of his age and was probably copied from a map by the London cartographer Herman Moll, which it closely resembles.38 Tom planned to have ‘a good many maps’ ready to show to his mother and prepared several others, including ‘a very large map of Spain and Portugal and the Mediterranean Sea’.39 It was a formative time for the young boy. As he approached his tenth birthday he felt the stirring of an adventurous spirit and a burning curiosity about the wider world. Doubtless he hoped to visit at least some of the places he mapped, and while he would never make it as far as Africa, his early understanding of the geography of the Mediterranean would serve him well later in life.
Tom may still have been at his cartographic efforts over two years later: early in 1778 he wrote to Faulkner asking him to send him ‘a couple of small pencil[s] and two or three brushes’. By this stage he and his brothers had moved to a new school, possibly in Armagh. Tom also asked after Faulkner’s nephew Sam, who had been unwell.40 It did not bode well. The Faulkner boy’s health seems to have been poor and in September 1782 he died. The list of expenses for his funeral makes for poignant reading: a shroud sheet and cap, an oak coffin covered with black cloth, a hearse and horses to bring the body to St Peter’s Church in Dublin, followed by a mourning coach. Tom later wrote to Faulkner to commiserate: ‘one could not say but he [had] as good a life as I [I’ll] drop this subject … excuse me for calling to your mind a thing that must have distressed you very much but as he is happy I hope a manly firmness has reconsiled you’.41 Having witnessed his own brother’s passing ten years before Tom was well acquainted with the inescapable reality of death. Now, as he entered his late teens, he himself was starting to make his first moves towards manhood. His schooldays were over, and he was about to get his first taste of the wider world he had imagined so often while carefully marking out his maps.
***
‘When I had attained my sixteenth year, my mother thought proper to send me to France in order to finish my education.’ (W, 10–11) With this nonchalant statement Tom recalled the most formative and turbulent period of his early life: his grand tour. Travel on the continent was reckoned an indispensable part of the education of the sons of wealthy gentlemen. It was intended to broaden their minds, enhance their social accomplishments and enable them to acquire a range of useful contacts. But they did not always behave like the gentlemen they aspired to be.42 Critics of the grand tour argued that the young men who went on it were too immature to appreciate its benefits and had too many opportunities for drinking, gambling and self-indulgence. Yet most felt that the benefits outweighed the dangers and hoped that under the guidance of their travelling tutors, known as ‘bearleaders’, grand tourists could avoid these pitfalls. As Tom Whaley’s seventeenth birthday approached, his mother, assisted by his grandfather Bernard Ward, made arrangements to dispatch him to France.
It was around this time that Whaley sat for what was probably his first portrait. The only proper likeness of him that survives today, it shows a boy on the cusp of manhood (see Plate 4). Finely attired in a red coat and pink waistcoat, he stands with one hand on his hip, staring resolutely from the canvas. His face is well-nourished, slightly pudgy even, with the expression of a confident young gentleman readily embracing his life of wealth and privilege. But there is also a certain wildness in his blue-eyed gaze, as if he were liable to do something unwarranted and unpredictable at any time. Like the excitable adolescent he was, Whaley was enthusiastic about the new prospects and experiences that foreign travel would offer him. His grandfather proposed to send him off with a yearly allowance of £500, later increased to £600. This sum would have been sufficient to maintain a prudent tourist, but not a young man eager to be let loose on the world.
His mother trusted that his bearleader would provide wise and strict supervision. For this role she settled on an army veteran named William Wray, ‘who had been recommended to her by some persons of distinction in Ireland’. (W, 11) The son of a County Donegal landowner, Wray had served as a lieutenant captain in the Thirty-ninth Foot, an Irish regiment that spent long periods stationed abroad. This old soldier with a penchant for books and smelling salts had spent much of his life on the continent and seemed a suitable individual to oversee Whaley’s tour.43 But had Anne looked more closely into his past she might have had second thoughts. Wray was a good-natured man but he was not good at managing money. In the army he had found his officer’s salary insufficient to support his lifestyle and had had to sell his commission to pay off his debts. As well, he was in bad health – the result of youthful overindulgence – and he lacked the ‘firmness of character necessary to superintend the conduct of a young man’. (W, 11) Wray hardly seemed a model of prudence and discretion. As a contemporary writer put it, he ‘was supposed to be a fit person to undertake the direction of young Whaley’s studies. It soon however appeared that the tutor had not the ability.’44
It was arranged that Bernard Ward would accompany Whaley to Bath, where they would rendezvous with Wray. The young grand tourist and his bearleader would then leave for Paris, where the grand tour would commence. But neither Anne nor Ward nor Wray could have anticipated the series of disasters that would unfold in the course of Whaley’s travels. He set out brimming with energy and optimism, but he would return a year and a half later distressed and disarrayed, having abandoned his tutor and endured a remarkable series of misfortunes that left him physically shattered and thousands of pounds in debt.
2
THE GRAND TOUR
Ward and his grandson arrived in Bath sometime in November or early December 1782. This was one of Whaley’s first trips out of Ireland and while he had little time to admire the famous spa town’s elegant streets and ancient remains, he knew he would soon visit more exotic places. He seems to have been impressed to meet Wray, with the genial old soldier perhaps regaling him with tales of derring-do from his days in the army. As they were stepping into their coach to depart a thought struck Ward and he stopped them for a final word. ‘Mr. Wray my G[ran]d. Sons allowance is five hundred,’ he reminded him. ‘But should you go beyond [this] weel suppose it was laid out properly and your bills shall be honoured.’ The old man did not know it, but he was opening the first crack in the floodgates. Whaley would not be of age for another four years but already he was musing on how to get hold of and spend his inheritance. ‘I know [I’ll] have a good fortune and a good deal of ready money [which] I have found out is in my disposal should any thing happen between this and that time.’1
Soon afterwards Wray and Whaley reached Paris. The French capital was a popular and attractive destination on the grand tour, offering ‘an enormous range of cultural and social activities that tourists could participate in, an active artistic life, and a large number of splendid sights’.2 While these no doubt interested Whaley, he was also keen to sample the city’s other attractions. One evening Wray went alone to the theatre, returning later to find his pupil in the arms of a prostitute. Without taking much notice, the older man went straight to bed. The next morning Whaley faced Wray with ‘all the awkward bashfulness attendant on a first offence’ but was surprised to find him ‘treating the matter as a bagatelle. He told me that the love of the fair sex was a natural passion, particularly at my time of life, and concluded by giving me some general cautions respecting the prudence to be observed and the choices to be made in those connexions’.3 Wray’s relaxed attitude set the tone of the relationship, but in time Whaley would find that this laid-back approach was not to his advantage.
At the end of December they relocated to Auch in the south of France where Whaley was to learn French and refine his riding, dancing and fencing skills. Boasting an imposing gothic cathedral, the ancient Gascon town is sited prominently on an escarpment overlooking the River Gers. Visiting it in 1787 the agriculturist Arthur Young found Auch to be ‘almost without manufactures or commerce, and … supported chiefly by the rents of the country’. Farmsteads were scattered throughout the surrounding countryside instead of being gathered in towns, as elsewhere in France.4 This rustic region may have seemed a strange place for Whaley to work on refining his character, but Wray had reasons of his own for choosing it: he had once lived in Auch and had many friends there who welcomed him and his young charge with open arms.
