Matthew Parker: A Holy Anchor
Matthew Parker became the Archbishop of Canterbury December 17, 1559, just a year into Elizabeth’s reign as Queen of England and Ireland. As the Tudor soverigns before her, Elizabeth I served the newly formed Church of England as its Supreme Governor. The Virgin Queen reigned for over 44 years and she was assisted by three remarkable Archbishops, Matthew Parker, Edmund Grindal, and John Whitgift, each of whom played a different role in helping Elizabeth set the church in Protestantism. Parker had earlier been one of Anne Boleyn’s chaplains, and now for 16 years (1559-1575) he was the construction manager for what came to be know at the "Elizabethan Settlement" that fixed the Church of England into an expression of Protestantism that is thoroughly biblical, theologically confessional, pastorally generous, and liturgically beautiful.
With Elizabeth’s sometimes-fickle help, Parker saw to it that Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (1552) was preserved with very minor tweaks in the 1559 version, supervised the revision of Anglican's confessional statement that was authorized in 1571 as the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, organized and distributed the Elizabethan book of homilies, authorized and contributed to a new and improved Bible translation, (the Bishop's Bible, 1568) that served the church until the King James Version in 1611, and he helped keep the church focused on faith and worship essentials by curbing the more radical Puritans who sometimes called him “the pope of Lambeth.” John Jewel expressed the majority view of the English reformers when he called Parker “a holy anchor unto me and others.”
When the Tractarians (Oxford Movement) of the 1830's threatened to undo the Church of England's Reformation identity, a group of (mostly) evangelicals in the Church of England countered the attempted coup by publishing 56 volumes of letters, essays and sermons of the early English reformers (1841-1853). They named it after Matthew Parker whose Protestantism defined the Church of England and who was a world-renowned collector of early church manuscripts. These are, unfortunately, the dustiest books in most Anglican and Episcopal seminary libraries today. The Parker Society publications are now available on-line for everyone to read the inside thinking of Thomas Cranmer, Myles Coverdale, John Bale, John Jewel and many other leaders who are behind our Anglican heritage.
“'A Man of Stomach: Matthew Parker’s Reputation,” David J. Crankshaw, Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History, Ed. Crankshaw and Gross