Parker, MATTHEW, the second Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, was born son of a calenderer at Norwich, August 6, 1504, studied at St Mary's Hostel and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, took orders, and was elected to a fellowship. He was an arduous student of the Scriptures and of church history, yet, in spite of his strong leaning to the past, from an early period he was infected by the new doctrines. In 1535 he was appointed chaplain to the queen Anne Boleyn, and soon after he obtained the deanery of the college of St John the Baptist at Stoke near Clare in Suffolk. Here he lived mainly till 1545, his retiring temper finding pleasure enough in his studies and the administration of the college. In 1538 he was created D.D., next a royal chaplain and canon of Ely, and in 1544 master of Corpus Christi Col- lege, Cambridge, and the year after vice-chancellor of the university. Two years later he married. He was presented by Edward VI. to the deanery of Lincoln and the prebend of Corringham, but on the accession of Mary he resigned his mastership and was deprived of his preferments, finding safety, however, in strict retirement. The accession of Elizabeth called him from his retirement, and he was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in the chapel at Lambeth, December 17, 1559. The ridiculous fable about the informality of the ceremony is discussed under the head of the Nag's Head Consecration.
During his fifteen years' primacy Parker strove to define more clearly the limits of belief and discipline, and to bring about more general conformity. The Thirty-nine Articles were passed by convocation in 1562, and four years later the archbishop issued his 'Advertisements' for the regulation of service, which, with the measures of repression perhaps forced upon him by the imperious queen, provoked great opposition in the ranks of the growing Puritan party. To Parker belongs the merit of originating the revised translation of the Scriptures known as the Bishops' Bible. His wife died in August 1570. Her on one occasion Elizabeth insulted at Lambeth with the words, 'Madam I may not call you, and mistress I am loath to call you: however, I thank you for your good cheer.' Parker died 17th May 1575.
Parker did much for our native annals, but his methods as an editor have not commended themselves to modern scholars. He edited Ælfric's Anglo-Saxon Homily, to prove that transubstantiation was not the doctrine of the ancient English church; the Flores Historiarum, as the work of an assumed Matthew of Westminster; the Historia Major of Matthew Paris, the Historia Anglicana of Walsingham Asser's Gesta Ælfredi, and the Itinerarium of Giraldus Cambrensis. The De Excidio Britanniae of Gildas was edited under his eye by Josselin. He was an indefatigable collector of books, and the greater part of the treasures he had amassed he bequeathed to Corpus Christi College. This collection Fuller called 'the sun of English antiquity before it was eclipsed by that of Sir Robert Cotton.' Parker established a scriptorium at Lambeth, where he maintained printers, transcribers, engravers. His original writings are inconsiderable, the chief being a Latin treatise, De Antiquitate Britanniae Ecclesiae et Privilegiis Ecclesiae Cantuariensis (1572). His letters fill a volume (1853) in the publications of the Parker Society, a fitting memorial of the book-loving archbishop. The Society published from 1841 till its dissolution in 1853 as many as fifty-three volumes of the works of Ridley, Bull, Grindal, Hooper, Cranmer, Coverdale, Latimer, Jewel, Tyndale, Bullinger, Whitgift, Rogers, and other fathers of the English Reformation. For Parker's life, see the Life and Acts by Strype (3 vols. Oxford, 1824); also Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. ix. (1872).