Matthew Parker(1504–1575)

Matthew Parker was born at Norwich on 6 August 1504, the eldest son of a worsted cloth-finisher. He went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1521, into the small-college community in which the Greek New Testament and the reformist reading group at the White Horse Inn produced the next generation of English Protestant clergy. He took his degree in 1525, was elected a fellow of Corpus in 1527, and was ordained priest the same year.

He came to royal attention through his preaching. In 1535 Anne Boleyn chose him as her chaplain and entrusted him with the religious education of her infant daughter Elizabeth. He carried that charge for the rest of his life, and twenty-three years later, when Elizabeth was queen, the trust it had created was the foundation of her choice of him as archbishop.

He was Master of Corpus Christi from 1544 and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge in 1545. Through the Marian years he lived quietly out of public office, kept his faith, and returned the moment Elizabeth's accession allowed; she wanted him as archbishop within weeks. He twice asked to be left to scholarly retirement at Cambridge before accepting, and was consecrated at Lambeth on 17 December 1559.

The fifteen years that followed were the institutional construction of the Elizabethan Church of England. Parker was the executive who turned the statutes of the religious settlement into a working church. The Thirty-Nine Articles, which he drafted in 1563 and which took final form in 1571, became the doctrinal spine of Anglicanism for the next four centuries, and the Bishops' Bible of 1568, the official translation he commissioned, was a predecessor text from which the 1611 King James Bible drew much of its phrasing.

His other great work was scholarly rescue. The dissolution of the monasteries had thrown the medieval English library collections onto the market and many had been lost. Parker spent his years as archbishop systematically buying up surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; by his death the Parker Library held about four hundred, including the sixth-century Gospels of St Augustine, the Parker manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the Bury Bible. He bequeathed the library to Corpus Christi College in 1575 under a covenant binding the college to preserve it and inspect it every two years, observed continuously ever since. It is the foundation source of every modern study of Anglo-Saxon literature. He died at Lambeth on 17 May 1575. The Parker name, the Norman-Latin office of the deer-park keeper, carries him as the man who built the Church of England and saved the Anglo-Saxon manuscript inheritance.