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.”

This was the state of the controversy when Marvell entered upon it with his Rehearsal Transprosed, a fantastic title he borrowed for no very good reasons from the farce of the hour, and a very good farce too, the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, which was performed for the first time at the Theatre Royal on the 7th of November 1671, and printed early in 1672.  Most of us have read Sheridan’s Critic before we read Buckingham’s Rehearsal, which is not the way to do justice to the earlier piece.  It is a matter of literary tradition that the duke had much help in the composition of a farce it took ten years to make.  Butler, Sprat, and Clifford, the Master of Charterhouse, are said to be co-authors.  However this may be, the piece was a great success, and both Marvell and Parker, I have