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 to yourself to come over to me or not as you think it necessary … I shall be impatient to know how I am to act.’12 Richardson’s reaction to this bolt from the blue is not hard to imagine. Whaley’s evident naïveté and recklessness was not so surprising; after all he was still only 18. Much more worrying was the news that he was heavily in debt, dangerously ill and at the mercy of a ruthless swindler. As if his massive loss in France was not bad enough, he had also embroiled himself in a crazy scheme to abduct an heiress. Richardson knew he had no option but to leave for London at once and drag him back from the edge of the precipice.
When Richardson received the letter his wife was away in the spa town of Swanlinbar, County Cavan, attempting to cure an upset stomach and a dose of gout. When her son was in France he had written to her regularly, mentioning some of the debts he had racked up, but thus far this had caused her only mild concern. She informed Faulkner that ‘Toms demands will I fear be much higher now than we coud wish and yet what can you or I do.’ He had assured her he would not gamble again until he came of age and she blithely trusted that this would be the case: ‘God grant he may keep his resolution.’13 She then wore her pen ‘to an actual stump’ writing him a nine-page letter, the contents of which leave little doubt that he was her favourite son: ‘it is very good of you my dearest boy to write so constantly to me, your letters are the delight of my heart’. She urged him to ‘keep but your resolution with respect to play, and my anxietys about you will from this moment be at an end, except those which a doating mother must always feel when the darling of her heart is at such a distance’.14 Instead, Anne’s anxieties were about to increase. Soon she would discover not only that Whaley’s ‘demands’ were far greater than she thought, but also that he was dangerously ill.
Leslie Grove’s Paris mission did not go as hoped. When he and the lawyer arrived at the convent they presented the letter Whaley had received to the heiress and her governess. They, however, knew nothing about it: it was, unsurprisingly, a complete forgery. Miss Duthrey ‘burst into a violent fit of laughter in which she was joined by her companion, to the manifest confusion of the two adventurers, who … slunk away and made the best of their way back to London’. (W, 30) It later transpired that John Ryan and his associates had cooked up the whole story. Since Whaley had failed to raise any money in London, they had hoped to lure him back to France to get him arrested for the bill his banker had returned protested and ‘pursue their further operations and schemes on me with greater security’. (W, 31)
Whaley’s illness had saved him from this fate but it threatened to consign him to a worse one. With his condition deteriorating rapidly he had no option but to seek medical advice, even though the likely treatment was far from appealing. Many doctors treated syphilis using a method known as ‘salivation’, whereby sufferers took doses of mercury that not only poisoned them but also produced large amounts of black saliva.15 It is not known if Whaley’s physician, Cuthbert Potts of Pall Mall, used this method: he was after all said to be ‘skilful and humane in his profession’.16 But whatever treatment he employed, it was not to his patient’s liking and Whaley informed him that he would be seeking a second opinion. Offended, Potts replied that he was as well qualified as any physician in London to treat him ‘and had you treated me with the respect due to a gentleman who is in the practice of a liberal profession, surely I could never object to your consulting whome you pleased’.17 By this time Whaley was probably not in an entirely reasonable frame of mind. He would have found salivation, if he underwent it, both mentally and physically debilitating.18 Meanwhile he was still fending off the avaricious Ryan, who by now had been weaving webs around him for several weeks. Alone, vulnerable and lacking even Wray’s feeble guidance, he was in sore need of a friend. Richardson could not come soon enough.
Whaley had a high opinion of his stepfather, commending him as an ‘incomparable man … at once the tender husband, the warm friend and generous benefactor’. (W, 31) In a surviving portrait Richardson looks kindly and good-natured (see Plate 5) and indeed he seems to have been universally liked.19 The man that Anne esteemed as ‘the very best husband upon earth’ had proven himself a true friend to his stepchildren and she assured Tom that ‘were you his own son I am confident he coud not be more anxious for your welfare’.20 When Richardson finally reached London early in July, he and his stepson had not seen one another for over a year and a half and their reunion was an emotional one. ‘I was much afflicted at the sight of this sincere friend,’ Whaley confessed. Richardson’s first action was to bring him ‘to his lodging, where I should be better accommodated than at a public Hotel, and at the same time be at some distance from a society to whom I might impute the greatest part of my misfortunes’. (W, 32) As soon as he had lodged his stepson in a safer place, Richardson set about
