fol. 190, and on the back of fol. 191 is a poetical epitaph on him (Hist. MSS. Comm. 2nd Rep. App. p. 41). After his death a work, published, probably, at the instance of the government, and entitled ‘A true and plaine Declaration of the Horrible Treasons practised by William Parry,’ charged him with various atrocious crimes quite inconsistent with Burghley's confidence in him. It made depreciatory remarks on his birth and parentage, but little reliance can be placed upon them.
There is some doubt as to Parry's guilt, and it is improbable that he would ever have summoned up sufficient resolution to carry his scheme into effect even if he had been genuine in his intention. ‘Subtle, quick, and of good parts,’ he was extremely weak and vacillating, and his confession and letters convey the suspicion that he was not quite sane. Parry's nephew, according to Strype, had been with him in Rome, and the younger man subsequently served the Duke of Guise and Alexander of Parma; he was executed late in Elizabeth's reign for highway robbery.
[There are numerous letters from Parry to Burghley in Lansdowne MSS., where is also an account of the proceedings relative to his trial for assault on Hugh Hare; cf. also Harl. MSS. 787 No. 49, 895 No. 3, which gives his speech on the scaffold; Cal. State Papers, Dom. Ser.; Murdin's Burghley Papers, p. 440; Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th Rep. App. p. 213, 6th Rep. App. p. 306 a; Hatfield MSS. vv. 25, 58, 59; Stubbes's Intended Treason of Doctor Parrie [1585]; A true and plaine Declaration of the Horrible Treasons practised by William Parry, &c., 1585, also reprinted with Sir W. Monson's Megalopsychy, 1681, fol.; D'Ewes's Journals, passim; Collection of State Tryals, 1719, i. 103–10; Cobbett's State Trials, i. 1097–1111; Jardine's Criminal Trials, i. 246–76; Journals of the House of Commons; Official Returns of Members of Parliament; Strype's Annals, passim; Camden's Elizabeth, ed. Hearne, ii. 426–30; Holinshed, iii. 1382–96; Somers's Tracts, i. 264; Foulis's Hist. of Romish Treasons, p. 342, &c.; Bartoli's Istoria della Compagnia di Giesù—l' Inghilterra, 1667, pp. 286–91; Hazlitt's Handbook and Collections, passim; Spedding's Bacon, viii. 37, x. 37, 55; Aikin's Memoirs of Elizabeth, ii. 143–6; Letters, &c., of Cardinal Allen, pp. 392–3; Dodd's Church History, ii. 152–3, and Tierney's Dodd, iii. 20, App. No. xiii.; Foley's Records of the English Jesuits, i. 327, 384, iv. 169; Pike's Annals of Crime; Lingard, Froude, Ranke, and Hallam's Histories; Gardiner, x. 144; Williams's Eminent Welshmen; Notes and Queries, 7th ser. vi. 468, vii. 76; cf. art. Elizabeth.]
PARRY, WILLIAM (fl. 1601), traveller, is the author of ‘A New and Large Discourse of the Travels of Anthony Sherley, Kt.,’ in Turkey, Persia, and Russia (1601). He accompanied Shirley [see Shirley, Sir Anthony] in all his wanderings in the track of John Newberie [q. v.], Ralph Fitch [q. v.], and Anthony Jenkinson [q. v.], and his account is amusing and observant. He describes the outward route by Flushing, the Hague, Cologne, Frankfort, the Alps, and Venice to Aleppo. The Englishmen were arrested by the Turks in Cyprus on the slanderous information of Italians; released on payment of backsheesh, they had to make their way to Tripoli in Syria in a small boat. The Syrians, according to Parry, ‘sit all day drinking a liquor they call coffee, made of a seed like mustard.’ Embarking on the Euphrates at Birrah, after visiting Antioch and Aleppo, Shirley and Parry sailed down the river for twenty-three days, and so reached Babylon, where their merchandise was seized, and only half its value given back. Informed against by a ‘drunken Dutchman,’ they hurried on from Babylon, where Parry describes the ‘old tower of Babel, about the height of Paul's,’ into Persia. They were lucky enough to escape the Turkish frontier guards, who threatened ‘to cut them into gobbets,’ and, passing through the country of the Kurds, ‘altogether addicted to thieving, not much unlike the wild Irish,’ they received a warm welcome at Casben from the shah. Parry gives a short account of the Persian court, and the manners and religion of the people, and condemns them as ‘ignorant in all kinds of liberal or learned sciences, except in … horses' furniture, carpettings, and silk works.’ Persian coppers, he says, are like ‘our Bristow tokens.’ After very honourable treatment the Englishmen took their leave for Russia. They were two months crossing the Caspian in stormy weather; from Astrakhan to Moscow was a journey of ten weeks more, seven of them up the ‘mighty river of Volga.’ At the Russian capital the English travellers, though at first entertained by a ‘crew of aqua vitæ bellied fellows,’ soon fell under suspicion, were put in confinement, and vexed with ‘frivolous particularities,’ as if spies. The English merchants in Moscow went bail for them; and the visitors were allowed to go on their way, after witnessing a great church and state procession, in which a monstrous bell of twenty tons weight was dragged by 3,500 men, as Parry relates, ‘after the manner of our western bargemen in England.’
From Russia Parry returned home with some reputation for travel. John Davies (1565?–1618) [q. v.] of Hereford addressed to him a sonnet in praise of his daring. Parry's ‘Discourse’ was partly reprinted in Purchas's
