Tone's exile was spent acquiring a rather different education in the glittering society of Richard Martin (Patriot MP for Jamestown, County Leitrim) and his beautiful and well-connected wife, Elizabeth Vesey of Lucan, County Dublin. Her father's home was the first of the great mansions on the road west out of Dublin. With the return of Peter Tone to the family home in Kildare, Tone would have spent much of his student days in this, the prime area for country seats and aristocratic mansions.

In Kildare the Tones’ neighbour, the wealthy and public-spirited MP Richard Griffith of Millicent, was much impressed with young Tone's gifts and provided his entree to Dublin society. He was introduced to the Martins’ social circle in fashionable Kildare Street and at their country seat of Dangan, on the shores of Lough Corrib, three miles from Galway town. Here Tone made three long visits during the years 1783–5. He shared the Martins’ passion for amateur dramatics. Martin was also a celebrated duellist and must have sympathised with the young man's plight. Tone was invited to accompany them to Dangan as tutor to Martin's younger half-brothers.

There a new social world was opened to him. The Martins were well connected with the country's leading political families, on both ‘government’ and ‘opposition’ sides. But Richard Martin was genuinely reformist and many of the ideas which were to dominate Tone's political thinking would have been encountered first in Martin's company. Martin was a colonel of the Galway Volunteers, a believer in Catholic emancipation and an indomitable critic of corruption in politics. He had been a supporter of Henry Grattan, the talented leader of the Patriot opposition in Parliament, but at the time of Tone's residence with the family he was undergoing an agonising conversion to the side of Henry Flood, Grattan's predecessor and rival.

It is, however, as the cuckold that we encounter Martin in Tone's journal.