Sir Willoughby Parfitt (also referred to on one occasion as Lord Parfitt) is the main antagonist of the television movie Sharpe's Justice.
He was portrayed by the late Tony Haygarth, who voiced Mr. Tweedy in Chicken Run.
Biography[]
Sir Willoughby Parfitt was a Yorkshire mill and factory owner, who prided himself in being a self-made man. He had his own private army, the Scarsdale yeomanry, led by the somewhat foppish and sadistic Captain George Wickham. Major Richard Sharpe was given a commission as commander of the yeomanry and Parfitt welcomed him in a friendly manner, presenting himself as a similar working class success story and instructing him to put an end to the rabble-rousing caused by the rebellious Matthew Truman.
In fact, Parfitt's success was the result of underhand tactics: It was not Truman who was behind the acts of sabotage against local businesses but Parfitt and his cronies, led by Wickham and Parfitt's foreman Saunders. This was why, despite being one of the most hated employers in the area, Parfitt had never been affected. He announced he was cutting his employees' wages and, when Lord Rossendale approached him asking for advice on improving the land he had inherited, noted he never built himself but bought from others, even if they didn't initially want to sell. He was cynical about Rossendale's claim to have taken in Sharpe's wife Jane Gibbons out of "pity".
Despite his scheming, Parfitt was furious that several of his workers were killed by his yeoman during a failed attempt to capture Truman, but seemed to accept Wickham's claim that he had been acting under Sharpe's orders. With the discovery that Truman was Sharpe's half-brother, Parfitt continued to see him as a convenient scapegoat. Parfitt made plans to wreck a steam engine that his rival Lord Stanwyck was having delivered, but Sharpe and his friends Harper and Hagman caught Wickham and his men in the act.
With Wickham as a prisoner, Sharpe and Stanwyck confronted Parfitt. Stanwyck contemptuously told Parfitt that now the truth about him was known, his businesses would soon fail and he'd be left to rot. Sharpe similarly demanded that Parfitt write a letter acknowledging that it was Wickham, and not him, who was responsible for the workers' massacre, to which Parfitt meekly agreed.
