Born at Norwich, England, Aug. 6, 1504: died at London, May 17, 1575. Archbishop of Canterbury. He graduated at Cambridge (Corpus Christi College) in 1525, and was appointed chaplain to Anne Boleyn. He was selected to preach at Paul’s Cross by Thomas Cromwell. In 1545 he was appointed vice-chancellor of Cambridge. On the accession of Mary Tudor he resigned, and lost all his preferments. He was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury Dec. 17, 1559. As primate he devoted himself to the organization and discipline of the English Church, and was a firm opponent of puritanism.

  Wrote a treatise “De Antiquitate Britannicæ Ecclesiæ et Priviligiis Ecclesiæ Cantuariensis, cum Archiepiscopis ejusdem 70” (1572), superintended the production of the “Bishop’s Bible” (1568), and edited the works of Matthew of Paris and other writers.

  He was a Parker indeed,—careful to keep the fences, and shut the gates of discipline against all such night-stealers as would invade the same. No wonder, then, if the tongues and pens of many were whetted against him, whose complaints are beheld, by discreet men, like the exclamations of truantly scholars against their master’s severity, correcting them for their faults.

  His apostolical virtues were not incompatible with the love of learning, and while he exercised the arduous office, not of governing, but of founding the Church of England, he strenously applied himself to revive the study of the Saxon tongue, and of English antiquities.

  A name, never to be pronounced without emotions of pious respect.

  On the accession of Queen Mary, Matthew Parker shared the fate of all the married clergymen who would not part with their wives. He was stripped of his preferments, and lived, poor and content, under the shelter of a friend’s house in Norfolk, with his wife and their two little sons. He was sometimes looked for; and once, in escaping, had a fall from a horse, of which the hurt remained for life. When Parker, in his day of trouble under Mary, turned the Psalms into English verse, he did so for comfort to himself like that of David, for whom, he says in his metrical preface to this work,

	“With golden stringes such harmonie
	His harpe so sweete did wrest,
	That he relieved his phrenesie
	When wicked sprites possest.”

This version of the Psalter—the first in which all the Psalms were fashioned by one person into English metre—finished in 1557, was printed about 1560 by John Day.

  Parker kept a staff of scribes and painters in miniature, and had his own press and fount of type. He published many scarce tracts to save them from oblivion. Others he ordered to be copied in manuscript, and these and all his ancient books he caused to be “trimly covered;” so that we may say with Dibdin, “a more determined book-fancier existed not in Great Britain.” He gave some of his books to “his nurse Corpus Christi” at Cambridge, and some to the public library; and his gift to the College was compared to “the sun of our English antiquity,” eclipsed only by the shadow of Cotton’s palace of learning.

  His position gave him exceptional opportunities for securing and preserving literary treasures, and he turned them to the best account…. Though highly esteemed by Elizabeth, he was but an indifferent courtier. He shunned all occasions of pomp and parade, his natural bashfulness having been increased, according to his own statement (Corresp. p. 199), “with passing those hard years of Mary’s reign in obscurity.” He avoided the society of the great, and especially that of foreigners; and at the council-board he sat diffident and mostly silent. His modesty, however, conciliated those who disapproved his policy, and by the great majority of his contemporaries to whom the fame and prosperity of England were dear he was honoured and esteemed. In the exercise of hospitality he was materially aided by his wife, whose tact and genial disposition signally fitted her for such duties; and Elizabeth herself, touched by the grace and courtesy of her reception when on a visit to Lambeth Palace, but unable altogether to suppress her dislike of clerical matrimony, took leave of her hostess with the oft-quoted words; “Madam I may not call you; mistress I am ashamed to call you; but yet I thank you” (Nugæ Antiquæ, ii. 46).