at the rate with which Whaley’s expenses and debts were piling up, his mother urged him to join her at Somerset (or Summerseat), a country house near Coleraine that her husband had inherited. ‘When we get him here we will not part with him again if we can possibly keep him here,’ she insisted. ‘I wish I knew how much money he has got or drawn for, in short how much he has expended … a very great deal I fear.’37 Whaley seems to have been reluctant to go, as this meant leaving Harriet in Dublin, but his mother was insistent and around the middle of November he arrived at Somerset. He would stay there for several weeks while the Richardsons distracted him with various amusements such as hunting and theatre.38 ‘We shall keep down his expenses as much as possible,’ Anne resolved, while admitting that it was ‘very hard to accomplish it for the money vanishes without my being able to find out how it goes’.39 This was not surprising: Whaley was secretly sending money to Harriet.40 By the New Year (1786) he was unable to stay away from her any longer and he returned to Dublin. Almost resignedly, Anne wrote to Faulkner asking him to ‘manage him as well as you can till I come’.41 While she knew he would continue spending money on Harriet she was probably more concerned about the cost of his ship and the wagers it would inevitably give rise to. By the summer of 1786 the vessel was ready to sail. She was commodious enough, with space below decks to accommodate a cabin and a ‘state room’,42 but how would she bear up on a lengthy sea voyage, namely the planned expedition to the Mediterranean? To try her out Whaley decided to sail to Milford Haven in Wales before pressing on to Brighton and Le Havre. Harriet, his brother John and his fellow MP Lord Sudley agreed to accompany him.43
Before they departed Faulkner’s nephew and clerk William Norwood sat down with Whaley to go through his accounts with ‘his boatmen, tradesmen &c I mean those that have done any work for the boat’. Unsurprisingly he had not kept track of his outgoings and Norwood estimated that he had paid the tradesmen £200 more than was owed. ‘I showed him clearly how much he was cheated. he seemed something troubled. and was satisfied it was so. but all that he said … was not to let on to Faulkner his mother or anyone for fear it should be knowen.’ No doubt they knew already and harboured serious misgivings about the mooted voyage to Le Havre. Whaley was down to his last 150 guineas, and Norwood did not believe there was ‘a farthing more remaining’ of £1,000 he had received ‘the other day’ – probably an advance of funds from his inheritance, secured through Faulkner.44 Anne was unwell and had reached the end of her patience with her son’s continual spending. ‘Her little fitt of sickness has altered her for the worse very much,’ Norwood observed. ‘She says she never will whilst she is Mr. Whaley’s guardian [i.e. the guardian of his inheritance] accept a bill of his that may be on acc[oun]t of his house or girl.’45
Norwood, for his part, could only dream of the kind of money Whaley was splurging. His father Jack had worked at the Faulkners’ linen bleaching yard near Cookstown, County Tyrone, where he lived in ‘a house built of mud … 42 feet long’.46 This was where William had grown up, a far cry from the magnificence of St Stephen’s Green. He knew that he and Whaley had little in common (‘moderate and immoderate youth are no companions’) and he was inclined to be sanctimonious, stating confidently that if he moved in ‘a higher sphere’ he would not be seduced into extravagance or do anything to ‘hurt and shame’ himself: ‘folly and disapation [dissipation] is a lesson I realy do not wish to learn’.47 Meanwhile he dismissed Harriet as Whaley’s ‘whore’. Yet it is not hard to feel some sympathy for Norwood. All he hoped was to someday improve his circumstances by obtaining a lease on a small farm, and he insisted that no one wished Whaley better than he did. The latter, for his part, did not look down on the humble clerk and invited him to dine with him on several occasions. ‘I did not wish to go oftimes as he has always such great folks with him,’ Norwood confessed, ‘but realy he made no distinction between any one that was there and me.’48 Whaley had his faults, but snobbery does not seem to have been one of them.
