Читать книгу Buck Whaley - David Ryan - Страница 15

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. ‘This place is Mr Wrays home,’ Whaley observed, ‘and the people here of the first rank quite court him … by which means I will get into the best company.’ He continued to take more than a passing interest in the opposite sex. His experience with the prostitute had probably been his first sexual encounter, and though initially bashful he soon became more confident. Whaley did not care for the appearance of most of the Auch women, who were ‘as yellow as saffron’ and, he thought, ‘the uglyest creatures I ever saw’. Yet he found them ‘nevertheless very ingageing[.] they have a great deal of wit and are very agreeable’. He did find a few of the girls pretty. One in particular caught his eye: the 20-year-old niece of the Archbishop of Auch, who invited him to attend to mass with her. ‘I would you may be sure have been glad to go,’ he wrote to Faulkner, ‘but unfortunately [on] the day appointed I was seized so violently with the tooth ach[e] I really thought I should have dyed.’5

It turned out that Whaley had to have a tooth pulled. It was no doubt an uncomfortable procedure: eighteenth-century dentistry could be excruciating. A couple of years later his lawyer Robert Cornwall complained of being ‘in the greatest torture these three days with a pain in my jaw, I went yesterday to have one of my teeth drawn, but the fellow has left the stump behind after cutting away great part of my gum and at this moment [I] am in great agony’.6 Whaley’s dentist was not so ham-fisted, but it seems that he impressed upon his patient the fashionable notion that teeth could be transplanted from one individual to another. Keen to find replacements, Whaley ‘gave three guineas to a peasant for one of his that fitted and it was put in the place of mine immediately and I am in hopes it will do. In a day or two I am to get another put in as soon as the one is fast.’7 But he was to be disappointed. Teeth cannot be transplanted and the ones he got from the peasant must have fallen out soon afterwards.

Despite his dental issues Whaley was not long in making himself at home in Auch, where he rented a stylish house and set himself up with servants, horses and dogs. He also acquired residences in several nearby towns, alternating between them as it suited him. Wray’s hands-off approach to his pupil’s tuition suited both parties and for a while they lived together amicably. ‘I am very happy with Mr. Wray,’ Whaley declared. ‘He is a real gentleman.’8 But in time they started living apart. ‘I found that we generally agreed better asunder, and therefore his visit at one of my residences was always a signal for me to remove to the other.’ (W, 13) Wray, in any case, had other things to occupy his mind. Whaley had noticed that in Auch women would ‘come lepping into Mr Wrays room before he is well out of bed in the morning and taulk pollyticks for two hours’.9 It is not clear whether talking ‘pollyticks’ was a code for something else, but in any event it was not long before the bearleader took up with a female companion.

***

As time went on Whaley found his funds running low. The rentals on his houses and his other outgoings could not be maintained on an allowance of £600 a year and in June 1783 he had to undertake a costly excursion. His tutor was ailing and so, ‘for my amusement and for poor Wrays health’, they travelled to the Pyrenean town of Bagnères de Luchon, famous for its thermal baths and medicinal waters. Bagnères was ‘one of the most expensive towns in France, [and] after Spa the most fashionable water drinking place’. It attracted upper-class visitors from all over Europe and Whaley met many young Irish and English gentlemen. He soon found his money running away from him as he tried to keep up with them. ‘When they gave one a dinner, or supper [they] thought it odd if I did not entertain them in return, which I did and certainly did what was proper.’ Within a month he spent £150, a quarter of his allowance, accumulating large debts into the bargain. To add further pressure, his new friends declared themselves shocked ‘at the pittyfulness of my scanty allowance’.10

