Matthew Parker(1504–1575)

Matthew Parker was born at Norwich on 6 August 1504, the eldest son of William Parker, a calenderer (a worsted cloth-finisher) of St Saviour's parish, and Alice Monnings. His father died when the boy was twelve. His mother remarried John Baker, a Norfolk yeoman who paid Parker through Norwich grammar school and then in 1521 to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The Cambridge of the 1520s was the early-Tudor crucible of the English Reformation, the small-college community in which the Greek New Testament, the Lutheran tracts smuggled from the Continent, and the reformist theological reading group at the White Horse Inn produced the next generation of English Protestant clergy. Parker took his BA in 1525, was elected a fellow of Corpus in 1527, and was ordained priest in 1527. He was twenty-three.

He came to royal attention through his preaching. Anne Boleyn, casting around in 1535 for a chaplain of moderate Lutheran sympathy who could be entrusted with the religious education of her daughter Elizabeth, then two, chose Parker on the recommendation of her almoner John Skip. He stood by Anne at her trial and execution in May 1536 (the Lord Mayor's records put him in the deputation that visited her in the Tower in her last week), and he carried with him for the rest of his life what he later described in a letter to William Cecil as a charge from her that he should always have a special care for the welfare of the princess Elizabeth. The charge mattered. Twenty-three years later, when Elizabeth, by then queen, picked him out of the ruined post-Marian church and made him archbishop, the choice rested on the trust between them that Anne's request in the Tower had set up.

He was Master of Corpus Christi from 1544 and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge in 1545, married Margaret Harlestone of Mattishall in 1547 (one of the first openly married English clergy of the Edwardian phase), and was made Dean of Lincoln in 1552. Mary's accession in 1553 took everything off him. The Marian regime stripped him of his college, his deanery, his livings and his right to officiate; the marriage was annulled by Catholic law and his wife and small children went into hiding in friends' houses. He spent the five years of the reign moving between friends in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, partly in a small house at Stoke-by-Clare in Suffolk, writing private theological notes and a metrical psalter, and once nearly killed when a horse he was riding stumbled. Elizabeth's accession in November 1558 brought him back. She wanted him as archbishop within weeks. He refused twice on the grounds that he wanted to return to scholarly retirement at Cambridge. Cecil and the privy council told him the queen was not asking. He was consecrated at Lambeth on 17 December 1559.

The fifteen years that followed were the institutional construction of the Elizabethan Church of England. The Act of Supremacy of 1559 had restored the royal supremacy; the Act of Uniformity had imposed a slightly revised version of the 1552 Prayer Book. Parker was the executive who turned the statutes into a church. The Thirty-Nine Articles, drafted by him in 1563 and given final form in convocation in 1571, became the doctrinal spine of Anglicanism for the next four centuries. The Bishops' Bible of 1568, the official translation he commissioned and partly oversaw, was the predecessor text from which the 1611 King James Bible drew much of its phrasing. He also wrote and forced into print the *Advertisements* of 1566 that required surplice, square cap and standardised liturgy across the parish church, the policy decision that broke the first vestments controversy and produced the first Puritan resistance to the Elizabethan settlement.

His other work was scholarly. The dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and 1540s had thrown the great medieval English library collections of the abbeys onto the market and into private hands; many had been pulped to wrap fish. Parker, on the antiquarian principle that the Anglo-Saxon and early medieval English church was the historical foundation of an English Christianity independent of Rome, spent his fifteen years as archbishop systematically buying up surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts wherever they could be tracked. By the time of his death the Parker Library held about four hundred manuscripts, including the sixth-century Gospels of St Augustine (the oldest illustrated Latin gospel book in existence), the *Anglo-Saxon Chronicle* in the Parker manuscript, the *Ælfric Homilies*, and the *Bury Bible*. He bequeathed the library to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1575 under a covenant binding the college to preserve it and submit it to inspection every two years against the catalogue. The covenant has been observed continuously since. The Parker Library is the foundation source of every modern study of Anglo-Saxon literature, of the *Beowulf* manuscript line, and of the pre-Conquest English church. He died at Lambeth on 17 May 1575, seventy years old, and is buried in the Lambeth Palace chapel. The Parker name in the English-side catalogue is the Norman-Latin office of *parker*, deer-park keeper; he carried it from a Norwich worsted-finisher's family into the foundation of the Church of England and the rescue of the Anglo-Saxon manuscript inheritance.