In the weeks before Byron’s
death William Parry (1773–1859) became the poet’s confidante and partisan. As
a result he was drawn into political broils and after his patron’s death
stripped of his responsibilities and criticized by members of the London Greek
Committee—in Leicester Stanhope’s Greece, in 1823 and 1824 and
Henry Southern’s article in the London Magazine, “Personal
Character of Lord Byron,” both of which had appeared in October 1824. In
defending himself in Last Days (which appeared in April 1825) Parry took
pains to document his case; while transparently biased, his memoir is a
particularly valuable record of Byron’s intentions and actions at
Missolonghi.
Little is known of Parry’s
earlier life; he had been a shipwright before travelling to Greece under the
auspices of the Greek Committee to establish a small munitions factory at
Missolonghi. Byron admired him as a practical man and boon companion in contrast to
the usual visionaries and ideologues of the Committee. Things went badly for the
munitions laboratory almost from the start: it had to compete for resources with
other projects such as the newspaper favored by Byron’s rival commissioner,
Leicester Stanhope. The six artisans who were to operate the factory departed
almost immediately, leaving Parry with only his foreman and clerk. Parry was
distressed by Mavrocordo’s lack of interest in defensive preparations and
money was ever in short supply.
As time passed Parry seems to have
less involved with the laboratory and more involved with the affairs of
Byron’s brigade, in which he was promoted to major. This caused resentment
among officers who regarded themselves as Parry’s social and professional
superiors, and among subordinates who undercut Parry’s authority by entering
into secret communications with Stanhope. The fact that Parry was dividing his time
between his official duties at the factory and unofficial duties as Byron’s
companion and counsellor did not sit well in some quarters; there were further
tensions during Byron’s illness when Parry took Byron’s part against
the ministrations of the physicians.
After Byron’s death Parry
found himself in a difficult position when Leicester Stanhope moved quickly to undo
most of what his rival commissioner had striven to accomplish. At this critical
juncture Parry fell ill and was removed to Zante in the Ionian Islands. During his
absence Edward John Trelawny arrived at Missolonghi and at Stanhope’s behest
assigned Parry’s munitions to the Greek chieftain Odysseus and dispersed what
remained of Byron’s brigade. Parry and Mavrocordato waited in vain for a new
commissioner, Thomas Gordon of Cairness, whom they hoped would put a stop to
Stanhope’s proceedings and support the constitutional government. In May of
1824 Stanhope and Parry were both recalled, the former to march in Byron’s
funeral and the latter to prepare his defense of Byron.
As came out in a subsequent trial
for libel, Parry was assisted in writing Last Days of Lord Byron by the
political economist Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) who like Parry came from a naval
background. The lawyer-like care with which Parry marshals his evidence is more
than one might expect from an outraged shipwright. So too, perhaps, the ambition of
its thorough-going attack on Stanhope, his patron Jeremy Bentham, and the
machinations and incompetency of the London Greek Committee. Yet we know little of
Parry’s history; the letters transcribed in Last Days suggest a very
different man than the illiterate boor his detractors made him out to be.
Whatever the extent of
Hodgskin’s contribution, the book’s documentation, anecdotes, and
character analysis derive from Parry himself. He counters the common views of Byron
as a wild-eyed idealist or sneering dilettante by presenting him as a pragmatic
war-leader undone by the factionalism of his associates and the incompetence of his
physicians. Hodgskin’s populist economic views favoring the claims of labor
against those of capital and Benthamite utilitarianism also come across clearly: a
great-hearted mechanic and heroic aristocrat are pit against the self-serving
interests of a faux-enlightened managerial class.
The publisher Charles Knight
described his 1824 encounter with Parry in Passages of a Working Life
(1864-65):
In the midst of these Chancery proceedings [related to R. C. Dallas’s
Recollections] a Captain Parry was announced. “A fine rough subject”—as
Byron designated this “fire-master who was to burn a whole fleet,”—came into my
private room, with a leathern bag slung over his shoulder. He threw it on the
table, exclaiming, “There you have the best book that any one can write about the
Right Honourable George Gordon, Lord Byron.” He opened the wallet; handed me some
of the illiterate scrawl; vaunted again and again his friendship with the Right
Honourable George Gordon, Lord Byron—always naming him by his titles at full
length; and was very much astonished when I declined having anything to say to the
affair. Captain Parry found some person to prepare his MS. for the press. An action
of some sort arose out of the publication; and I was called as a witness to prove
the nature of the contents of that leathern bag, Parry having maintained that he
was the sole author of the book. The most remarkable part of this piece of literary
manufacture was a ribald description of Jeremy Bentham, running up Fleet Street
pursued by a notorious woman called “The City Barge.” Parry had indoctrinated his
scribe with his own hatred of the Utilitarians of the Greek Committee in London,
who sent out printing-presses and pedagogues in more plentiful supply than
Congreve-rockets. Byron writes on the 8th February, “Parry says B . . . . . [?
