Matthew Parker

• 1. Introduction

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  Matthew Parker died on the 17th of May 1575 with a warning on his lips: that Puritan ideas of governance would, in his own words, "in conclusion undo the Queen and all others that depended upon her." He had spent sixteen years as Archbishop of Canterbury trying to hold the Church of England together, fighting on every front at once. Evangelicals wanted fewer vestments. Early presbyterians wanted no bishops at all. Conservatives wanted to roll back the clock toward the old Henrician church. And the Queen herself gave him the impossible task of imposing conformity while refusing to back him publicly.

  Parker was not a firebrand. He was a scholar, a disciplinarian, a man of genuine piety who had once been the personal chaplain of Anne Boleyn. He kept a printing establishment at Lambeth Palace, collected ancient manuscripts from dissolved monasteries, and helped give the English people their own Bible. He was also the man whose consecration as archbishop in 1559 sparked a theological argument about the nature of holy orders that would not be settled for more than three centuries.

  Who was this modest Norfolk-born cleric, and how did he come to shape the doctrine, liturgy, and scholarly foundations of the Church of England at its most turbulent hour?

• 2. Norwich Roots

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  William Parker, Matthew's father, was a wealthy worsted weaver in Norwich whose own grandfather had served as registrar to successive archbishops of Canterbury between 1450 and 1483. That family thread connecting trade, scholarship, and church administration would run through Matthew Parker's entire life. Born on the 6th of August 1504 in St Saviour's parish, he was the eldest surviving child of six, raised on what is now called Magdalen Street.

  His early education was piecemeal and largely domestic. His biographer John Strype recorded that his first reading masters were one Benis, Rector of St Clements in Norwich, and one Pope, a priest. A clerk named Prior taught him writing. Two masters, Love and Manthorp, drilled him in singing with a harshness he reportedly never forgot. Relief came from a schoolmaster named W. Neve, who taught grammar at home with what Strype described as a more gentle and mild disposition.

  In 1520 the sixteen-year-old Parker arrived at Cambridge, entering what is now Corpus Christi College under Richard Cowper. Within six months he had won a scholarship and moved into rooms in the college itself. Cambridge opened a different world: Luther's writings were circulating, and Parker could read works by married theologians from the Continent. He first commended clerical marriage while still a student there, a conviction he would act on decades before it was legally safe to do so.

• 3. A Circle of Reformers

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  Thomas Bilney shaped Parker's earliest years as a Cambridge scholar more than almost anyone else. Parker moved in Bilney's reformist circle and remained loyal to him throughout their time at the university together. In 1527 Bilney was accused of heresy, recanted under pressure, and was imprisoned for two years. He returned to Cambridge regretting that recantation and began preaching across Norfolk. In August 1531 he was condemned as a relapsed heretic and burnt at the stake in Norwich. Parker was present at the execution on the 19th of August, and in its aftermath he defended Bilney against accusations that Bilney had recanted again at the stake.

  Around the same year, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey invited a group of Cambridge scholars, Parker among them, to his new Cardinal College at Oxford. Parker declined, as did Thomas Cranmer. The college had been founded in 1525 on the site of St Frideswide's Priory and was still under construction when Wolsey fell from power in 1529.

  Parker was licensed to preach by Cranmer in 1533 and quickly became popular in and around Cambridge. Not one of his sermons has survived. His connection to the court came through Anne Boleyn, whose chaplain he became. Through her influence he was appointed dean of the college at Stoke-by-Clare in Suffolk in 1535, a post that would give him the quiet space to become the educator and institution-builder he most wanted to be.

• 4. Stoke and Corpus

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  Stoke-by-Clare had been secularised in 1514, and its residents were expected mainly to perform the offices of the church and pray for the founder's family. Parker transformed it. He introduced new statutes to ensure regular preaching, brought Cambridge scholars to deliver lectures, improved the education of the boy choristers, and built a free grammar school for local boys within the college precincts. His biographer V.J.K. Brook wrote that the post provided Parker with a happy and quiet place of retirement in the country to which he became devoted. His revitalisation of the college was thorough enough that he successfully argued for its exemption from dissolution, and it kept its status until after the death of Henry VIII in 1547.

  Shortly before Anne Boleyn's arrest in 1536, she charged her daughter Elizabeth to Parker's care, a responsibility he honoured for the rest of his life. He obtained his Bachelor of Divinity in July 1535 and was appointed chaplain to Henry in 1537, graduating Doctor of Divinity in July 1538. In 1539 opponents at Stoke denounced him to the Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley, accusing him of heresy and disloyal language. Audley dismissed every charge and told Parker to fear no such enemies.

  On the 4th of December 1544, on Henry's recommendation, Parker was elected master of Corpus Christi College. He is now regarded as its second founder. In January 1545, after only two months in the post, the university elected him vice-chancellor. A dispute arose with the Chancellor Stephen Gardiner over a student play called Pammachius, which derided the old ecclesiastical system. Parker was obliged to investigate but was ultimately allowed to resolve the matter himself on the university's behalf.

• 5. Marriage, Exile, and Return

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  In June 1547, before clerical marriages were legalised by Parliament and Convocation, Parker married Margaret, daughter of Robert Harlestone, a Norfolk squire. They had been planning to marry since around 1540 but had waited until it was no longer a felony for priests to wed. The marriage was a happy one, though Queen Elizabeth's personal dislike of Margaret would later cause Parker what his biographers describe as great distress.

