soon visit more exotic places. He seems to have been impressed to meet Wray, with the genial old soldier perhaps regaling him with tales of derring-do from his days in the army. As they were stepping into their coach to depart a thought struck Ward and he stopped them for a final word. ‘Mr. Wray my G[ran]d. Sons allowance is five hundred,’ he reminded him. ‘But should you go beyond [this] weel suppose it was laid out properly and your bills shall be honoured.’ The old man did not know it, but he was opening the first crack in the floodgates. Whaley would not be of age for another four years but already he was musing on how to get hold of and spend his inheritance. ‘I know [I’ll] have a good fortune and a good deal of ready money [which] I have found out is in my disposal should any thing happen between this and that time.’1
Soon afterwards Wray and Whaley reached Paris. The French capital was a popular and attractive destination on the grand tour, offering ‘an enormous range of cultural and social activities that tourists could participate in, an active artistic life, and a large number of splendid sights’.2 While these no doubt interested Whaley, he was also keen to sample the city’s other attractions. One evening Wray went alone to the theatre, returning later to find his pupil in the arms of a prostitute. Without taking much notice, the older man went straight to bed. The next morning Whaley faced Wray with ‘all the awkward bashfulness attendant on a first offence’ but was surprised to find him ‘treating the matter as a bagatelle. He told me that the love of the fair sex was a natural passion, particularly at my time of life, and concluded by giving me some general cautions respecting the prudence to be observed and the choices to be made in those connexions’.3 Wray’s relaxed attitude set the tone of the relationship, but in time Whaley would find that this laid-back approach was not to his advantage.
At the end of December they relocated to Auch in the south of France where Whaley was to learn French and refine his riding, dancing and fencing skills. Boasting an imposing gothic cathedral, the ancient Gascon town is sited prominently on an escarpment overlooking the River Gers. Visiting it in 1787 the agriculturist Arthur Young found Auch to be ‘almost without manufactures or commerce, and … supported chiefly by the rents of the country’. Farmsteads were scattered throughout the surrounding countryside instead of being gathered in towns, as elsewhere in France.4 This rustic region may have seemed a strange place for Whaley to work on refining his character, but Wray had reasons of his own for choosing it: he had once lived in Auch and had many friends there who welcomed him and his young charge with open arms. ‘This place is Mr Wrays home,’ Whaley observed, ‘and the people here of the first rank quite court him … by which means I will get into the best company.’ He continued to take more than a passing interest in the opposite sex. His experience with the prostitute had probably been his first sexual encounter, and though initially bashful he soon became more confident. Whaley did not care for the appearance of most of the Auch women, who were ‘as yellow as saffron’ and, he thought, ‘the uglyest creatures I ever saw’. Yet he found them ‘nevertheless very ingageing[.] they have a great deal of wit and are very agreeable’. He did find a few of the girls pretty. One in particular caught his eye: the 20-year-old niece of the Archbishop of Auch, who invited him to attend to mass with her. ‘I would you may be sure have been glad to go,’ he wrote to Faulkner, ‘but unfortunately [on] the day appointed I was seized so violently with the tooth ach[e] I really thought I should have dyed.’5
It turned out that Whaley had to have a tooth pulled. It was no doubt an uncomfortable procedure: eighteenth-century dentistry could be excruciating. A couple of years later his lawyer Robert Cornwall complained of being ‘in the greatest torture these three days with a pain in my jaw, I went yesterday to have one of my teeth drawn, but the fellow has left the stump behind after cutting away great part of my gum and at this moment [I] am in great agony’.6 Whaley’s dentist was not so ham-fisted, but it seems that he impressed upon his patient the fashionable notion that teeth could be transplanted from one individual to another. Keen to find replacements, Whaley ‘gave three guineas to a peasant for one of his that fitted and it was put in the place of mine immediately and I am in hopes it will do. In a day or two I am to get another put in as soon as the one is fast.’7 But he was to be disappointed. Teeth cannot be transplanted and the ones he got from the peasant must have fallen out soon afterwards.
Despite his dental issues Whaley was not long in making himself at home in Auch, where he rented a stylish house and set himself up with servants, horses and dogs. He also acquired residences in several nearby towns, alternating between them as it suited him. Wray’s hands-off approach to his pupil’s tuition suited both parties and for a while they lived together amicably. ‘I am very happy with Mr. Wray,’ Whaley declared. ‘He is a real gentleman.’8 But in time they started living apart. ‘I found that we generally agreed better asunder, and therefore his visit at one of my residences was always a signal for me to remove to the other.’ (W, 13) Wray, in any case, had other things to occupy his mind. Whaley had noticed that in Auch women would ‘come lepping into Mr Wrays room before he is well out of bed in the morning and taulk pollyticks for two hours’.9 It is not clear whether talking ‘pollyticks’ was a code for something else, but in any event it was not long before the bearleader took up with a female companion.
***
As time went on Whaley found his funds running low. The rentals on his houses and his other outgoings could not be maintained on an allowance of £600 a year and in June 1783 he had to undertake a costly excursion. His tutor was ailing and so, ‘for my amusement and for poor Wrays health’, they travelled to the Pyrenean town of Bagnères de Luchon, famous for its thermal baths and medicinal waters. Bagnères was ‘one of the