under the tutelage of a future bishop, to his last public acts, defending
the Elizabethan Settlement from the Presbyterians, Jewel knew and
consorted not only with the leaders of the English Reformation, but with
those in Switzerland as well. Honored at his death by both foreign
reformers and his fellow bishops, in his life notable Reformers from the
continent whom he had not met would write him to praise his work,^3
while the Council of Trent would damn it.^4 In short, his life knew both
misery and joy, success and setbacks; often the two were mixed. At the
moment of Elizabeth’s triumph in getting her Acts of Supremacy and
Uniformity passed, returning England to the haven of Protestantism, he
pined for Zurich.^5 Having embraced Protestantism under Edward VI,
Jewel recanted under Mary only to flee the country and apostatize again,
only this time managing to run afoul of the Knoxians in Frankfurt. Yet
while Jewel’s life seems far from mundane, it was this he desired more
than anything else, the uneventful otiose career of a scholar. As events
turned out, he was the most prolific of Elizabeth’s first bishops, and it
can hardly be contraverted that in his day he was her chief apologist,
undaunted by either Papist or Puritan, though it is with the former that
almost all of his polemical work dealt. Consequently, this work shall be
both theological and historical in character, akin to Jewel’s method of
polemics so tied to the history and the theology of the early Church.
Nonetheless, there is nothing of genius about Jewel; and despite his
occasional cavalier use of sources, this is not to say he was disingenuous.
While there is no cause to think him either a hypocrite or lacking in
intellect, he was not always honest with his sources, and his scholarship
showed more fervor than imagination. In this regard many things about
the icon of Jewel need altering, for the original has been touched up and
painted over many times. Within two years of his death his first
biographer championed him as England’s gallant against the beast of
Rome, a model Reformed cleric given to the care of his flock and the
equipping of a Protestant ministry, cutting a figure worthy of all
emulation.^6 But Laurence Humphrey’s Reformed image of Jewel,
essentially repeated in the brief biography Daniel Featly attached to the
first collection of the bishop’s works,^7 did not survive a century. Barely 70
2 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
Parliament(London, 1573).
(^3) Jerome Zanchius to Jewel, 2 September 1571 in Hastings Robinson, ed. and trans.,
The Zurich Letters, in two volumes (Cambridge: Vol I, 1842; Vol II, 1845), pp. 185–88.
(^4) John Jewel, The Works of John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, ed., John Ayre (Cambridge,
1845–50) four volumes. III, pp. 186–87.
(^5) Jewel,Works, IV, p. 1210.
(^6) Humphrey, Vita Iuelli, pp. xx–xxiii.
(^7) Daniel Featley, A life of bishop Jewel, in The Works of John Jewell; and a briefe
discourse of his life(London, 1609–11).
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