As a supporter of Northumberland and a married man, Parker was naturally deprived of his deanery, his mastership of Corpus, and his other preferments. But he found means to live in England throughout Mary's reign without further molestation. He was not cast in a heroic mould, and he had no desire to figure at the stake; like Cecil, and Elizabeth herself, he had a great respect for authority, and when his time came he could consistently impose authority on others. He was not eager to assume this task, and he made great efforts to avoid promotion to the archbishopric of Canterbury, which Elizabeth designed for him as soon as she had succeeded to the throne. He was elected on the 1st of August 1559; but it was difficult to find the requisite four bishops willing and qualified to consecrate him, and not until the 17th of December did Barlow, Scory, Coverdale and Hodgkins perform that ceremony at Lambeth. The legend of an indecent consecration at the Nag's Head tavern in Fleet Street seems first to have been printed by the Jesuit, Christopher Holywood, in 1604; and it has long been abandoned by reputable controversialists. Parker's consecration was, however, only made legally valid by the plentitude of the royal supremacy; for the Edwardine Ordinal, which was used, had been repealed by Mary and not re-enacted by the parliament of 1559.
Parker owes his fame to circumstances rather than to personal qualifications. This wise moderation of the Elizabethan settlement, which had been effected before his appointment, was obviously not due to him; and Elizabeth could have placed Knox or Bonner in the chair of St Augustine had she been so minded. But she wanted a moderate man, and so she chose Parker. He possessed all the qualifications she expected from an archbishop except celibacy. He distrusted popular enthusiasm, and he wrote in horror of the idea that “the people” should be the reformers of the Church. He was not inspiring as a leader of religion; and no dogma, no original theory of church government, no prayer-book, not even a tract or a hymn is associated with his name. The 56 volumes published by the Parker Society include only one by its eponymous hero, and that is a volume of correspondence. He was a disciplinarian, a scholar, a modest and moderate man of genuine piety and irreproachable morals. His historical research was exemplified in his De antiquitate ecclesiae, and his editions of Asser, Matthew Paris, Walsingham, and the compiler known as Matthew of Westminster; his liturgical skill was shown in his version of the psalter and in the occasional prayers and thanksgivings which he was called upon to compose; and he left a priceless collection of manuscripts to his college at Cambridge.
He was happier in these pursuits than in the exercise of his jurisdiction. With secular politics he had little to do, and he was never admitted to Elizabeth's privy council. But ecclesiastical politics gave him an infinity of trouble. Many of the reformers wanted no bishops at all, while the Catholics wanted those of the old dispensation, and the queen herself grudged episcopal privilege until she discovered in it one of the chief bulwarks of the royal supremacy. Parker was therefore left to stem the rising tide of Puritan feeling with little support from parliament, convocation or the Crown. The bishops' Interpretations and Further Considerations, issued in 1560, tolerated a lower vestiarian standard than was prescribed by the rubric of 1559; the Advertisements, which Parker published in 1566, to check the Puritan descent, had to appear without specific royal sanction; and the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum, which Foxe published with Parker's approval, received neither royal, parliamentary nor synodical authorization. Parliament even contested the claim of the bishops to determine matters of faith. “Surely,” said Parker to Peter Wentworth, “you will refer yourselves wholly to us therein.” “No, by the faith I bear to God,” retorted Wentworth, “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.” Disputes about vestments had expanded into a controversy over the whole field of Church government and authority, and Parker died on the 17th of May, 1575, lamenting that Puritan ideas of “governance” would “in conclusion undo the queen and all others that depended upon her.” By his personal conduct he had set an ideal example for Anglican priests, and it was not his fault that national authority failed to crush the individualistic tendencies of the Protestant Reformation.
John Strype's Life of Parker, originally published in 1711, and re-edited for the Clarendon Press in 1821 (3 vols.), is the principal source for Parker's life. A biographical sketch written from a different point of view was published by W. M. Kennedy in 1908. See also J. Bass Mullinger's scholarly life in Dict. Nat. Biog.; W. H. Frere's volume in Stephens and Hunt's Church History; Strype's Works (General Index); Gough's Index to Parker Soc. Publ. Fuller, Burnet, Collier and R. W. Dixon's Histories of the Church; Birt's Elizabethan Settlement; H. Gee's Elizabethan Clergy (1898); Froude's Hist. of England; and vol. vi. in Longman's Political History.
PARKER, SAMUEL (1640-1688), English bishop, was born
at Northampton, and educated at Wadham College, Oxford.
His Presbyterian views caused him to move to Trinity College,
where, however, the influence of the senior fellow induced him
to join the Church of England, and he was ordained in 1664.
In 1665 he published an essay entitled Tentamina physico-theologica
de Deo, dedicated to Archbishop Sheldon, who in
1667 appointed him one of his chaplains. He became rector
of Chartham, Kent, in the same year. In 1670 he became
archdeacon of Canterbury, and two years after he was appointed
rector of Ickham, Kent. In 1673 he was elected master of Edenbridge
Hospital. His Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (London,
1670), advocating state regulation of religious affairs, led him
into controversy with Andrew Marvell (1621-1675). James II.
appointed him to the bishopric of Oxford in 1686, and he
in turn forwarded the king's policy, especially by defending
the royal right to appoint Roman Catholics to office. In 1687
the ecclesiastical commission forcibly installed him as president
of Magdalen College, Oxford, the fellows having refused to elect
any of the king's nominees. He was commonly regarded as
a Roman Catholic, but he would appear to have been no more
than an extreme exponent of the High Church doctrine of
passive obedience. After he became president the action of
the king in replacing the expelled fellows with Roman Catholics
agitated him to such a degree as to hasten his end; to the priests
sent to persuade him on his death-bed to be received into the
Roman Church he declared that he “never had been and never
would be of that religion,” and he died in the communion of
the Church of England.
Parker's second son, Samuel Parker (1681-1730), was the author of Bibliotheca biblica, or Patristic Commentary on the Scriptures (1720-1735), an abridged translation of Eusebius, and other works. He was also responsible during 1708 and 1709 for a monthly periodical entitled Censura temporum, or Good and Ill Tendencies of Books. He passed most of his life in retirement at Oxford. His younger son Richard founded the well-known publishing firm in Oxford.
See Magdalen College and James II. 1686-1688, by the Rev. J. R. Bloxam (Oxford Historical Society, 1886).
PARKER, THEODORE (1810-1860), American preacher
and social reformer, was born at Lexington, Massachusetts, on the 24th of August 1810, the youngest of eleven children. His father, John Parker, a small farmer and skilful mechanic, was a typical New England yeoman. His mother took great pains with the religious education of her children, “caring, however, but little for doctrines,” and making religion to consist of love and good works. His paternal grand-father, Captain John Parker (1729-1775), was the leader of the Lexington minute-men in the skirmish at Lexington. Theodore obtained the elements of knowledge in the schools of the district, which were open during the winter months only. During the rest of the year he worked on his father's farm. At the age of seventeen he became himself a winter schoolmaster, and in his twentieth year he entered himself at Harvard, working on the farm as usual (until 1831) while he followed his studies and going over to Cambridge for the examinations only. For the theological course he took up in 1834 his
