all over Europe and Whaley met many young Irish and English gentlemen. He soon found his money running away from him as he tried to keep up with them. ‘When they gave one a dinner, or supper [they] thought it odd if I did not entertain them in return, which I did and certainly did what was proper.’ Within a month he spent £150, a quarter of his allowance, accumulating large debts into the bargain. To add further pressure, his new friends declared themselves shocked ‘at the pittyfulness of my scanty allowance’.10
Whaley was convinced that his relatives were treating him shabbily. His allowance, he felt, did not reflect his status or his fortune. In late June he wrote to Samuel Faulkner asking him ‘if you think six hundred a year a compatency equal to my fortune and what a young man on his travels should have when within three years of being of age’. Faulkner, of course, did not decide the amount of Whaley’s allowance, but as his land agent he did have access to the income from his estates and the young man knew he was his best chance of getting money. Insisting that ‘I neither play [i.e. gamble] nor whore’ he asked Faulkner to send him £300 to offset the expenses of his horses, his munificence to the locals (‘a young man in a small town abroad is esteemed and respected principally by his gennerous manner of treating the inhabitants’), and his excursions to places like Bagnères ‘where the acquaintance may well merrit cultivation’. While admitting that he was fond of pleasure ‘as is natural at my age’, he reiterated that he had ‘not the least desire to play’.11 The young gentleman, it seemed, protested too much: probably he had already lost a fair bit of money gambling. Faulkner forwarded the requested amount, but it was insufficient to answer Whaley’s demands. He was also annoyed to find his tutor spending with abandon: ‘Mr. Wray instead of saveing his income to my knolege spends every farthing of it.’12 Meanwhile he discovered that in France debtors were not permitted to leave town until they had paid everything they owed. When some of his creditors stopped his phaeton (a lightly sprung open carriage, the eighteenth-century version of a sports car) in the street in front of several of his compatriots, from whom he borrowed the money to pay them, he was mortified. ‘Now sure,’ he reasoned, ‘every person of common sense must see the impropriety and bad polliticks of sending me abroad when I am not allowed sufficient to live like a gentleman.’ His letters to his mother contained similar protestations, which eventually had the desired effect: from April 1784 his allowance would be doubled to £1,200 a year.
Shortage of money was not the only trouble Whaley had to contend with. At some point during his stay in Bagnères his horse fell on top of him, bruising him so badly that he decided to move further into the Pyrenees to another spa town, Barèges, where ‘the waters are better for wounds’.13 Though he recovered from the injury he did not see fit to tone down his excessive lifestyle and soon he was engaging in ‘all the folly and extravagance peculiar to our countrymen abroad’. (W, 13) Some of it involved the opposite sex. After leaving Barèges to return to Auch, probably during the autumn of 1783, he started pursuing romantic intrigues in earnest.
On a visit to Tarbes, around forty miles from Auch, Whaley made the acquaintance of an aristocratic couple: Henri Louis de Rohan, Prince of Guéméné, and his wife Victoire-Armande. The pair had once stood at the glittering apex of Parisian society: Henri Louis belonged to a noble house that claimed descent from the dukes of Brittany, while his wife was a favourite of Marie Antoinette and had been governess to the royal children. In 1782 Henri Louis had ‘managed to set the entire nation in an uproar by playing the starring role in one of the country’s most resounding bankruptcies’.14 His wildly extravagant lifestyle had resulted in an astronomical debt of 33 million livres and he and his wife were forced to flee to the south of France. Whaley was a regular visitor to their chateau in Tarbes and became a particular favourite of Victoire-Armande. He learned that she was contemplating a match between him and a female relative he believed to be her daughter. ‘At first I looked upon this as a feint; as I had conceived the idea that the Princess did not regard me with indifference herself. But on her persisting in the proposal, I expressed my acknowledgment in the warmest terms.’ (W, 15) In fact, Victoire-Armande could not have proposed such a match: her only surviving daughter, Marie-Louise, was already married. It may be that the noblewoman actually suggested that Whaley marry a niece or other female relative. But Whaley’s relatives in Ireland were vehemently opposed to the idea on the basis that the two parties were of different religions and they instructed Wray to take the young man away from Auch as soon as possible. This might have proved difficult had Whaley not become caught up in another romantic entanglement. This one had a much more troubling outcome.
