ditch his new friends – to no avail. This was the extent of the bearleader’s guidance and when Whaley accepted an invitation to dine with the Irishmen, Wray inexplicably failed to accompany him to the soiree. On arrival Whaley found that ‘a handsome company of female beauties’ were present and with their encouragement he drank so much wine ‘that before the dessert was introduced the glasses seemed to dance before me. Nothing would then satisfy them but we must drink champagne out of pint rummers, which soon completed the business.’ Getting a gambler drunk was and is among the oldest tricks in the book and with Whaley now ‘in a proper state for them to begin their operations’ his ‘friends’ proposed that they gamble. Within a short time they had extracted no less than £14,800 from him, ‘exclusive of my ready money, carriage, jewels, etc. I know not why they even stopped here; for I was in such a state that they might have stript me of my whole fortune.’ (W, 21)
Still just 18 years old, Whaley had been efficiently and remorselessly defrauded by two of the most predatory sharpers he ever had the misfortune to encounter. He immediately drew up a bill instructing his banker in Dublin to pay the amount, but even in his drunken state he must have known it would be returned protested, which it was in due course. With his allowance and any monies he had obtained from Faulkner long since spent, there seemed to be little hope of his raising the huge sum needed to pay his ‘friends’. But soon an opportunity to do so seemed to present itself, in the form of a mad scheme to abduct a wealthy young heiress.
3
WILD SCHEMES
Even as he reeled from the worst gambling loss he had ever suffered, Whaley somehow got his hands on a sum of money: two thousand louis d’ors (around £2,000), possibly advanced by Faulkner, to whom he may have written and given a hint of what had happened. If so, he swore him to secrecy. Under no circumstances were his mother and stepfather to be told and indeed they would not find out for several more weeks. Whaley used some of the £2,000 to clear his less significant debts: the lavish parties he had thrown in Lyons had not paid for themselves. The remainder fell well short of what he owed the Irishmen, but they were not deterred and proposed that he go to London ‘where, upon my fortune being made known, I should find no difficulty in getting my bills discounted to any amount I thought proper’. (W, 22) If he would do this, they promised, they would halve the amount of the debt. There was just one catch: one of them, John Ryan,1 would accompany him.
Wray advised against the London trip but Whaley dismissed the older man’s protestations and agreed to the plan.2 Wray had not been much of a bearleader. Having given Whaley little in the way of guidance in Auch and the spa resorts of the Pyrenees, he had failed to protect him from being monumentally defrauded in Lyons. Admittedly, Whaley had not been the easiest pupil. Headstrong and impulsive, he had refused to listen to sensible advice or be swayed in his resolutions, however foolish. But by allowing him to go unaccompanied to London, Wray was exposing him to whatever further machinations the swindlers might choose to employ. With Ryan in tow, Whaley set out for Paris. He spent long enough in the city to have a fling with ‘an intriguante … whose business it was to entrap young men by such artifices, in which the courtezans are much more expert … than they are in London’. The lady knew her business well, and after Whaley had spent ‘a most delicious time’ in her company she informed him that she needed a large sum to settle a gambling debt. Ignoring his own precarious financial situation he handed her £500.3 To be fleeced twice in such a short space of time looked like carelessness, and the episode would take its toll on more than just his purse. Following this latest debacle he and Ryan continued on to London, arriving there around the middle of May 1784.
This was to be Whaley’s first extended stay in the British capital. Home to some 700,000 people, it was a massive city by the standards of the time and as notorious for its poverty and squalor as it was famous for its wealth and elegance. With money still in his pocket (though he was going through it fast), Whaley avoided the squalor and stayed in the West End, home to luminaries like the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Devonshire. He checked into the Royal Hotel on St James’s Street4 while Ryan, determined to keep his prey within arm’s reach, took lodgings just up the road on Albemarle Street. Somehow, Whaley had to raise the money needed to get the sharper off his back. Almost certainly his first recourse was Leslie Grove, an Irish merchant-turned-banker based at 4 Crosby Square in Bishopsgate.5 Grove was friendly with Wray and had managed finances for Whaley’s family in the past, but getting the required sum out of him proved more difficult than anticipated. Although the banker would have been well aware that the young man stood to inherit a large fortune, he either could or would not advance the money: probably he did not want to do so without first conferring with Whaley’s relatives.
His attempts to get hold of the money elsewhere came to nothing. But soon afterwards he received a proposition that seemed to promise an end to his troubles. A man had arrived from Paris with a message from a Miss Duthrey, an heiress who had been confined in a convent there. Claiming to having heard of Whaley while he was in Paris, she had written asking him to rescue her. ‘From what I have heard of your character I have conceived the flattering hope that you will exert your utmost endeavours to deliver me from this captivity.’ The letter-bearer said that he was married to the heiress’s governess ‘and that if I would go back he and the governess had agreed to let me carry off Miss Duthrey’. Always susceptible to flattery, Whaley was ready to believe that the heiress was ‘in love with me who she never saw’. He doubtless saw himself a knight-errant about to save a distressed maiden, but what really attracted him was the young woman’s enormous inheritance: a lump sum of £100,000 along with an annual income of £12,000.6 As a proof of her gratitude, Miss Duthrey avowed, she would ‘be happy to lay myself and [my] fortune at your feet’. (W, 27) If Whaley could but get her to Ireland, they would be free to marry, he would have untold wealth and his troubles would be at an end.
He told Ryan, who was ‘in raptures at the prospect of such a good fortune, and confirmed me in the design of repairing immediately to Paris’. With only ten guineas now left to his name, Whaley turned to Grove to obtain money for the journey. He was surprised when, instead of rebuffing him, the banker joined enthusiastically in the scheme. He promised to supply the required finance and even offered to accompany Whaley to Paris. Grove’s lack of caution in this matter seems extraordinary, but he was credulous and generous to a fault.7 ‘Without guile himself, he suspected none in others.’ (W, 29) Even when Miss Duthrey’s messenger absconded with £150 he had borrowed from Grove, ostensibly in order to pay a creditor, the banker was not deterred. But just as they were about to set out for France, Whaley found that his skin had broken out in an unpleasant rash.8 In return for his money the Parisian courtesan had given him his first dose of the pox (syphilis).9 As a popular rhyme put it,
All alone, yet in Her Lap,
The Temple Beau may get a Clap,
Where, Pox’d, & Poxing, they shall own
The Pains of Love, are Pains alone.10
Whaley felt too unwell to go outdoors, let alone contemplate another trip to France, but he and Grove decided to press ahead with the plan regardless. Grove hired a French-speaking lawyer to deal with the legalities and left for Paris, ‘determined to carry [Miss Duthrey] off and bring her to Ireland’.11
***
Even as he languished in his sickbed Whaley was conscious of Ryan watching him with hawklike vigilance ‘lest I should slip through his fingers’. (W, 30) It was then that he made his first sensible move for weeks and wrote to his stepfather John Richardson to tell him how things stood. ‘You will I dare say be much surprized to hear from me from London’, he began. Richardson would have been even more surprised at the sorry sequence of events that had brought him there. Whaley admitted that while gambling in Lyons he had made ‘a very considerable and serious loss’, though he did not dare to mention the amount, and confessed to having ‘very unfortunately … got poxed’. In an attempt to soften the bad news he proceeded to reveal ‘the good’: his planned abduction of and marriage to Miss Duthrey and the financial windfall he believed would accompany it. ‘I am getting rich fast,’ he assured Richardson, ‘and if I was perfectly so could set out for Ireland but must hear from these [i.e. Grove and the lawyer] from Paris first … I just leave it