Читать книгу Buck Whaley - David Ryan - Страница 16

3

WILD SCHEMES

Even as he reeled from the worst gambling loss he had ever suffered, Whaley somehow got his hands on a sum of money: two thousand louis d’ors (around £2,000), possibly advanced by Faulkner, to whom he may have written and given a hint of what had happened. If so, he swore him to secrecy. Under no circumstances were his mother and stepfather to be told and indeed they would not find out for several more weeks. Whaley used some of the £2,000 to clear his less significant debts: the lavish parties he had thrown in Lyons had not paid for themselves. The remainder fell well short of what he owed the Irishmen, but they were not deterred and proposed that he go to London ‘where, upon my fortune being made known, I should find no difficulty in getting my bills discounted to any amount I thought proper’. (W, 22) If he would do this, they promised, they would halve the amount of the debt. There was just one catch: one of them, John Ryan,1 would accompany him.

Wray advised against the London trip but Whaley dismissed the older man’s protestations and agreed to the plan.2 Wray had not been much of a bearleader. Having given Whaley little in the way of guidance in Auch and the spa resorts of the Pyrenees, he had failed to protect him from being monumentally defrauded in Lyons. Admittedly, Whaley had not been the easiest pupil. Headstrong and impulsive, he had refused to listen to sensible advice or be swayed in his resolutions, however foolish. But by allowing him to go unaccompanied to London, Wray was exposing him to whatever further machinations the swindlers might choose to employ. With Ryan in tow, Whaley set out for Paris. He spent long enough in the city to have a fling with ‘an intriguante … whose business it was to entrap young men by such artifices, in which the courtezans are much more expert … than they are in London’. The lady knew her business well, and after Whaley had spent ‘a most delicious time’ in her company she informed him that she needed a large sum to settle a gambling debt. Ignoring his own precarious financial situation he handed her £500.3 To be fleeced twice in such a short space of time looked like carelessness, and the episode would take its toll on more than just his purse. Following this latest debacle he and Ryan continued on to London, arriving there around the middle of May 1784.

This was to be Whaley’s first extended stay in the British capital. Home to some 700,000 people, it was a massive city by the standards of the time and as notorious for its poverty and squalor as it was famous for its wealth and elegance. With money still in his pocket (though he was going through it fast), Whaley avoided the squalor and stayed in the West End, home to luminaries like the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Devonshire. He checked into the Royal Hotel on St James’s Street4 while Ryan, determined to keep his prey within arm’s reach, took lodgings just up the road on Albemarle Street. Somehow, Whaley had to raise the money needed to get the sharper off his back. Almost certainly his first recourse was Leslie Grove, an Irish merchant-turned-banker based at 4 Crosby Square in Bishopsgate.5 Grove was friendly with Wray and had managed finances for Whaley’s family in the past, but getting the required sum out of him proved more difficult than anticipated. Although the banker would have been well aware that the young man stood to inherit a large fortune, he either could or would not advance the money: probably he did not want to do so without first conferring with Whaley’s relatives.

His attempts to get hold of the money elsewhere came to nothing. But soon afterwards he received a proposition that seemed to promise an end to his troubles. A man had arrived from Paris with a message from a Miss Duthrey, an heiress who had been confined in a convent there. Claiming to having heard of Whaley while he was in Paris, she had written asking him to rescue her. ‘From what I have heard of your character I have conceived the flattering hope that you will exert your utmost endeavours to deliver me from this captivity.’ The letter-bearer said that he was married to the heiress’s governess ‘and that if I would go back he and the governess had agreed to let me carry off Miss Duthrey’. Always susceptible to flattery, Whaley was ready to believe that the heiress was ‘in love with me who she never saw’. He doubtless saw himself a knight-errant about to save a distressed maiden, but what really attracted him was the young woman’s enormous inheritance: a lump sum of £100,000 along with an annual income of £12,000.6 As a proof of her gratitude, Miss Duthrey avowed, she would ‘be happy to lay myself and [my] fortune at your feet’. (W, 27) If Whaley could but get her to Ireland, they would be free to marry, he would have untold wealth and his troubles would be at an end.

