Sir Henry PARKER
Born: BEF 1514, Morley Hall and Hingham, Norf., and Furneux Pelham, Herts
Died: 1552
Father: Henry
PARKER (1º B. Morley)
Mother:
Alice St. JOHN (B. Morley)
Married: Grace NEWPORT (b. 1515 - d. ABT 1549) (dau. of John
Newport of Furneux Pelham and Mary Daniel) 18 May 1523
Children:
1. Henry PARKER
(2º B. Morley)
2. Charles PARKER (Bishop
of Man)
3. Edmund PARKER
4. Mary PARKER
5. Margaret PARKER
6. Amy PARKER
Married 2: Elizabeth CALTHORPE BEF 1549
Children:
7.
Phillip PARKER
(Sir)
The details in this biography come from the
History of Parliament, a
biographical dictionary of Members of the House of Commons.
Son of Henry Parker, 8º Lord
Morley; by Alice, dau. of Sir John St. John of Bletsoe, Beds. educ. ?L. Inn, adm.
1516. Married first, 18 May 1523, Grace, dau. and heiress of John Newport of Furneux Pelham,
by whom he had at least two sons and one dau. Married secondly, by 1549, Elizabeth, dau. and heiress of
Sir Phillip Calthrope of Erwarton, Suff., Anne Boleyn's
aunt, by whom he had at least one son. d.v.p. KB 31
May 1533. Commr. tenths of spiritualities, Herts.
1535, musters 1539, loan 1544, chantries, Essex and Herts. 1548 relief, Essex,
Herts., Norf. and household of Princess Elizabeth 1550; other commissions
1538-51; sheriff, Essex and Herts. 1536-7; j.p.
Herts. 1537-d.; custos rot. c.1547.
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Grace Newport
by Hans Holbein the Younger |
Sir Henry Parker's father was a prominent
courtier, an accomplished translator and author, and a close friend of
Cromwell.
One of his daughters, Jane,
married George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford,
and the other, Margaret, married Sir John
Shelton. Parker
himself was to be connected, through his
second marriage, with the Boleyn family. The beginnings of Parker's career are
obscure. The man of that name who was page of the chamber and gentleman usher
from 1514 was probably a namesake, perhaps Henry Parker of Berden, Essex.
By his marriage to Grace Newport (generally accepted to be the subject
of the Holbein drawing inscribed “The Lady Parker”), who was
only eight in 1523, Parker acquired the manors of Furneux Pelham and Stapleford,
and in 1536 he procured a private Act (28 Hen. VIII c.20) settling his two
Norfolk manors on himself and his wife, in
lieu of the jointure that he had covenanted to make her on marriage. In 1541 the
under sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire was sued for abducting a 14 year-old
ward, Jane Barenton, who had been contracted in marriage to the younger
John
Newport,
presumably Parker's brother-in-law. Parker was apparently a party to the
abduction, for his servants escorted the girl in her flight from her guardian
and helped her to elude him in London.
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Parker was knighted at Anne Boleyn's
coronation and served regularly on Hertfordshire commissions from 1535. It is
possible that he sat in the short Parliament of 1536, for which the
Hertfordshire returns have not survived; it was that
Parliament which passed the Act relating to the settlement on Grace Parker,
although such an uncontroversial measure hardly required Parker's presence in
the Commons as well as his father's in the Lords. His election for Hertfordshire
in 1539
is to be explained by his father's closeness to
Cromwell and his own leading
position in his county. In two letters to
Cromwell (probably of 1536) Parker
reported his imprisonment of two parsons who had disobeyed the royal injunctions
against
superstitious holy days, and begged Cromwell to help his chaplain, whom the
Bishop of London's surveyor was suing for no good reason. Parker explained that
he knew ‘the love and favour which ... your lordship always hath borne to the
word of
God and to all them which endeavour to set forth the King's most godly and
gracious injunctions’ and interpreted the action against his chaplain as an
attack by the conservative Bishop Stokesley on himself. He attended at court on
ceremonial
occasions, such as the christening of Prince Edward and the reception of
Anne of
Cleves. He was also called on for military service, his name appearing in lists
of Hertfordshire gentlemen to serve against the
northern rebels in 1536, and
eight
years later he was with the rearguard of the army in France. In Apr 1536 he
had a grant from the crown of the dissolved priory of Latton, Essex, which he
sold, with other land, five years later. He was assessed in Hertfordshire for
the
subsidy, his lands there being valued at £100 a year in 1546, which made him
one of the county's ten or 12 richest men.
Parker retained interests in Norfolk which
involved him in several Star Chamber cases. One of these concerned rights of common at Hingham, where he
wished to pasture 500 sheep. His alleged enclosure of Hingham common was one of the grievances of the Norfolk peasantry at the
time of in his unsuccessful attempt to put down the rebellion in Aug.
Under Edward VI Parker was appointed to
most of the important commissions for Hertfordshire. He was not immediately
chosen knight of the shire in 1547 but was elected on 24 Oct, less than a
fortnight before the Parliament met, to fill the
vacancy left by the death of Sir Anthony Denny on the previous 10 Sep.
A bill
‘for increase of trees and woods’ was committed to him on 5 Nov 1549, after
its first reading. His parliamentary career ended before the following and last
session
of this Parliament began, for he died on 6 Jan 1552. The Privy Council sent
instructions on 19 Jan following for a second by-election in Hertfordshire and
recommended Sir Ralph Sadler as the fittest person; it was nevertheless
John
Cock
who was elected. Parker died during the lifetime of his father. The inquisition
post mortem taken in Norfolk thus mentioned only the two manors settled on Parker and his first wife to provide her jointure and valued at £50 a year; the
larger of
these, Hingham, had been re-settled for the benefit of Parker's second wife,
Elizabeth, who later married Sir William Woodhouse and Dru Drury.
Parker's
heir was his eldest son Henry, aged 20 years and 11 months at his father's
death; he did
not share his father's religious views, but fled to the Continent in
Elizabeth's
reign and became one of the leading English Catholic exiles there. No will of Parker's has been found.
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