On the accession of Mary, being stripped of all his benefices as a married priest, Parker with his family was reduced to poverty and distress; and it was only by a careful concealment of his person, by frequent changes of place, and in some instances by the timely advertisements of watchful friends, that he was enabled to avoid a still severer trial of his constancy. During this period of distress he found support and solace from the pious task of translating into English metre the whole of the Psalms. The version still exists in manuscript, and is executed with some spirit, and not inelegantly, in the old measure of fourteen syllables.
Parker's "Nolo episcopari" is supposed to have been more than ordinarily sincere: in fact, the station of metropolitan must at this juncture have been felt as one of considerable difficulty, perhaps even of danger; and the stormy temper of the queen afterwards prepared for the prelate so much of contradiction and humiliation as caused him more than once to bewail his final acceptance of the highest dignity of the English church.
With all her personal regard for the primate, Elizabeth could not always refrain in his presence from reflections against married priests, which gave him great pain.
During a progress which she made in 1561 into Essex and Suffolk, she expressed high displeasure at finding so many of the clergy married, and the cathedrals and colleges so filled with women and children; and in consequence she addressed to the archbishop a royal injunction, "that no head or member of any college or cathedral should bring a wife or any other woman into the precincts of it, to abide in the same, on pain of forfeiture of all ecclesiastical promotion." Parker regarded it as his duty to remonstrate with her in person against so popish a prohibition; on which, after declaring to him that she repented of having made any married bishops, she went on to treat the institution of matrimony itself with a satire and contempt which filled him with horror.
It was to his wife that her majesty, in returning acknowledgements for the magnificent hospitality with which she had been received at the archiepiscopal palace, made use of the well-known ungracious address; "Madam I may not call you, mistress I am ashamed to call you, and so I know not what to call you; but howsoever I thank you."
But these fits of ill-humor were transient; for Parker learned the art of dispelling them by submissions, or soothing them by the frequent and respectful tender of splendid entertainments and costly gifts. He did not long remain insensible to the charms of rank and fortune; and it must not be concealed that an inordinate love of power, and a haughty intolerance of all opposition, gradually superseded that candor and Christian meekness of which he had formerly been cited as an edifying example. Against that sect amongst the clergy who refused to adopt the appointed habits and scrupled some of the ceremonies, soon after distinguished by the appellation of Puritans, he exercised his authority with unsparing rigor; and even stretched it by degrees so far beyond all legal bounds, that the queen herself, little as she was inclined to tolerate this sect or to resent any arbitrary conduct in her commissioners, was moved at length to interpose and reverse some of his proceedings. The archbishop, now become incapable of yielding his own will even to that of his sovereign, complained and remonstrated instead of submitting: reproaches ensued on the part of Elizabeth; and in May 1575 the learned prelate ended in a kind of disgrace the career which he had long pursued amid the warmest testimonies of royal approbation.
The fairest, at least the most undisputed, claim of this eminent prelate to the gratitude of his contemporaries and the respect of posterity, is founded on the character which his high station enabled him to assume and maintain, of the most munificent patron of letters of his age and country. The study which he particularly encouraged, and to which his own leisure was almost exclusively devoted, was that of English antiquities; and he formed and presented to Corpus Christi college a large and valuable collection of the manuscripts relative to these objects which had been scattered abroad at the dissolution of the monasteries, and must have been irretrievably lost but for his diligence in inquiring after them and the liberality with which he rewarded their discovery. He edited four of our monkish historians; was the first publisher of that interesting specimen of early English satire and versification, Pierce Plowman's Visions; composed a history in Latin of his predecessors in the see of Canterbury, and encouraged the labors of many private scholars by acts of generosity and kindness.
Grindal, a divine of eminence, who during his voluntary exile at Frankfort had taken a strong part in favor of king Edward's Service-book, was named as the successor of Bonner in the bishopric of London; but a considerable time was spent in overcoming his objections to the habits and ceremonies, before he could be prevailed upon to assume a charge of which he deeply felt the importance and responsibility.
To the reputation of learning and piety which this prelate enjoyed in common with so many of his clerical contemporaries, he added an extraordinary earnestness in the promotion of Christian knowledge, and a courageous inflexibility on points of professional duty, imitated by few and excelled by none. His manly spirit disdained that slavish obsequiousness by which too many of his episcopal brethren paid homage to the narrow prejudices and state-jealousies of an imperious mistress, and it soon became evident that strife and opposition awaited him.
His first difference was with archbishop Parker, whom he highly offended by his backwardness in proceeding to extremities against the puritans, a sect many of whose scruples Grindal himself had formerly entertained, and was still inclined to view with respect or pity rather than with indignation. Cecil, who was his chief friend and patron, apprehensive of his involving himself in trouble, gladly seized an occasion of withdrawing him from the contest, by procuring his appointment in 1570 to the vacant archbishopric of York; a hitherto neglected province, in which his efforts for the instruction of the people and the reformation of the state of the church were peculiarly required and eminently successful.