He told Ryan, who was ‘in raptures at the prospect of such a good fortune, and confirmed me in the design of repairing immediately to Paris’. With only ten guineas now left to his name, Whaley turned to Grove to obtain money for the journey. He was surprised when, instead of rebuffing him, the banker joined enthusiastically in the scheme. He promised to supply the required finance and even offered to accompany Whaley to Paris. Grove’s lack of caution in this matter seems extraordinary, but he was credulous and generous to a fault.7 ‘Without guile himself, he suspected none in others.’ (W, 29) Even when Miss Duthrey’s messenger absconded with £150 he had borrowed from Grove, ostensibly in order to pay a creditor, the banker was not deterred. But just as they were about to set out for France, Whaley found that his skin had broken out in an unpleasant rash.8 In return for his money the Parisian courtesan had given him his first dose of the pox (syphilis).9 As a popular rhyme put it,

All alone, yet in Her Lap,

The Temple Beau may get a Clap,

Where, Pox’d, & Poxing, they shall own

The Pains of Love, are Pains alone.10

Whaley felt too unwell to go outdoors, let alone contemplate another trip to France, but he and Grove decided to press ahead with the plan regardless. Grove hired a French-speaking lawyer to deal with the legalities and left for Paris, ‘determined to carry [Miss Duthrey] off and bring her to Ireland’.11

***

Even as he languished in his sickbed Whaley was conscious of Ryan watching him with hawklike vigilance ‘lest I should slip through his fingers’. (W, 30) It was then that he made his first sensible move for weeks and wrote to his stepfather John Richardson to tell him how things stood. ‘You will I dare say be much surprized to hear from me from London’, he began. Richardson would have been even more surprised at the sorry sequence of events that had brought him there. Whaley admitted that while gambling in Lyons he had made ‘a very considerable and serious loss’, though he did not dare to mention the amount, and confessed to having ‘very unfortunately … got poxed’. In an attempt to soften the bad news he proceeded to reveal ‘the good’: his planned abduction of and marriage to Miss Duthrey and the financial windfall he believed would accompany it. ‘I am getting rich fast,’ he assured Richardson, ‘and if I was perfectly so could set out for Ireland but must hear from these [i.e. Grove and the lawyer] from Paris first … I just leave it to yourself to come over to me or not as you think it necessary … I shall be impatient to know how I am to act.’12 Richardson’s reaction to this bolt from the blue is not hard to imagine. Whaley’s evident naïveté and recklessness was not so surprising; after all he was still only 18. Much more worrying was the news that he was heavily in debt, dangerously ill and at the mercy of a ruthless swindler. As if his massive loss in France was not bad enough, he had also embroiled himself in a crazy scheme to abduct an heiress. Richardson knew he had no option but to leave for London at once and drag him back from the edge of the precipice.

When Richardson received the letter his wife was away in the spa town of Swanlinbar, County Cavan, attempting to cure an upset stomach and a dose of gout. When her son was in France he had written to her regularly, mentioning some of the debts he had racked up, but thus far this had caused her only mild concern. She informed Faulkner that ‘Toms demands will I fear be much higher now than we coud wish and yet what can you or I do.’ He had assured her he would not gamble again until he came of age and she blithely trusted that this would be the case: ‘God grant he may keep his resolution.’13 She then wore her pen ‘to an actual stump’ writing him a nine-page letter, the contents of which leave little doubt that he was her favourite son: ‘it is very good of you my dearest boy to write so constantly to me, your letters are the delight of my heart’. She urged him to ‘keep but your resolution with respect to play, and my anxietys about you will from this moment be at an end, except those which a doating mother must always feel when the darling of her heart is at such a distance’.14 Instead, Anne’s anxieties were about to increase. Soon she would discover not only that Whaley’s ‘demands’ were far greater than she thought, but also that he was dangerously ill.

Leslie Grove’s Paris mission did not go as hoped. When he and the lawyer arrived at the convent they presented the letter Whaley had received to the heiress and her governess. They, however, knew nothing about it: it was, unsurprisingly, a complete forgery. Miss Duthrey ‘burst into a violent fit of laughter in which she was joined by her companion, to the manifest confusion of the two adventurers, who … slunk away and made the best of their way back to London’. (W, 30) It later transpired that John Ryan and his associates had cooked up the whole story. Since Whaley had failed to raise any money in London, they had hoped to lure him back to France to get him arrested for the bill his banker had returned protested and ‘pursue their further operations and schemes on me with greater security’. (W, 31)

Whaley’s illness had saved him from this fate but it threatened to consign him to a worse one. With his condition deteriorating rapidly he had no option but to seek medical advice, even though the likely treatment was far from appealing. Many doctors treated syphilis using a method known as ‘salivation’, whereby sufferers took doses of mercury that not only poisoned them but also produced large amounts of black saliva.15 It is not known if Whaley’s physician, Cuthbert Potts of Pall Mall, used this method: he was after all said to be ‘skilful and humane in his profession’.16 But whatever treatment he employed, it was not to his patient’s liking and Whaley informed him that he would be seeking a second opinion. Offended, Potts replied that he was as well qualified as any physician in London to treat him ‘and had you treated me with the respect due to a gentleman who is in the practice of a liberal profession, surely I could never object to your consulting whome you pleased’.17 By this time Whaley was probably not in an entirely reasonable frame of mind. He would have found salivation, if he underwent it, both mentally and physically debilitating.18 Meanwhile he was still fending off the avaricious Ryan, who by now had been weaving webs around him for several weeks. Alone, vulnerable and lacking even Wray’s feeble guidance, he was in sore need of a friend. Richardson could not come soon enough.

