In 1926, Emily and Henry Folger purchased a manuscript travel account written in 1763 from book dealer Bernard Halliday’s latest catalog. Halliday had wisely placed it in the “Shakespeare” section, highlighting that the writer quoted Shakespeare, visited his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, and saw renowned actor-manager David Garrick (1717 – 1779) as King Lear on the London stage. This made it worth £4 10s. to the Folgers, who wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in an 18th-century traveler’s observations. As it happens, though, the manuscript wasn’t quite what they and Halliday thought it was.
According to Bernard Halliday’s catalog description, Irish politician Sir John Parnell (1743 – 1795) had written the manuscript when he was a young man.
Item 832 in Catalogue of Books, Autographs, Manuscripts & Prints offered for sale by Bernard Halliday, no. 82, 1926, page 98
A pencil note on the front end-leaf gives Halliday’s reason for the attribution to Sir John: the writer quotes a line from Anglo-Irish poet Thomas Parnell (1679 – 1718) and identifies it as being by his uncle.
![Handwritten note reading "Journal of Sir John Parnell Bart. of Rathleague, Queen's Co., Ireland. See pages 18 and 19 where he quotes "whose dull brown Nayids [Naiads] ever sleep in mud" as his uncle's description of a sluggish river. The line is to be found in Thomas Parnell's Poem, "To Mr. Pope" (line 81)."](https://images.folger.edu/uploads/2023/08/PencilNote-e1693166542942.jpg)
Dealer’s handwritten note on front endleaf of Folger M.a.11 (detail from scanned microfilm)
Thanks to research shared with the Folger by David Menzies, MA student at University College Cork, we now know that the dealer got it wrong. The writer wasn’t politician Sir John Parnell, it was his cousin, Samuel Hayes (1743 – 1795), a politician, amateur architect, and expert in Irish forestry.
Family tree showing the relationship between Thomas Parnell and his great-nephews Samuel Hayes and John Parnell [compiled by Erin Blake from information in the Dictionary of Irish Biography; Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage; and Ireland, Abstracts of Wills and Marriages, 1620-1923]
The object of reaching Oxford was for the writer to attend a semester of lectures at Christchurch College, presented by Sir William Blackstone, legal writer and judge, who wrote the Commentaries on the Laws of England. To qualify to attend these lectures one had to first of all have a degree from a recognised European university, this allowed you to be accepted ‘ad eundem’ into Oxford University following a conferring ceremony.1
Samuel Hayes did, indeed, hold the required degree at the time, having received a BA that spring from Trinity College Dublin. John Parnell, on the other hand, had only just begun his studies that September. He didn’t receive his BA until the spring of 1766.
![Hayes, Samuel, S.C. (Mr. Ford), Jan. 8, 1759. [N.F.P.] B.A. Vern. 1762. [Of the Middle Temple; eldest s. of John, of Hayesville, Co. Wicklow; M.P., Wicklow, 1783, and Maryborough, 1790; Irish Bar 1767.] See Allibone.](https://images.folger.edu/uploads/2023/08/Hayes-Alumni-Dublinenses-e1693166432961.png?fit=300%2C300 "Hayes-Alumni-Dublinenses")
![Parnell, John, S.C. (Eton Coll.), Sept. 20, 1762; s. of Sir John, Bart. [N.F.P.] B.A. Vern. 1766 [2nd Bart. P.C.] See D.N.B., Eton College Register 1753-90, and Kilkenny Members of Parliament.](https://images.folger.edu/uploads/2023/08/Parnell-Alumni-Dublinenses-e1693166311483.png?fit=300%2C300 "Parnell-Alumni-Dublinenses")
The writer of the Folger manuscript records that he was “readily admitted” into Christ Church College, Oxford, on Friday, 5 November 1762, and formally received his degree ad eundem “about ten days” after that.
Account of being admitted to Christ Church College, Oxford, Folger M.a.11, page 23 (detail from scanned microfilm)
Alumni oxonienses confirms that a 19-year-old named Samuel Hayes, son of John Hayes of Dublin, matriculated 16 November 1762 (making the “about ten days” exactly eleven). Alumni oxonienses has no record of a John Parnell at Oxford.
Thanks to the information from David Menzies, we were able to update the Folger catalog, and M.a.11 is now correctly attributed to Samuel Hayes (with a cross-reference from John Parnell, since that’s who has been credited for almost 100 years of scholarship).
The story doesn’t end with the reattribution, though. The manuscript’s description in the “Shakespeare” section of the 1926 Bernard Halliday catalog revealed that “some other MSS. of Parnell’s are catalogued under ‘Agriculture’ in this list.” Were these other manuscripts really by John Parnell, or might they be directly related to Samuel Hayes’s “observations made during my Residence in England in 1763” now at the Folger?
I scrolled back in the digitized microfilm and found item 14, “Manuscript ‘Journal of a Tour through Wales and England 1769’ and continuation to 1783, written in 4 vols.” Finding the current whereabouts of those four manuscript volumes turned out to be as easy as typing some keywords into a search engine. They’re now LSE Library Archives and Special Collections Coll Misc 0038, also reattributed to Samuel Hayes thanks to David Menzies’s research. I contacted curatorial staff there, and they kindly sent some photographs.
The inside front cover has a penciled attribution in the same hand as the note in the Folger manuscript, along with a clipping from the 1926 bookseller’s catalog. Only the first three volumes are travel journals. The fourth is an account book begun in 1777 that records income, expenses, and notes about the construction of Avondale House on his country estate.2 The Folger catalog record for M.a.11 now directs researchers to this related material.
Detail from Folger catalog record for M.a.11
Hayes and his wife Alice (“Ally” in his journals) had no children, so by his will the Avondale estate passed to his mother’s brother’s son, entailed such that it could only be inherited by younger sons from then on. His mother’s brother’s son, of course, was his cousin — the same Sir John Parnell previously thought to have been the author of the manuscripts. In other words, when the dealer wrote “Journal of Sir John Parnell, Bart. of Rathleague” on the endleaves, he wasn’t actually wrong. They were his journals: he owned them. He just wasn’t their creator.
- “Findings that Samuel Hayes wrote the Journal attributed to Sir John Parnell in 1762,” unpublished paper sent to Folger staff 2 July 2023.
- Note that Halliday was able to ask £4 10s. for the one volume with a Shakespeare association, but only £3 3s. (expressed as “63s.”) for all four of the other volumes together.
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