Bentham] is a humbug, to which I say nothing. He sorely laments the printing and
civilizing expenses, and wishes that there was not a Sunday school in the world.”
(2:16)
Parry’s preface describes
the materials used to compose the book: a journal of the activities at the factory,
a report of these drawn up for Byron, and various letters and documents appended to
his book. From these he (and Hodgskin) compiled the first six chapters covering the
period enlistment with the Greek Committee under the auspices of Joseph Hume and
Thomas Gordon in November of 1823 to the death of Byron in April of 1824. The tenth
and eleventh chapters are devoted to the case against Leicester Stanhope.
The three intervening chapters
present a character of Lord Byron developed from anecdotes and opinions expressed
in conversation. Byron’s fifteen-page peroration on the future of Greece
given in chapter eight was obviously composed as a set piece; if in such passages
one suspects Thomas Hodgskin’s artful aid the sentiments expressed do sound
like Byron. The appended documents cover Parry’s business with Mavrocordato
and the Greek Committee. Of particular interest are the letters written subsequent
to Byron’s death, including four from the American George Jarvis (1798-1828)
who had enlisted in Byron’s regiment.
One of the most prominent items in
Last Days is the ludicrous caricature of Jeremy Bentham which drew fire
from the Hunts’ Examiner, which characterised William Parry as an
“exceedingly ignorant, boasting, bullying, and drunken individual ... who
cannot write ten lines of English” (22 May 1825). The Examiner
appended these words to Stanhope’s otherwise tepid reply to Parry, dated 14
May, but belatedly reprinted 2 April 1826. The aspersions cost Parry a lucrative
post and he sued for damages.
The case was tried 14 June 1827,
and while Parry won the jurors awarded him only £50. Worse, John Hunt and his
lawyer Thomas Wilde attempted to “prove” the libel by assembling a cast
of witnesses hostile to Parry who thoroughly blackened his character. Among them
was Leicester Stanhope, who testified that:
I have read the Last Days of Lord Byron. Parry is not capable of writing
such a work. He is a man of a sound natural mind, but uneducated. He does not speak
grammatically correct.... Lord Byron treated him as a fool, a buffoon—not as
one of these fools that have so often graced the tables of the great. Parry called
Lord Byron Hal, and he called him Falstaff. (The Times, 15
June 1827)
Byron’s servants Fletcher
and Lega Zambelli were called to testify that Parry was a sot and a coward, along
with other disaffected parties present at Missolonghi. Julius Millingen, one of the
Missolonghi physicians, later caricatured Parry in Memoirs of the Affairs of
Greece (1831):
Parry was altogether a “curious fish,” an excellent mimic; and
possessed a fund of quaint expressions, that made up for his deficiency of real
wit. He could tell, in his coarse language, a good story, could perform the
clown’s or Falstaff’s part very naturally, rant Richard the
Third’s or Hamlet’s soliloquies in a mock-tragic manner, unrivalled by
any of the players of Bartholomew fair, and could always engender laughter enough
to beguile the length of our rainy evenings.... It was soon perceived, that the
brandy-bottle was Parry’s Castalian spring, and that, unless he drank deep,
his stories became dull. Lord Byron, in consequence, took constant care to keep him
in good spirits; but unfortunately, partly from inclination, and partly to keep him
company, he drank himself to the same excess. (117)
Edward John Trelawny, also no
friend of Parry’s, later claimed that he “drank himself into a
madhouse.” Parry did spend the last seventeen years of his life in the
Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, where he died at the age of eighty-five. But the shipwright
could give as good as he got, and in passages like this, even if the phrasing is
Hodgskin’s, one begins to see why Byron admired the man:
Colonel Stanhope carried in his head plans for organizing the army, regulating
the government, establishing schools, setting up newspapers, forming utilitarian
societies, running mails, instructing the people, reforming the rulers, changing
the religion, framing codes of law, regulating judicial proceedings, and in short,
for doing every thing. He had a constitution ready cut and dried; and he set about
all these mighty projects without any of that previous acquaintance with the Greeks
which one might expect would at least be possessed by any man who proposed to
legislate for them. He had indeed been in Hindostan, and had such a correct idea of
the mode of treating the Greeks, that he recommended the Greek committee to consult
Anglo-Indians, in order to ascertain the best means of treating the Greeks. (270)
In James Parry Byron found a loyal
ally, a convivial friend, and an effective witness to his disinterested love for
Greek liberty.
