Robert Parker (minister)

Robert Parker (c.1564–1614) was an English Puritan clergyman and scholar. He became minister of a separatist congregation in Holland where he died while in exile for his heterodoxy. The Revd. Cotton Mather wrote of Parker as "one of the greatest scholars in the English Nation, and in some sort the father of all Nonconformists of our day."

Parker was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became a chorister in 1575. He was a demy there 1580-3, and graduated B.A. on 3 November 1582. He was elected Fellow in 1585, and proceeded M.A. 22 June 1587. In the following year he was more than once reprimanded for not wearing scholastic gown or surplice. In October 1591, during a vacancy in the diocese, he was presented by Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke to the Rectory of Patney, Wiltshire, by authority of Archbishop Whitgift, and in January 1592 was instituted by Bishop Coldwell with the Bishop of Winchester as patron. In 1593 he resigned his College fellowship and his position at Patney, and the next year was instituted as Rector of Stanton St. Bernard, Wiltshire, in the patronage of the Crown. At this time he married Dorothy Stevens: their daughter Sarah was born in 1593, and their son Thomas Parker c.1595. He became brother-in-law of William Noyes, minister of Cholderton, Wiltshire.

He held the Rectory of Stanton until 1607, and in 1605 he presented his wife's brother Richard Stevens as Perpetual Vicar to the same parish. Stevens's son Nathaniel, who became a noted religious controversialist, was born there in 1606/7. In 1607 Parker issued a discourse against idolatrous uses of the sign of the Cross during religious ceremonies. This work, much admired by some, amounted to an open declaration of nonconformism, and caused the bishops to induce King James to issue a proclamation offering a reward for his capture. To avoid prosecution before the Court of High Commission he went into hiding in London. After some narrow escapes he made his way to Gravesend and thence into exile in the Netherlands.

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