Whaley had a high opinion of his stepfather, commending him as an ‘incomparable man … at once the tender husband, the warm friend and generous benefactor’. (W, 31) In a surviving portrait Richardson looks kindly and good-natured (see Plate 5) and indeed he seems to have been universally liked.19 The man that Anne esteemed as ‘the very best husband upon earth’ had proven himself a true friend to his stepchildren and she assured Tom that ‘were you his own son I am confident he coud not be more anxious for your welfare’.20 When Richardson finally reached London early in July, he and his stepson had not seen one another for over a year and a half and their reunion was an emotional one. ‘I was much afflicted at the sight of this sincere friend,’ Whaley confessed. Richardson’s first action was to bring him ‘to his lodging, where I should be better accommodated than at a public Hotel, and at the same time be at some distance from a society to whom I might impute the greatest part of my misfortunes’. (W, 32) As soon as he had lodged his stepson in a safer place, Richardson set about dealing with his troublesome creditor.

The failure of the Duthrey ploy and Richardson’s presence in London meant that John Ryan’s chances of getting money out of Whaley were fast diminishing. In a last-ditch effort he seems to have reduced his demand to £1,000 but found he could not obtain even this. On 13 July he wrote requesting the money urgently as he had ‘occasion for it immediately and conceives it must be very easy for Mr Whaley to get it from Mr Richardson’.21 Richardson, however, refused to give him a penny and took him to task ‘for the atrociousness of his conduct in pillaging a young man and enticing him away from his tutor’. (W, 32) Though the criticism was well warranted, Ryan saw fit to call Richardson to account for it and a duel might have ensued had some unknown third parties not made peace between the antagonists. Whaley, meanwhile, slowly recovered. By the end of July he was well enough to set out for Ireland.

***

On 30 July Whaley set out for Holyhead22 and soon afterwards he reached Dublin, pox-scarred and all but penniless. On the whole it was not surprising that his grand tour had turned out thus. He had been barely 3 years old when his father died and had lacked a firm hand to instil discipline and responsibility. His mother doted on him and neither she, Richardson nor his grandfather Bernard Ward (who died before he returned) seems to have done much to rein him in. While Samuel Faulkner had taken care of Whaley as a child, he was not his guardian and he lacked the authority to refuse his demands or check his wilder impulses. William Wray had been vested with this authority but had been incapable of exerting it. As a result, Whaley had all but gone off the rails during his grand tour and was lucky to survive it. He had shown himself to be volatile, careless and irresponsible, but after all he was still only 18 and perhaps he had learned something from the experience.

On his return Whaley was ‘received and treated like the Prodigal Son’ (W, 33), no great surprise given his mother’s partiality to him. She hoped he would open a new leaf and ‘let unnecessary superfluitys alone, not only now but during your whole life … prove your self a man of sound principles and good sense, setting such a value on every thing, as a man of success ought, and not letting your self be carried away by fashion or the very natural love of pleasure inherent almost in every young breast’.23 No doubt such advice filled Whaley with good intentions, but only time would show if he would take the lessons of his grand tour to heart and henceforth live a responsible life. The events of early 1785 seemed to suggest he would. Like many other young men he was attracted by the idea of a political career and the prestige and opportunities that went with it. In February 1785 he stood for election to Parliament and was returned as MP for Newcastle, County Dublin.24 This encouraged him ‘to apply myself, for some time, to the study of the constitution, laws and commerce of the country, with that degree of attention and assiduity, which so important and arduous a pursuit required’. (W, 276) Standing on the cusp of manhood, he seemed to have acquired a new sense of purpose and responsibility.

