Parker, Henry, Lord Morley

Parker (Henry) Lord Morley, a nobleman of literary taste in the reign of Henry VIII. was the son and heir of sir William Parker, knight, by Alice, sister and heir of Henry Lovel, and daughter of William Lovel, a younger son of William lord Lovel of Tichmersh, by Alianore, daughter and heir of Robert Morley, lord Morley, who died 21 Henry Vlth. He was educated at Oxford, but at what college, or at what time, does not appear. After | leaving the university, he retired to his estate in Northamptonshire, and in the 21st year of the reign of Henry VIII. was summoned to parliament by the title of lord Morley. He was one of the barons, who, in the year following, signed the memorable declaration to pope Clement Vji. threatening him with the loss of his supremacy in England, unless he consented to the king’s divorce, but he still remained a bigoted adherent to the popish religion. In the 25th of the same reign, having a dispute for precedence with lord Dacre of Gillesland, his pretensions were confirmed by parliament. Anthony Wood says, that “his younger years were adorned with all kind of superficial learning, especially with dramatic poetry, and his elder with that which was divine.” Wood adds, that he was living, “an ancient man, and in esteem among the nobility, in the latter end of Henry VIII.” But from his epitaph, which is inserted in Collins’s Peerage, it appears that he died in Nov. 1556, aged eighty. His great grandson, Edward lord Morley, who married Elizabeth, sole daughter and heir of William Stanley, lord Montegle, had issue Mary, who by her husband Thomas Habington, of Henlip in Worcestershire, was mother of William Habington the poet, and was supposed to have been the person who wrote to her brother William, lord Morley and Montegle, the famous letter of warning respecting the gun-powder plot.

Phillips says that our lord Morley was sent by Henry VIII. with the garter to the archduke of Austria. Of his works, nothing has been published but “A Declaration of the 94th Psalm,” printed by T* Berthelet in 1539. The rest, which remain in ms. in the king’s library, and whose titles are given in Casley’s catalogue, are translations from catholic writers, three or four lives from Plutarch, and Tully’s Dream of Scipio. Waldron, in his “Literary Museum,” has given a specimen of one of lord Morley’s translations from Boccaccio. Lord Morley is also said to have written several tragedies and comedies, whose very titles are lost, and which, as Mr. Warton thinks, were nothing more than grave mysteries and moralities, which probably would not have been lost had they deserved to live. “Certain Rhimes,” and the “Lives of Sectaries,” are mentioned as his, but of them nothing is now known, ex cept some lines which may be seen in our authorities. ¹