Whaley was convinced that his relatives were treating him shabbily. His allowance, he felt, did not reflect his status or his fortune. In late June he wrote to Samuel Faulkner asking him ‘if you think six hundred a year a compatency equal to my fortune and what a young man on his travels should have when within three years of being of age’. Faulkner, of course, did not decide the amount of Whaley’s allowance, but as his land agent he did have access to the income from his estates and the young man knew he was his best chance of getting money. Insisting that ‘I neither play [i.e. gamble] nor whore’ he asked Faulkner to send him £300 to offset the expenses of his horses, his munificence to the locals (‘a young man in a small town abroad is esteemed and respected principally by his gennerous manner of treating the inhabitants’), and his excursions to places like Bagnères ‘where the acquaintance may well merrit cultivation’. While admitting that he was fond of pleasure ‘as is natural at my age’, he reiterated that he had ‘not the least desire to play’.11 The young gentleman, it seemed, protested too much: probably he had already lost a fair bit of money gambling. Faulkner forwarded the requested amount, but it was insufficient to answer Whaley’s demands. He was also annoyed to find his tutor spending with abandon: ‘Mr. Wray instead of saveing his income to my knolege spends every farthing of it.’12 Meanwhile he discovered that in France debtors were not permitted to leave town until they had paid everything they owed. When some of his creditors stopped his phaeton (a lightly sprung open carriage, the eighteenth-century version of a sports car) in the street in front of several of his compatriots, from whom he borrowed the money to pay them, he was mortified. ‘Now sure,’ he reasoned, ‘every person of common sense must see the impropriety and bad polliticks of sending me abroad when I am not allowed sufficient to live like a gentleman.’ His letters to his mother contained similar protestations, which eventually had the desired effect: from April 1784 his allowance would be doubled to £1,200 a year.

Shortage of money was not the only trouble Whaley had to contend with. At some point during his stay in Bagnères his horse fell on top of him, bruising him so badly that he decided to move further into the Pyrenees to another spa town, Barèges, where ‘the waters are better for wounds’.13 Though he recovered from the injury he did not see fit to tone down his excessive lifestyle and soon he was engaging in ‘all the folly and extravagance peculiar to our countrymen abroad’. (W, 13) Some of it involved the opposite sex. After leaving Barèges to return to Auch, probably during the autumn of 1783, he started pursuing romantic intrigues in earnest.

On a visit to Tarbes, around forty miles from Auch, Whaley made the acquaintance of an aristocratic couple: Henri Louis de Rohan, Prince of Guéméné, and his wife Victoire-Armande. The pair had once stood at the glittering apex of Parisian society: Henri Louis belonged to a noble house that claimed descent from the dukes of Brittany, while his wife was a favourite of Marie Antoinette and had been governess to the royal children. In 1782 Henri Louis had ‘managed to set the entire nation in an uproar by playing the starring role in one of the country’s most resounding bankruptcies’.14 His wildly extravagant lifestyle had resulted in an astronomical debt of 33 million livres and he and his wife were forced to flee to the south of France. Whaley was a regular visitor to their chateau in Tarbes and became a particular favourite of Victoire-Armande. He learned that she was contemplating a match between him and a female relative he believed to be her daughter. ‘At first I looked upon this as a feint; as I had conceived the idea that the Princess did not regard me with indifference herself. But on her persisting in the proposal, I expressed my acknowledgment in the warmest terms.’ (W, 15) In fact, Victoire-Armande could not have proposed such a match: her only surviving daughter, Marie-Louise, was already married. It may be that the noblewoman actually suggested that Whaley marry a niece or other female relative. But Whaley’s relatives in Ireland were vehemently opposed to the idea on the basis that the two parties were of different religions and they instructed Wray to take the young man away from Auch as soon as possible. This might have proved difficult had Whaley not become caught up in another romantic entanglement. This one had a much more troubling outcome.

This affair arose out of his acquaintance with the young female cousin of an Auch nobleman he named only as the Count V—. Whaley’s efforts to seduce her ‘in a short time succeeded to the utmost extent of my wishes’ (W, 15), but things became more complicated when it transpired that the girl was pregnant. Hoping to hush the matter up Whaley tried to keep her concealed in his house ‘till such time as it might be thought proper for her to appear again in the world’. (W, 16) Unfortunately a local abbé discovered what had happened and lectured the young woman harshly. Whaley responded to this interference by subjecting the priest to a thrashing. This was an era when gentlemen frequently met perceived slights or insults with violence and Whaley, though still a minor, certainly considered himself a gentleman. Even so, to attack a priest was nothing if not reckless and the local magistrate arrested him and threw him into prison without even the formality of a trial. Luckily the Archbishop of Auch, who was friendly with Wray, intervened on his behalf and he was released. It afterwards transpired that the ‘abbé’ was no such thing. ‘This fellow only wore the dress of a Priest, and had never been ordained.’ (W, 17)