This affair arose out of his acquaintance with the young female cousin of an Auch nobleman he named only as the Count V—. Whaley’s efforts to seduce her ‘in a short time succeeded to the utmost extent of my wishes’ (W, 15), but things became more complicated when it transpired that the girl was pregnant. Hoping to hush the matter up Whaley tried to keep her concealed in his house ‘till such time as it might be thought proper for her to appear again in the world’. (W, 16) Unfortunately a local abbé discovered what had happened and lectured the young woman harshly. Whaley responded to this interference by subjecting the priest to a thrashing. This was an era when gentlemen frequently met perceived slights or insults with violence and Whaley, though still a minor, certainly considered himself a gentleman. Even so, to attack a priest was nothing if not reckless and the local magistrate arrested him and threw him into prison without even the formality of a trial. Luckily the Archbishop of Auch, who was friendly with Wray, intervened on his behalf and he was released. It afterwards transpired that the ‘abbé’ was no such thing. ‘This fellow only wore the dress of a Priest, and had never been ordained.’ (W, 17)
While this meant that Whaley would not be prosecuted for attacking a priest,15 it did not signal an end to his troubles. If it was shown that he had abducted a female he would face the full rigours of French law. Whaley managed to get the young woman away from Auch and to Montpellier, where she gave birth to a daughter. The child died not long afterwards and as soon as the unfortunate mother had recovered Whaley had her committed to the care of a religious order.16 Although she had joined willingly with him in their liaison, its outcome had destroyed her life as she knew it. For eighteenth-century females such experiences were not uncommon. The law offered women a degree of protection, but in general men used them as they saw fit and few gave much thought to female suffering. Whaley probably regarded the fate of his erstwhile lover as unfortunate but not much more than that. And while he no doubt regretted his daughter’s death, she was only the first of several children he would father out of wedlock. He was living in a man’s world and fast becoming an adept player in it.
Whaley had now been in France for around a year. In that time he had lurched fecklessly from mishap to misadventure but had come off relatively unscathed. He had survived a dangerous accident and a spell in prison and his debts, while significant, were not prohibitive.17 He had also managed to escape any lasting consequences from his ill-fated liaison. His letters home carefully avoided any mention of this affair but in one, probably written early in 1784, he hinted at it. Describing himself as ‘a quarrelsome dog’ (a possible reference to his thrashing of the ‘abbé’) he mentioned that he had ‘been such a wild fellow of late that I have neither heard nor wrote to any one’. He knew that the time was approaching for him to leave Auch. His sister Sophia and her husband Robert Ward, formerly MP for Wicklow, had moved to France after Ward failed to get returned in the election of 1783. Having already met them in Aix, Whaley decided to join them in Lyons, where they had relocated.18 It was there that his luck finally ran out.
***
Accompanied by Wray, who seems to have offered little in the way of guidance during the pregnancy crisis, Whaley set out for Lyons in May 1784. Unimpressed by the city’s attractions, he decided to make his own entertainment and footed the bill for ‘sumptuous entertainments’ for all and sundry. ‘Magnificent balls and suppers to the ladies, extravagant and expensive dinners to the gentlemen, succeeded each other in quick rotation.’ (W, 19) Lavish displays of this kind were bound to attract hangers-on and opportunists and before long Whaley took up with ‘a set of wild young men’ among whom were two Irish gentlemen.19 He was no doubt glad to make the acquaintance of these fellow countrymen and he enjoyed their company so much that before long they were inseparable.
Not long afterwards he received an anonymous note warning him that the men were a pair of swindlers who