Biographers of controversialists seldom do justice to the other side. Possibly they do not read it, and Parker has been severely handled by my predecessors. He was not an honour to his profession, being, perhaps, as good or as bad a representative of the seamy side of State Churchism as there is to be found. He was the son of a Puritan father, and whilst at Wadham lived by rule, fasting and praying. He took his degree in the early part of 1659, and migrating to Trinity came under the influence of Dr. Bathurst, then Senior Fellow, to whom, so he says in one of his dedications, "I owe my first rescue from the chains and fetters of an unhappy education."[152:2] Anything Parker did he did completely, and we next hear of him in London in 1665, a nobleman's chaplain, setting the table in a roar by making fun of his former friends, "a mimical way of drolling upon the puritans." "He followed the town-life, haunted the best companies and, to polish himself from any pedantic roughness, he read and saw the plays with much care and more preparing than most of the auditory." In 1667 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Sheldon, a very mundane person indeed, made Parker his chaplain, and three years later Archdeacon of Canterbury. He reached many preferments, so that, says Marvell, "his head swell'd like any bladder with wind and vapour." He had an active pen and a considerable range of subject. In 1670 he produced "A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie wherein the Authority of the Civil Magistrate over the Consciences of Subjects in Matters of External Religion is Asserted; The Mischiefs and Inconveniences of Toleration are represented and all Pretenses pleaded in behalf of _Liberty of Conscience_ are fully answered." Some one instantly took up the cudgels in a pamphlet entitled _Insolence and Impudence Triumphant_, and the famous Dr. Owen also protested in _Truth and Innocence Vindicated_. Parker replied to Owen in _A Defence and Continuation of Ecclesiastical Politie_, and in the following year, 1672, reprinted a treatise of Bishop Bramholl's with a preface "shewing what grounds there are of Fears and Jealousies of Popery."