INTRODUCTIONThe Image of Jewel: an icon
of a dice player
The debate about the English Reformation, what prompted it, how it
was effected, how fast it spread and how thoroughly, assumes only an
ancillary part of this study. The significance of this work’s subject,
namely John Jewel, the bishop of Salisbury from 1560 to 1571,
capacious in his own day, reaches far beyond his time even to the present
distress that afflicts the worldwide Anglican Communion. This study is
not, however, an apologia for either side of that debate. Instead it is an
attempt to see in Jewel more than merely a champion of some abortion
of an agreement which allowed him to again live in England having spent
four years in exile. Jewel in fact agreed with what occurred in 1559 just
as much as he adhered to the theology of his Swiss Reformed hosts in the
city of Zurich: to Jewel the Elizabethan Settlement made no virtue of a
necessity. The real significance of Jewel then is not so much his impact
upon the spread of the Protestant faith in his own day, however much he
may have desired that and bent his energies toward it, but rather the
legacy he bequeathed – an ambiguous one I shall argue – to the Church
of England, an ecclesiastical entity he worked so hard to defend and did
so much to define, however much this definition lacked specificity.
In his own day Jewel stood as an icon, and his death only enhanced
the image. Intimate with the most prominent Reformers, both English
and continental, and party to a number of the more pointed
controversies of the Reformation, the peripeties of his life mirrored the
course of the English Reformation, and were greatly influenced by the
fortunes of the Reformation on the continent as well. Jewel also stands
as a fulcrum between England’s two reformations: present at the trial of
Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley,^1 his last written piece formed the very
contours of the arguments between Whitgift and Cartwright about the
proper polity of the church.^2 From the beginning of his academic career,
(^1) John Strype, Remains of Thomas Cranmer(Oxford, 1840), I.483, named Jewel as the
notary at Cranmer and Ridley’s Oxford disputation with the Catholic doctors in 1554. In
all probability it was Jewel who carried Cranmer’s anonymous letter to Martyr in late 1554
or early 1555. Humphrey records that Jewel was known to the household of Latimer,
Laurence Humphrey, Ioannis Iuelli Angli, Episcopi Sarisburniensis vita & mors. (London:
John Day, 1573), p. 84.
(^2) John Whitgift, An Answere to a Certen Libell, intituled, An Admonition to the