Correspondence of Matthew Parker
The letters of Matthew Parker, Elizabeth I’s first archbishop of Canterbury, with his own Latin notes on the chief dates of his life. The notes record his birth in 1504, his loss of office under Mary I and his consecration as archbishop on 17 December 1559.
The volume gathers Parker’s surviving letters to and from the queen, her secretary William Cecil and the bishops, and so shows the Elizabethan settlement being put into practice from the inside. Its first appendix prints a short autobiographical record in Latin, kept by Parker himself and continued, as the editors note, in another hand: his birth at Norwich on 6 August 1504, his degrees and preferments, his marriage in 1547, the loss of his offices in 1554, and the entry for 17 December 1559, “consecratus sum in Archiepiscopum Cantuar.”, followed by a prayer of dismay at the burden.
These are private memoranda and letters, not a narrative written for readers, and they are evidence for what Parker did and said he thought at the time.
Cited in
- 1559, firm date