a few weak bigots with avidity; rewards were offered for apprehending priests, and the fellows who pursued this infamous avocation were termed priest catchers’. Whaley was said to be an ardent priest-catcher, leading expeditions into the countryside in search of his prey. At some point he became known as ‘Burn-Chapel’ Whaley: according to one tradition, he got the nickname when he fired his pistol at a Catholic chapel and set its thatched roof alight, burning it to the ground.6 It seems the attack was motivated by Whaley’s animosity towards a Father Byrne, a Catholic priest who lived at Greenan Beg near Whaley Abbey. Byrne’s sister was married to a Protestant named Willis or Wills, and while dining with her one day the priest had given ‘umbrage to a Protestant of the party by stating that Protestants would be lost’. In retaliation for this, and no doubt keen to deal with the Romish cleric in his midst, Whaley recruited a pair of thugs named Collins and Quinsey and set fire to the Catholic chapel at Greenan. The three men are said to have used a picture of the Virgin Mary for target practice, with Whaley exclaiming ‘I shot the wh[or]e through the heart and she did not bleed.’ Whatever the truth of the story, the ‘Burn-Chapel’ moniker stuck and would endure long after his death.7
It was not the only legacy he had to worry about. As the owner of estates scattered over seven counties – Dublin, Wicklow, Carlow, Galway, Armagh, Louth and Fermanagh – he needed to produce an heir who could carry on his name and property, but his first marriage, to Catherine Armitage, had been childless. When Catherine died in November 1758 Whaley, now in his late fifties, decided to remarry. Youth and good looks must have been among the qualities he sought in his new bride because she turned out to be Anne Ward, the 18-year-old daughter of the Rev. Bernard Ward, Rector of Knockbreda in County Down.8 With her lustrous dark hair and prominent nose Anne was arrestingly beautiful. She also possessed ‘captivating manners, a well-cultivated mind and the most incorruptible virtue’. (W, 9) The dramatist John O’Keeffe (1747–1833) described how she and Whaley met:
[She] went to Dublin, on a visit, and with some female friends was one day walking about to see the fine buildings, as she had never been in town before. On viewing Stephen’s Green, they stopped before a house, with a large carved stone dormant lion over the door; as they were admiring this, a person standing near, asked them to walk in and look at the house; they consented, and he led them all over the apartments, which were furnished in the first style, but they saw no one but their polite guide. They were much pleased, and, expressing great admiration, were thanking him, and taking their leave, when, in a particular and pointed manner, he asked the country lady [i.e. Anne Ward] … whether she liked all she saw; with great pleasure she said she did. ‘Then, madam,’ he replied, ‘this house and all it contains is mine, and if you wish to make it yours also, you may have the house and the master of it;’ – making her a low bow. A marriage followed.9
O’Keeffe claimed to have had the story from Anne’s brother and it has the ring of truth, apart from one detail: Whaley had not yet started building the house with the lion over the door. When he met Anne he was living in ‘prince-like magnificence’ at No. 75 (now No. 85) St Stephen’s Green and this must have been the dwelling he showed her around. Designed by the German architect Richard Castle, this stone-fronted townhouse is now part of Newman House, an administrative centre of University College Dublin. It has been carefully restored and boasts a lavishly decorated interior. Its front parlour, the Apollo Room, has magnificent stucco ornamentation, while the Great Room or Saloon is regarded as one of Ireland’s finest eighteenth-century interiors.10 Whaley must have seemed a decidedly eligible widower and Anne was sufficiently impressed to overcome whatever reservations she had about marrying a man forty years her senior. For his part he was besotted with his bride-to-be, who he described as ‘my soul’s darling’. The marriage took place in February 1759, just three months after Catherine’s death, and Anne settled into the role of dutiful wife. Her son would later praise the ‘undeviating rectitude of her conduct towards my father, notwithstanding the disparity of their age, which would have been sufficient to have excited the malevolence of slander against her, had she given the least opening for it, by any levity in her behaviour’. (W, 9)
The marriage was certainly successful if judged by the number of offspring it produced. The year 1760 saw the birth of a daughter, Mary Susanna, followed two years later by a son, named Richard Chapel after his father. Whaley was reported to be so delighted at the birth of his son and heir that he made his wife a present of £10,000, sending his banker a note in the form of a piece of doggerel:
Good Mr. Latouche,
Prithee open your pouch,
and pay my soul’s darling
Ten thousand pounds sterling …11
With the arrival of a further two daughters, Anne and Frances Sophia in 1763 and 1764 respectively, Whaley decided that his present residence was too small to meet the needs of his growing family.12 He set about building a new house on an adjoining plot of land. It was to be a huge mansion with five bays and four storeys over a rusticated basement and when completed it would dwarf No. 75 (see Plate 1).13 Over the portico Whaley installed a lead statue of a lion by John Van Nost II (c.1710–1780), then Ireland’s leading sculptor. Seemingly just awoken from its slumber, it gazes sombrely across at St Stephen’s Green.14 The mansion was similar in design to another great Dublin townhouse, Charlemont House, although its exterior was not as elegant. The interior was a different matter. Whaley hired skilled artists to produce some of the finest stuccowork in eighteenth-century Dublin. The stucco decoration on the walls and ceiling of the main staircase is breathtaking (see Plate 3). Many of the rooms also feature fine stuccoed ceilings, and in the ground floor drawing room there are two small portrait heads above the central wall panels, possibly representations of Richard Chapel Whaley himself.15
When not busy overseeing the construction and decoration of his palace Whaley concerned himself with the management of his estates, for which he relied heavily on his ‘honest’ and ‘faithfull’ servant and land agent, Samuel Faulkner. At this time Faulkner and his wife Catherine were living with the Whaleys, but they would later move into a place of their own a few doors down at No. 84 (now No. 96).16 Born around 1721 near Cookstown, County Tyrone, Faulkner was a no-nonsense Ulsterman known for his blunt language. On one occasion, suffering from diarrhoea, he claimed to have been ‘not less than 13 times at stool … at night[.] this would kill an elephant’.17 Hard-working and meticulous, he also acted as agent for several other landowners and kept copies of all his correspondence.18 Though his life was marred by tragedy – his wife and one of his nephews predeceased him – he was kindly, generous and well-liked. But Faulkner must also have had a ruthless edge to him; otherwise he would not have been able to perform the work of a land agent: letting property, collecting rents and arrears and, occasionally, carrying out evictions. In March 1765 Whaley gave Faulkner power of attorney to ‘receive all moneys rents and arrears of rents’ that were due to him while also instructing him to recover some property belonging to him ‘by any means without blood shed or burning a house … do the thing with spiritt and I will support it’. The fact that Whaley referred to ‘blood shed’ and ‘burning’ at all suggests that he and Faulkner may have used these methods in the past.19 They had known one another a long time and their relationship was one of friends rather than employer and employee.20 For the Whaley children, who knew Faulkner from birth, he seemed more like an affectionate uncle than their father’s agent.
***
On 15 December 1765, several months after work had begun on the new house, Anne gave birth to her fifth child. Thomas Chapel Whaley was baptised exactly two months later at St Peter’s Church on Aungier Street.21 Known to his family as Tom, this fair-haired blue-eyed boy captured his mother’s heart, more so perhaps than any of his siblings, but she had little notion of the extraordinary life that lay ahead of him or the worry he would cause her. Nor was he the last child she would bear. Over the next couple of years a further two boys, John and William, arrived. Perhaps sensing that his family was now complete, Richard Chapel Whaley commissioned a sculptor, Patrick Cunningham, to commemorate them in an unusual portrait: a wax bas-relief intended for display on a