He and his companions sailed from Dublin Bay at midnight on 12 August. There followed a few weeks’ of nervous anticipation as his family and associates waited for news of the voyage. Almost on a daily basis, Norwood reported to Faulkner that he had received no word.49 Finally, on 4 September a letter arrived. Whaley had reached Plymouth, where he was staying with John Macbride, a captain in the Royal Navy. Macbride was ‘an exceedingly troublesome, busy, violent man’ but it seems that he and Whaley were on friendly terms. The young adventurer was ‘much pleased with the part of England he has seen’ and planned to continue his voyage.50
Norwood passed the news on to Faulkner, but the land agent was about to receive a devastating blow. A few days later his wife Catherine died at the age of 76. They had no children and her passing hit him hard: ‘Lov’d in they Life Lamented in they End,/The Loving Wife and Faithful Friend’ read part of the headstone inscription he drafted.51 His friends and family rallied round. ‘I hope that your verey greate distress has not impeared your health as I much dread it’, wrote one, but Faulkner was made of stern stuff. In the course of a voyage from Dublin to Holyhead just over a month later the pain of his loss seemed not to trouble him as much as the tempestuous crossing: ‘I dont ever remember to have felt such a rowl and swell in the sea,’ he exclaimed. ‘All the pasangers were most monsterously sick I never was so sick in all my life I streained and reached [retched] so much that the discharge from my stomack was tinctured with blood.’52 Hard-bitten and resilient, Faulkner battled through his grief and would continue to manage Whaley’s affairs for almost another decade. But the Irish Sea had not done with him.
Whaley, meanwhile, resumed his voyage but like Faulkner he ran into bad weather and cancelled his plans to sail to Brighton and Le Havre. In early October he reached Bristol and decided to return to Ireland from there. Around the middle of the month he landed at Waterford and headed north, planning to join his mother at Somerset House.53 Thus far he had not managed to undertake his voyage to the Mediterranean and it seemed unlikely that it would happen. After all, he had failed to even make it as far as Brighton in his yacht. But within a few days he would find himself embroiled in an affair that threatened to put an end not only to the planned expedition, but to his very life.
4
JERUSALEM SYNDROME
On the evening of 21 October 1786 Tom Whaley entered the Phoenix Park near Dublin with feelings of excitement, indignation and fear churning in his stomach. He and an attorney, identified in reports only as a Mr O—r, had agreed to meet near the Castleknock Gate at the park’s north-western fringe to settle a quarrel. This was to be Whaley’s first duel, and although such encounters rarely ended in fatalities, there were exceptions. Just five days before two gentlemen, Robert Keon and George Nugent Reynolds, had kept a rendezvous in Sheemore, County Leitrim. Before the duel had formally commenced – ‘the seconds had neither measured the ground … nor requested the principals to take their positions’ – Keon had shot Reynolds in the head, killing him instantly.1 This murderous act was a flagrant breach of the code of honour, but it showed how tempers could flare during duels and how easy it was for them to end fatally, adding to the tension that surrounded Whaley’s encounter. However, on this occasion the proper formalities were observed and the two antagonists ‘behaved with the greatest honour and coolness at the ground’. With the seconds having agreed that the principals should discharge their pistols simultaneously on a ‘word of command’, Whaley and O—r took up their positions and prepared to fire.2
The incident that occasioned the meeting had happened only that morning, when Whaley was approaching Dublin in his carriage. On the road near Chapelizod a chaise – a two-wheeled, one-horse carriage – overtook him and while it is unclear what exactly happened, it seems the two vehicles either collided or narrowly missed one another. The mishap was sufficient to provoke an outburst of road rage, a phenomenon that has existed for as long as there have been roads. Fiery words passed between Whaley and the chaise’s occupant, Mr O—r. The two men met again that afternoon at Daly’s Chocolate House in Dublin where they tried and failed to make up the quarrel. Agreeing to settle their differences in another manner, they appointed seconds and arranged to meet that same day in the Phoenix
