(1746 - 1828), poet and traveller, 3rd s. of Rev. John Whalley; St John's Camb. BA 1767; ord. c.1770; m. 1 1774 Elizabeth Jones (d. 1801), 2 1803 Miss Heathcote (d. 1807), 3 1813 Mrs Horneck; lived in Bath 1776 - 83; DD Edinburgh 1808;
1785 - 6 Leghorn (by Nov. 1785), Pisa (Nov./Dec. 1785 - Jan. 1786), Leghorn, Pisa (by 13 Mar.), Florence (by May), Venice (Jun.) [Zurich by 15 Jun.]
In 1783, 'under the spur of economy', the Whalleys left their crescent house at Bath to live abroad.1 Having spent some time in France, they had sailed from Marseilles to Leghorn by November 1785 and spent the next six months in Tuscany, based in Pisa. Early in 1786 they witnessed the Carnival at Leghorn and during Lent they attended the assemblies of the Grand Duchess at Pisa; they also saw the Young Pretender in Florence. Early in June 1786 they were accompanying the Piozzis in Venice,2 and at the end of the month Thomas Whalley was in Zurich writing a long letter to his niece. He decried the Catholic church in Florence, whose priests 'sinking under the weight of their golden robes' were 'fuming the ignorant people round them with huge incense pots, finely wrought, and of massy silver'; the Great Duke had begun to act against such anomalies, having 'already suppressed above a hundred convents in Florence and its neighbourhood; and just before we left it, [he] had ordered mass to be said in the vulgar tongue'. Whalley's 'Notes on a journey from Italy through the Tyrol, Switzerland, and by the Rhine to Malines, in the summer of 1786' have been published.3 After spending the winter of 1786 - 7 in Brussels (where they again encountered the Piozzis in February 1787) they returned to England in the spring of 1787.
1. See Hill Wickham ed., Jnls. and Corr. of Thos. Sedgewick Whalley, [1863], 1:15 - 19, 441 - 71. 2. J.L. Clifford, Hester Lynch Piozzi, 279 - 80. 3. Hill Wickham (at n1), 1:169 - 230.