wife and children. He gazes devotedly at Anne as she tends to the seventh and youngest child, William, seated on her knee. To the left the eldest daughter, Susanna, sits seemingly preoccupied at a small desk, while to the right the eldest son, Richard, tugs at his father’s sleeve, eager to show him something or involve him in a game. Beside him the second daughter Anne is dancing, anticipating her later career as a socialite. At the extreme right the third daughter, Sophia, plays with some fruit. Beside her the toddlers, 2-year-old Tom and 1-year-old John, play on the floor. Both are attired as girls: whether male or female, infants were dressed in floor-length gowns worn over stiffened bodices or stays. It was not until between the ages of 4 and 7 that boys were ‘breeched’, i.e. given male clothing. Tom holds a rattle in his hands, an inauspicious symbol of the ‘play’ he would devote himself to in later years: gambling.
Richard Chapel Whaley took great joy in the beautiful wife and children that came to him so late in life, but he did not enjoy their company for more than a few years. By the end of 1768 he had fallen ill and the following February he died.23 After he had been buried in the Whaley family vault in Syddan, County Meath, his widow returned to St Stephen’s Green. Not long afterwards the new house was completed under Faulkner’s direction and the family moved into it. Now aged around 28, Anne faced bringing up her seven children without the support of a husband. Yet she was better placed than most widows to do so. She could rely on the help of the Faulkners (Catherine Faulkner acted as her maid) and her father, the Rev. Bernard Ward, who was guardian of the fortunes of the Whaley children. She also had the money to employ as many servants as she needed.24 Many years later, Tom commended her for bringing her children up ‘in the paths of religion and virtue … whatever follies any of us may have committed, the cause could never be imputed to her’. (W, 9)
Populated by a large family and a considerable staff of servants, the newly built mansion on St Stephen’s Green must have been a lively place. The children would have played in the stately rooms and corridors, causing mischief and getting in the servants’ way, while their mother or one of the Faulkners watched over and perhaps chided them. Over a century later, in his autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce hinted at feeling Tom Whaley’s presence in these hallways: ‘The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful … was it because he had heard that in Buck Whaley’s time there was a secret staircase there?’25 In the dining room, a large chamber with a richly stuccoed ceiling at the rear of the house, the family were served by a posse of attendants. French cuisine was in vogue and Anne and the older children may have tucked into a variety of exotic dishes such as lambs’ ears ragoût, fricassée of frogs and badger flambé.26 If so this influenced Tom’s culinary tastes as he employed a number of French cooks later in life. At the close of day the family retired to sleep in their rooms at the top of the house. One of the bedrooms looked out onto the back yard and stables and beyond that a green area known as Lord Clonmell’s Lawn (now the Iveagh Gardens). This may have been where Tom slept as a child. Over a hundred years later it was the bedchamber of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.27
It was unlikely that Anne would stay a widow. She was still young, attractive and fashionable and, as befitting a lady of her station, turned herself out in fine gowns and dresses, among them a Latin gown which she wore with a blond stomacher and ‘sleeve knots with French flowers’.28 More than a few gentlemen must have had their heads turned by this beautiful and wealthy widow and it was only a matter of time before she settled on a new husband. He turned out to be John Richardson, the son of a County Derry rector and a member of the Royal Dublin Society. A kind-hearted and affable man who would later enter politics as MP for Newtown Limavady, Richardson was the same age as Anne and seemed disposed to be a good stepfather to her children. They married at the end of 1770. It was a joyful union. ‘You have no notion how happy I am,’ Anne wrote to Faulkner a few years later, ‘and it is not at all extraordinary that it shou[l]d be so, I am blest with the very best husband upon earth’.29
Yet she also suffered tragedy. On 12 August 1772 her eldest son, Richard Chapel Whaley Junior, died. He was 10 years old. We do not know what occasioned his passing but it must have caused his mother and siblings great sorrow. Yet for the next oldest brother, Tom, the event had special significance. Under the terms of his father’s will, he had only stood to inherit leasehold lands in County Armagh. But now that he was the eldest surviving son he was also entitled to the extensive Carlow estates and the Dublin properties including, if he outlived Anne, the house on Stephen’s Green.30 The annual rental income from the Whaley estates came to £6,876 and Tom also stood to inherit the lion’s share of his father’s personal fortune of £43,630, which earned over £2,500 per annum in interest.31 His mother and grandfather did not tell him the amount of his inheritance but he knew it was very large and henceforth he would wait impatiently for the day when this wealth would pass into his hands. This certainly spurred some of the extravagance and recklessness he manifested during his teens. We will never know if he would have led a more prudent life had his brother survived – what we know of his temperament suggests he would not have – but if nothing else he would have had less wealth to squander.
Around the middle of 1773 Anne went to live with Richardson in Ulster. She seems to have brought her daughters with her, leaving her three surviving sons in the Faulkners’ care. Even though Richard junior’s death the previous year must still have been on her mind, this was a blissful time for Anne and her new husband. For most of the ten years that she had been married to Richard Chapel Whaley her days had been consumed with bearing and raising children. Now, happily married to Richardson, she was enjoying new-found freedom and ‘better health … than I have done for several years’. One suspects that she was also enjoying a break from rearing her boys. Tom, John and William were now aged 7, 6 and 5 respectively and must have been a handful. At the same time she missed them and at the end of the year she wrote to Sam Faulkner asking him to bring them to spend a month with her the following April or May.32 During the summer months she and Richardson again took up residence at the house on St Stephen’s Green, which was reportedly ‘frequented by the first people in the kingdom … the proprietors are not only very rich, but have great interest [i.e. influence]’.33 When Anne and her husband were absent, Faulkner had to keep the Whaley boys amused. Tom had a particular interest in exotic animals and Faulkner found himself bringing him to see the ‘wild beasts’: probably a private menagerie, as there were no zoological gardens in Dublin at the time.34 Luckily, he did not have to keep him entertained indefinitely. The time had come for him to be sent away to school.
Portarlington in the Queen’s County had been renowned for its boarding schools since the early eighteenth century. Most of them were run by Huguenots who had come to Ireland fleeing persecution in France. A large community of these immigrants had settled in the small town in the Irish midlands, where they filled a gap in the market for the education of upper-class Protestant children. By the middle of the century the number of schools in Portarlington ran well into double figures, with nobility and gentry from all over the country sending their children there to be educated. Tom probably attended Robert Hood’s school, a boarding school where students learned writing, grammar, arithmetic, English, French, classics and dancing; or the Rev. Richard Baggs’s public Latin school, ‘from which many gentlemen of rank and fortune have entered the College [i.e. Trinity College Dublin] with particular credit’. Baggs’s school taught writing, arithmetic, mathematics, geography, drawing, music and dancing.35
The writing master trained his pupils well, as is evident from the large neat calligraphy of a letter Tom wrote to Faulkner from Portarlington on 21 October 1775. By then his brothers had joined him at school, but he missed his mother and asked Faulkner ‘please to let me know’ when he expected her to arrive in Dublin as ‘she told me in her last letter, that she would send for us then’.36 But Tom was no shrinking violet, homesick and longing to be reunited with his loving mother. His thoughts wandered far beyond the bounds of home or school. Richard Baggs’s school taught ‘geography both antient and modern, as also the use of the globes’37 and if he did go there, Tom would have paid attention during geography class as he had started drawing maps of exotic foreign regions. Earlier that year he had completed a map of southern Africa which he presented to his grandfather on 25 June (‘dedicated to Mr. Ward by his dutiful gd. son