  The couple had five children; two sons, John and Matthew, reached adulthood. During Kett's Rebellion Parker preached at the rebels' camp on Mousehold Hill near Norwich. He later encouraged his secretary, Alexander Neville, to write the history of that rising.

  When Mary Tudor came to the throne in July 1553, Parker's world collapsed. As a supporter of the Duke of Northumberland and a married man, he was stripped of his deanery at Lincoln, his mastership at Corpus Christi, and all other preferments. He survived the reign without going into exile, a fact that would not have endeared him to the more ardent Protestants who idealised those martyred by Mary. Historian James D. Wenn has suggested Parker may have had the protection of Sir Rowland Hill of Soulton, Shropshire, during this period. Hill was associated with the publication of the Geneva Bible and would later join Parker as a Commissioner for Ecclesiastical Cases in 1559.

• 6. Archbishop Against the Tide

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  Elizabeth chose Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury on the recommendation of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, her chief adviser. Parker himself made great efforts to avoid the appointment. He was elected on the 1st of August 1559, but the ceremony of consecration could not take place until the 19th of December because it was difficult to find the four bishops willing and qualified to perform it. The four who eventually officiated were William Barlow, John Scory, Miles Coverdale, and John Hodgkins.

  Parker mistrusted popular enthusiasm and believed that definite ecclesiastical forms were necessary if Protestantism was to be firmly established in England at all. He vigorously suppressed what he called a mutinous individualism incompatible with a catholic spirit. When the evangelical reformer Miles Coverdale and others made a public display of their nonconformity over vestments in London, Parker published the Book of Advertisements in 1566 to impose conformity, but it had to appear without specific royal sanction.

  He had a notable exchange with the MP Peter Wentworth when Parliament contested the bishops' right to determine matters of faith. Parker told Wentworth that Parliament should refer itself wholly to the bishops. Wentworth replied: "No, by the faith I bear to God, 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." Elizabeth refused to give him the Crown's imprimatur for his efforts at conformity, yet insisted he achieve it. The composer Thomas Tallis contributed Nine Tunes for Archbishop Parker's Psalter, one of the few works that bears his name with any celebrity.

• 7. Scholar and Manuscript Collector

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  Parker's most durable legacy may be the library he assembled. Working alongside the pioneering scholar Lawrence Nowell and his secretary John Joscelyn, Parker gathered manuscripts from former monastic libraries following the dissolution and left the collection to Corpus Christi College. The Parker Library, which houses most of the collection, includes the book of St Augustine Gospels and Version A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Scholars regard the collection as one of the world's most important holdings of ancient manuscripts.

  His historical research produced De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae, probably printed at Lambeth in 1572, where he maintained an establishment of printers, engravers, and illuminators. He also produced editions of Asser, Matthew Paris in 1571, Thomas Walsingham, and the compiler known as Matthew of Westminster in 1571. In 1567 he published an old Saxon Homily on the Sacrament by Aelfric of Eynsham, using it to argue that transubstantiation was not the doctrine of the ancient English Church.

  The Bishops' Bible was undertaken at Parker's request, prepared under his supervision, and published at his expense in 1572; much of his labour from 1563 to 1568 went into it. He had the principal share in drawing up the Book of Common Prayer, and it was under his presidency that the Thirty-nine Articles were finally reviewed and subscribed by the clergy in 1562. His purpose throughout was consistent: to demonstrate that the Church of England had always been historically independent of Rome. The Parker Library on the Web project has since made digital images of the entire manuscript collection available online, extending the reach of his life's scholarly work far beyond Corpus Christi.

• 8. The Consecration Controversy

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  Parker was consecrated in 1559 using the Edwardine Ordinal, which Mary Tudor had repealed and which the parliament of 1559 had not formally re-enacted. This legal gap gave rise to a dispute that outlasted Parker by more than three centuries. In 1896 a papal commission condemned Anglican orders as, in its precise wording, "absolutely null and utterly void." The commission's argument was that the English rite was defective in form because its words did not explicitly mention the intention to create a sacrificing bishop, and defective in matter because it omitted the handing of a chalice and paten to symbolise the power to offer sacrifice.

  The Church of England's archbishops of Canterbury and York responded in 1897 with a document called Saepius Officio. They argued that the preface to the Ordinal clearly stated the intention to continue the existing holy orders; that the words and actions of a rite, not the private doubts of individual officiants, are the sole determinants of validity; and that explicit references to sacrificial priesthood had not existed in ancient Catholic ordination liturgies before the 9th century, nor in certain Eastern-rite ordinations the Roman Catholic Church itself considered valid.

  Two of Parker's four consecrators, Barlow and Hodgkins, had been made bishops in 1536 and 1537 using the Roman Pontifical, and their orders were accepted as valid even by Rome's own criteria. The allegation that the consecration had been conducted informally at a tavern called the Nag's Head appears to have been first made by a Jesuit, Christopher Holywood, in 1604, and has since been discredited. The question of Parker's consecration is buried in him: he was laid to rest in the chapel of Lambeth Palace, and Matthew Parker Street near Westminster Abbey carries his name.