Whaley had chosen an exciting time to enter politics. Dublin was the administrative and parliamentary capital of Ireland, boasting a parliament house that was architecturally far more impressive than that at Westminster.25 For a long time the Irish Parliament had been technically subordinate to the British and its legislation had had to be approved in Westminster before it could be enacted, but in 1782 the Irish Parliament had won a degree of legislative independence and over the years that followed various groups clamoured for further political change. Political reformers known as ‘patriots’ angled for greater political independence, while Catholics, having seen some of the penal laws repealed, pursued further concessions. Whaley, like his future brother-in-law, the Attorney General John Fitzgibbon, was more concerned with preserving the British connection and the authority of the Crown. But his fledgling career in parliament never took off because he, like a number of other MPs, had little or no interest in politics. Mostly avoiding the proceedings of the House of Commons, they spent their time pursuing pleasure. Those with whom Whaley socialised included Arthur Saunders Gore (known as Lord Sudley), George Frederick Nugent (styled Lord Delvin), and the dashing revolutionary-to-be Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The dissolute life he threw himself into in the company of these gentlemen threatened to extinguish his political career ‘and every other serious and laudable application’. (W, 276)

***

‘Nothing can be so gay as Dublin is,’ a correspondent insisted in 1782. ‘The Castle twice a week, the opera twice a week, with plays, assemblies and suppers to fill up the time.’26 Certainly, if one had money the city had a lot to offer. There were two fashionable districts, one centred around Rutland Square (now Parnell Square) to the north of the Liffey, and the other around St Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square to the south. Both were known for their streets of fine terraced houses and their wealthy inhabitants, who enthusiastically pursued comfort, fashion and pleasure. Whaley resided in the house his father had built on St Stephen’s Green. Technically the property was owned by his mother, but he stood to inherit it and seems to have treated it like it was his own, at least while he was living there.27 Although he had not yet come into his legacy (and would not until 15 December 1786) he was known to be one of the city’s richest young gentlemen and he did not mind flaunting his wealth. Whaley maintained an extensive domestic staff, including a coachman, footmen, a groom, a nurse, a French cook and a sedan chair manned by two chairmen. He kept a pack of hunting dogs and a small pet dog, a black and yellow female terrier named Vixen.28 He must have been a reasonably decent master as his coachman, Denis Lennard, later declared that ‘there is no gentellman in Ir[e]land I would [serve] before my master as he was so good to me when I was with him’.29

Whaley’s pastimes, normal enough for a young upper-class male, included attending the theatre, music, drinking, gambling, hunting and yachting.30 The last of these became a passion. Like many other young gentlemen Whaley liked racing boats along the coast, especially when wagers were involved. Yet he also had a much grander project in mind. ‘I conceived the strange idea of performing, like [Captain] Cook, a voyage round the world; and no sooner had it got possession of my imagination, than I flew off at a tangent … in order to put my plan in execution.’ (W, 34) The impracticality of sailing around the globe must have been pointed out to Whaley and he modified his plan, but it remained an ambitious one. In August 1785 Anne Richardson caught wind that he, ‘tho’ he has not as yet told it to me himself’, was ‘on a very wild scheme of building a ship to take him up the Mediterranean’. He intended to sail ‘through the Straights of Gibraltar … visiting all the noted places bordering on the Mediterranean sea, whether in Europe, Africa, or Asia’.31 Of course, to realise this dream Whaley needed money and he decided he would borrow £1,500 from his mother or his sister Anne, who had by then inherited her share of the Whaley fortune. His mother urged Samuel Faulkner to ‘try to put him off and shew him the impossibility of his getting the cash from us … or … his sister’. Tom pressed ahead regardless and by October he had hired a shipbuilder on the Isle of Wight to start building a yacht.32 The money problem now became more pressing, as he found that the tradesmen working on the ship were ‘calling every minuet for the amount of their bills and how to pay them he knew not … he then exclaimed of his own doings and said he had no one to blame but himself’. Faulkner found the money to pay some of the men,33 but further demands would inevitably follow.

The ship was not the only drain on Whaley’s finances. On one of his periodic trips to London he had visited a brothel and fallen for one of the girls, ‘a fille de chambre, who had not only the character of being chaste, but had actually remained so during three years service with her mistress’. Apparently Whaley had had to resort to ‘the assistance of a bank note and gold watch [to] beat her virtue out of the field … a circumstance which has made many believe, that she never before was offered what she esteemed an adequate price for it’.34 This girl was later depicted alongside Whaley in the Town and Country Magazine, a London society publication (see Plate 6). She may have been the woman he brought from London to Dublin to be his lady companion, as described in his memoirs. Her name was Harriet Heydon, and it is unlikely that she was ‘chaste’ as she was, or had been, a married woman. Though she was ‘neither distinguished for wit or beauty,’ she was not as aggressively greedy as other courtesans he had visited. (W, 33) Perhaps this was what attracted him. He lodged Harriet in a house he had rented on Holles Street and spent lavishly on her.35 This was also where Whaley ‘kept my midnight orgies, and saw my friends, according to the fashionable acceptation of the word’. (W, 34)36

Alarmed 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.