MATTHEW PARKER, Archbishop of Canterbury, was the eldest son of William Parker, a citizen of Norwich, where he was born, in St Saviour's parish, on the 6th of August 1504. His mother's maiden name was Alice Monins, and a John Monins married Cranmer's sister Jane, but no definite relationship between the two archbishops has been traced. William Parker died about 1516, and his widow married a certain John Baker. Matthew was sent in 1522 to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he is said by most of his biographers, to have been contemporary with Cecil; but Cecil was only two years old when Parker went to Cambridge.

He graduated B.A. in 1525, was ordained deacon in April and priest in June 1527, and was elected fellow of Corpus in the following September. He commenced M.A. in 1528, and was one of the Cambridge scholars whom Wolsey wished to transplant to his newly founded Cardinal College at Oxford. Parker, like Cranmer, declined the invitation. He had come under the influence of the Cambridge reformers, and after Anne Boleyn's recognition as Queen he was made her chaplain. Through her he was appointed dean of the college of secular canons at Stoke-by-Clare in 1535. Latimer wrote to him in that year urging him not to fall short of the expectations which had been formed of his ability. In 1537 he was appointed chaplain to Henry VIII, and in 1538 he was threatened with prosecution by the reactionary party. The Bishop of Dover, however, reported to Cromwell that Parker "hath ever been of a good judgment and set forth the Word of God after a good manner. For this he suffers some grudge." He graduated D.D. in that year, and in 1541 he was appointed to the second prebend in the reconstituted cathedral church of Ely.

In 1544 on Henry VIII's recommendation he was elected master of Corpus Christi College, and in 1545 vice-chancellor of the university. He got into some trouble with the chancellor, Gardiner, over a ribald play, "Pammachius," performed by the students, deriding the old ecclesiastical system, though Bonner wrote to Parker of the assured affection he bore him. On the passing of the act of parliament in 1545 enabling the King to dissolve chantries and colleges, Parker was appointed one of the commissioners for Cambridge, and their report saved its colleges, if there had ever been any intention to destroy them. Stoke, however, was dissolved in the following reign, and Parker received a pension equivalent to £400 a year in modern currency. He took advantage of the new reign [Edward VI] to marry in June, 1547, before clerical marriages had been legalized by parliament and convocation, Margaret, daughter of Robert Harlestone, a Norfolk squire. During Kett's rebellion he was allowed to preach in the rebels' camp on Mousehold Hill, but without much effect; and later on he encouraged his chaplain, Alexander Neville, to write his history of the rising. His Protestantism advanced with the times, and he received higher promotion under Northumberland than under the moderate Somerset. Bucer was his friend at Cambridge, and he preached Bucer's funeral sermon in 1551. In 1552 he was promoted to the rich deanery of Lincoln, and in July 1553 he supped with Northumberland at Cambridge, when the Duke marched north on his hopeless campaign against Mary.

As a supporter of Northumberland and a married man, Parker was naturally deprived of his deanery, his mastership of Corpus, and his other preferments. But he found means to live in England throughout Mary's reign without further molestation. He was not cast in a heroic mould, and he had no desire to figure at the stake; like Cecil, and Elizabeth herself, he had a great respect for authority, and when his time came he could consistently impose authority on others. He was not eager to assume this task, and he made great efforts to avoid promotion to the archbishopric of Canterbury, which Elizabeth designed for him as soon as she had succeeded to the throne. He was elected on the 1st of August 1559; but it was difficult to find the requisite four bishops willing and qualified to consecrate him, and not until the 17th of December did Barlow, Scory, Coverdale and Hodgkins perform that ceremony at Lambeth. The legend of an indecent consecration at the Nag's Head tavern in Fleet Street seems first to have been printed by the Jesuit, Christopher Holywood, in 1604; and it has long been abandoned by reputable controversialists.

Parker's consecration was, however, only made legally valid by the plentitude of the royal supremacy; for the Edwardine Ordinal, which was used, had been repealed by Mary and not re-enacted by the parliament of 1559. Parker owes his fame to circumstances rather than to personal qualifications. This wise moderation of the Elizabethan settlement, which had been effected before his appointment, was obviously not due to him; and Elizabeth could have placed Knox or Bonner in the chair of St Augustine had she been so minded. But she wanted a moderate man, and so she chose Parker. He possessed all the qualifications she expected from an archbishop except celibacy. He distrusted popular enthusiasm, and he wrote in horror of the idea that "the people" should be the reformers of the Church.

He was not inspiring as a leader of religion; and no dogma, no original theory of church government, no prayer-book, not even a tract or a hymn is associated with his name. The 56 volumes published by the Parker Society include only one by its eponymous hero, and that is a volume of correspondence. He was a disciplinarian, a scholar, a modest and moderate man of genuine piety and irreproachable morals. His historical research was exemplified in his De antiquitate ecclesiae, and his editions of Asser, Matthew Paris, Walsingham, and the compiler known as Matthew of Westminster; his liturgical skill was shown in his version of the psalter and in the occasional prayers and thanksgivings which he was called upon to compose; and he left a priceless collection of manuscripts to his college at Cambridge.

He was happier in these pursuits than in the exercise of his jurisdiction. With secular politics he had little to do, and he was never admitted to Elizabeth's privy council. But ecclesiastical politics gave him an infinity of trouble. Many of the reformers wanted no bishops at all, while the Catholics wanted those of the old dispensation, and the queen herself grudged episcopal privilege until she discovered in it one of the chief bulwarks of the royal supremacy. Parker was therefore left to stem the rising tide of Puritan feeling with little support from parliament, convocation or the Crown. The bishops' Interpretations and Further Considerations, issued in 1560, tolerated a lower vestiarian standard than was prescribed by the rubric of 1559; the Advertisements, which Parker published in 1566, to check the Puritan descent, had to appear without specific royal sanction; and the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum, which Foxe published with Parker's approval, received neither royal, parliamentary nor synodical authorization. Parliament even contested the claim of the bishops to determine matters of faith. "Surely," said Parker to Peter Wentworth, "you will refer yourselves wholly to us therein." "No, by the faith I bear to God," retorted Wentworth,"we will pass nothing before we understand what it is; for that were but to make you popes. Make you popes who list, for we will make you none." Disputes about vestments had expanded into a controversy over the whole field of Church government and authority, and Parker died on the 17th of May, 1575, lamenting that Puritan ideas of "governance" would "in conclusion undo the Queen and all others that depended upon her." By his personal conduct he had set an ideal example for Anglican priests, and it was not his fault that national authority failed to crush the individualistic tendencies of the Protestant Reformation.

(A. F. Pollard)

Books for further study:

Brook, Victor John Knight. A Life of Archbishop Parker.
            Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.

Bruce, John and Thomas T. Perowne, eds. Correspondence of Matthew Parker.
            Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005.

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