Matthew Parker

Elizabeth’s First Archbishop, 1504–1575

Matthew Parker was born at Norwich and educated at Corpus Christi (“Bennet”) College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow.1 He belonged to the Cambridge circle of evangelicals around Thomas Bilney and Hugh Latimer and was in trouble with them in 1528 over forbidden books, when Anne Boleyn interceded with Wolsey on their behalf. Anne made him her chaplain and dean of the collegiate church of Stoke by Clare, where he established regular preaching, a Bible lecture four days a week, and a grammar school. Shortly before her death she asked him to care for her daughter Elizabeth.2 He served Henry VIII and Edward VI as chaplain and became Master of his college, but under Mary he was deprived of everything and “compelled to live a poor and private life.”3

Elizabeth made him her first Archbishop of Canterbury. He was consecrated at Lambeth in December 1559 by bishops deprived under Mary, Miles Coverdale among them, since none of the Marian bishops would act; the tale of a consecration at the Nag’s Head tavern, Neal says, was “a fable.”4 Under his guidance the Forty-Two Articles were revised in 1563 and completed as the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1571.5 He oversaw the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, which Convocation in 1571 ordered kept in every cathedral and bishop’s house, and the same synod commended Foxe’s Acts and Monuments to the churches.6 He collected and preserved the old English manuscripts, paid for the first printing of the Anglo-Saxon Gospels in 1571, and left his great collection to his college.7

Parker was a moderate who disliked the cap and surplice himself, but he enforced the queen’s settlement against the Puritans with a firm hand, writing that “however the world may judge, he would serve God and his prince, and put her laws in execution.” Neal, writing for the Puritans, judges him harshly.8 He died in 1575 after some fifteen years as archbishop. Clarke gives 1502–1574; Littlejohn’s 1504–1575 is correct.9

Other Reformers   Thomas Cranmer

Notes

  1. Samuel Clarke, The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History (London: printed for T. V., 1654), “The Life of Matthew Parker.” ↩
  2. Colin Hamer, Anne Boleyn: One Short Life That Changed the English-Speaking World (Leominster: Day One, 2007), chap. 11, “A Faith in Action.” See Thomas Bilney. ↩
  3. Clarke, Marrow, “Matthew Parker.” ↩
  4. Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans, vol. 1, chap. 4; Forgotten Heroes, on Coverdale. See Miles Coverdale. ↩
  5. David M. Whitford, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012), pt. 1, Karin Maag, “Catechisms and Confessions of Faith,” and pt. 2, “A Reformation ABC,” s.v. “Articles of Religion.” ↩
  6. Frederic G. Kenyon, “English Versions,” in James Hastings, ed., A Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), §28; Whitford, Companion, pt. 1, “Making Martyrs, Martyr Theologies and Martyrologies.” See The Bishops’ Bible. ↩
  7. W. J. Heaton, Our Own English Bible: Its Translators and Their Work, chap. 12; Clarke, Marrow, “Matthew Parker.” ↩
  8. Neal, History of the Puritans, 1: chaps. 4–5; W. Bradford Littlejohn and Jonathan Roberts, eds., Reformation Theology: A Reader of Primary Sources with Introductions (Moscow, ID: Davenant Press, 2017), on the Elizabethan vestments controversy. ↩
  9. Littlejohn and Roberts, Reformation Theology; Clarke, Marrow, “Matthew Parker.” ↩