of the Duthrey ploy and Richardson’s presence in London meant that John Ryan’s chances of getting money out of Whaley were fast diminishing. In a last-ditch effort he seems to have reduced his demand to £1,000 but found he could not obtain even this. On 13 July he wrote requesting the money urgently as he had ‘occasion for it immediately and conceives it must be very easy for Mr Whaley to get it from Mr Richardson’.21 Richardson, however, refused to give him a penny and took him to task ‘for the atrociousness of his conduct in pillaging a young man and enticing him away from his tutor’. (W, 32) Though the criticism was well warranted, Ryan saw fit to call Richardson to account for it and a duel might have ensued had some unknown third parties not made peace between the antagonists. Whaley, meanwhile, slowly recovered. By the end of July he was well enough to set out for Ireland.
***
On 30 July Whaley set out for Holyhead22 and soon afterwards he reached Dublin, pox-scarred and all but penniless. On the whole it was not surprising that his grand tour had turned out thus. He had been barely 3 years old when his father died and had lacked a firm hand to instil discipline and responsibility. His mother doted on him and neither she, Richardson nor his grandfather Bernard Ward (who died before he returned) seems to have done much to rein him in. While Samuel Faulkner had taken care of Whaley as a child, he was not his guardian and he lacked the authority to refuse his demands or check his wilder impulses. William Wray had been vested with this authority but had been incapable of exerting it. As a result, Whaley had all but gone off the rails during his grand tour and was lucky to survive it. He had shown himself to be volatile, careless and irresponsible, but after all he was still only 18 and perhaps he had learned something from the experience.
On his return Whaley was ‘received and treated like the Prodigal Son’ (W, 33), no great surprise given his mother’s partiality to him. She hoped he would open a new leaf and ‘let unnecessary superfluitys alone, not only now but during your whole life … prove your self a man of sound principles and good sense, setting such a value on every thing, as a man of success ought, and not letting your self be carried away by fashion or the very natural love of pleasure inherent almost in every young breast’.23 No doubt such advice filled Whaley with good intentions, but only time would show if he would take the lessons of his grand tour to heart and henceforth live a responsible life. The events of early 1785 seemed to suggest he would. Like many other young men he was attracted by the idea of a political career and the prestige and opportunities that went with it. In February 1785 he stood for election to Parliament and was returned as MP for Newcastle, County Dublin.24 This encouraged him ‘to apply myself, for some time, to the study of the constitution, laws and commerce of the country, with that degree of attention and assiduity, which so important and arduous a pursuit required’. (W, 276) Standing on the cusp of manhood, he seemed to have acquired a new sense of purpose and responsibility.
Whaley had chosen an exciting time to enter politics. Dublin was the administrative and parliamentary capital of Ireland, boasting a parliament house that was architecturally far more impressive than that at Westminster.25 For a long time the Irish Parliament had been technically subordinate to the British and its legislation had had to be approved in Westminster before it could be enacted, but in 1782 the Irish Parliament had won a degree of legislative independence and over the years that followed various groups clamoured for further political change. Political reformers known as ‘patriots’ angled for greater political independence, while Catholics, having seen some of the penal laws repealed, pursued further concessions. Whaley, like his future brother-in-law, the Attorney General John Fitzgibbon, was more concerned with preserving the British connection and the authority of the Crown. But his fledgling career in parliament never took off because he, like a number of other MPs, had little or no interest in politics. Mostly avoiding the proceedings of the House of Commons, they spent their time pursuing pleasure. Those with whom Whaley socialised included Arthur Saunders Gore (known as Lord Sudley), George Frederick Nugent (styled Lord Delvin), and the dashing revolutionary-to-be Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The dissolute life he threw himself into in the company of these gentlemen threatened to extinguish his political career ‘and every other serious and laudable application’. (W, 276)
***
‘Nothing can be so gay as Dublin is,’ a correspondent insisted in 1782. ‘The Castle twice a week, the opera twice a week, with plays, assemblies and suppers to fill up the time.’26 Certainly, if one had money the city had a lot to offer. There were two fashionable districts, one centred around Rutland Square (now Parnell Square) to the north of the Liffey, and the other around St Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square to the south. Both were known for their streets of fine terraced houses and their wealthy inhabitants, who enthusiastically pursued comfort, fashion and pleasure. Whaley resided in the house his father had built on St Stephen’s Green. Technically the property was owned by his mother, but he stood to inherit it and seems to have treated it like it was his own, at least while he was living there.27 Although he had not yet come into his legacy (and would not until 15 December 1786) he was known to be one of the city’s richest young gentlemen and he did not mind flaunting his wealth. Whaley maintained an extensive domestic staff, including a coachman, footmen, a groom, a nurse, a French cook and a sedan chair manned by two chairmen. He kept a pack of hunting dogs and a small pet dog, a black and yellow female terrier named Vixen.28 He must have been a reasonably decent master as his coachman, Denis Lennard, later declared that ‘there is no gentellman in Ir[e]land I would [serve] before my master as he was so good to me when I was with him’.29
Whaley’s pastimes, normal enough for a young upper-class male, included attending the theatre, music, drinking, gambling, hunting and yachting.30 The last of these became a passion. Like many other young gentlemen Whaley liked racing boats along the coast, especially when wagers were involved. Yet he also had a much grander project in mind. ‘I conceived the strange idea of performing, like [Captain] Cook, a voyage round the world; and no sooner had it got possession of my imagination, than I flew off at a tangent … in order to put my plan in execution.’ (W, 34) The impracticality of sailing around the globe must have been pointed out to Whaley and he modified his plan, but it remained an ambitious one. In August 1785 Anne Richardson caught wind that he, ‘tho’ he has not as yet told it to me himself’, was ‘on a very wild scheme of building a ship to take him up the Mediterranean’. He intended to sail ‘through the Straights of Gibraltar … visiting all the noted places bordering on the Mediterranean sea, whether in Europe, Africa, or Asia’.31 Of course, to realise this dream Whaley needed money and he decided he would borrow £1,500 from his mother or his sister Anne, who had by then inherited her share of the Whaley fortune. His mother urged Samuel Faulkner to ‘try to put him off and shew him the impossibility of his getting the cash from us … or … his sister’. Tom pressed ahead regardless and by October he had hired a shipbuilder on the Isle of Wight to start building a yacht.32 The money problem now became more pressing, as he found that the tradesmen working on the ship were ‘calling every minuet for the amount of their bills and how to pay them he knew not … he then exclaimed of his own doings and said he had no one to blame but himself’. Faulkner found the money to pay some of the men,33 but further demands would inevitably follow.
The ship was not the only drain on Whaley’s finances. On one of his periodic trips to London he had visited a brothel and fallen for one of the girls, ‘a fille de chambre, who had not only the character of being chaste, but had actually remained so during three years service with her mistress’. Apparently Whaley had had to resort to ‘the assistance of a bank note and gold watch [to] beat her virtue out of the field … a circumstance which has made many believe, that she never before was offered what she esteemed an adequate price for it’.34 This girl was later depicted alongside Whaley in the Town and Country Magazine, a London society publication (see Plate 6). She may have been the woman he brought from London to Dublin to be his lady companion, as described in his memoirs. Her name was Harriet Heydon, and it is unlikely that she was ‘chaste’ as she was, or had been, a married woman. Though she was ‘neither distinguished for wit or beauty,’ she was not as aggressively greedy as other courtesans he had visited. (W, 33) Perhaps this was what attracted him. He lodged Harriet in a house he had rented on Holles Street and spent lavishly on her.35 This