While this meant that Whaley would not be prosecuted for attacking a priest,15 it did not signal an end to his troubles. If it was shown that he had abducted a female he would face the full rigours of French law. Whaley managed to get the young woman away from Auch and to Montpellier, where she gave birth to a daughter. The child died not long afterwards and as soon as the unfortunate mother had recovered Whaley had her committed to the care of a religious order.16 Although she had joined willingly with him in their liaison, its outcome had destroyed her life as she knew it. For eighteenth-century females such experiences were not uncommon. The law offered women a degree of protection, but in general men used them as they saw fit and few gave much thought to female suffering. Whaley probably regarded the fate of his erstwhile lover as unfortunate but not much more than that. And while he no doubt regretted his daughter’s death, she was only the first of several children he would father out of wedlock. He was living in a man’s world and fast becoming an adept player in it.

Whaley had now been in France for around a year. In that time he had lurched fecklessly from mishap to misadventure but had come off relatively unscathed. He had survived a dangerous accident and a spell in prison and his debts, while significant, were not prohibitive.17 He had also managed to escape any lasting consequences from his ill-fated liaison. His letters home carefully avoided any mention of this affair but in one, probably written early in 1784, he hinted at it. Describing himself as ‘a quarrelsome dog’ (a possible reference to his thrashing of the ‘abbé’) he mentioned that he had ‘been such a wild fellow of late that I have neither heard nor wrote to any one’. He knew that the time was approaching for him to leave Auch. His sister Sophia and her husband Robert Ward, formerly MP for Wicklow, had moved to France after Ward failed to get returned in the election of 1783. Having already met them in Aix, Whaley decided to join them in Lyons, where they had relocated.18 It was there that his luck finally ran out.

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Accompanied by Wray, who seems to have offered little in the way of guidance during the pregnancy crisis, Whaley set out for Lyons in May 1784. Unimpressed by the city’s attractions, he decided to make his own entertainment and footed the bill for ‘sumptuous entertainments’ for all and sundry. ‘Magnificent balls and suppers to the ladies, extravagant and expensive dinners to the gentlemen, succeeded each other in quick rotation.’ (W, 19) Lavish displays of this kind were bound to attract hangers-on and opportunists and before long Whaley took up with ‘a set of wild young men’ among whom were two Irish gentlemen.19 He was no doubt glad to make the acquaintance of these fellow countrymen and he enjoyed their company so much that before long they were inseparable.

Not long afterwards he received an anonymous note warning him that the men were a pair of swindlers who planned to make him ‘the dupe of their execrable trade’. (W, 20) Recognising this as sincere and valuable advice, Wray begged Whaley to ditch his new friends – to no avail. This was the extent of the bearleader’s guidance and when Whaley accepted an invitation to dine with the Irishmen, Wray inexplicably failed to accompany him to the soiree. On arrival Whaley found that ‘a handsome company of female beauties’ were present and with their encouragement he drank so much wine ‘that before the dessert was introduced the glasses seemed to dance before me. Nothing would then satisfy them but we must drink champagne out of pint rummers, which soon completed the business.’ Getting a gambler drunk was and is among the oldest tricks in the book and with Whaley now ‘in a proper state for them to begin their operations’ his ‘friends’ proposed that they gamble. Within a short time they had extracted no less than £14,800 from him, ‘exclusive of my ready money, carriage, jewels, etc. I know not why they even stopped here; for I was in such a state that they might have stript me of my whole fortune.’ (W, 21)

Still just 18 years old, Whaley had been efficiently and remorselessly defrauded by two of the most predatory sharpers he ever had the misfortune to encounter. He immediately drew up a bill instructing his banker in Dublin to pay the amount, but even in his drunken state he must have known it would be returned protested, which it was in due course. With his allowance and any monies he had obtained from Faulkner long since spent, there seemed to be little hope of his raising the huge sum needed to pay his ‘friends’. But soon an opportunity to do so seemed to present itself, in the form of a mad scheme to abduct a wealthy young heiress.