peculiar role in English ecclesiastical polity. The Apologiaof necessity
had made reference to the place of the godly prince, but all within the
greater sphere of the English Church as a whole. In A View of a Seditious
BullJewel lays out in detail the exact nature of the godly prince’s duties,
specifically the necessity of the godly prince for the bene esseof a godly
commonwealth and its Church.
Jewel had, in his previous writings, refrained from openly labeling the
pope Antichrist; instead he had allowed the invectives of others this place
in his work, while he himself demurred. But in his response to Pius V he
candidly applies the title, and some of its Biblical equivalents, that is, son
of perdition, man of sin, to the pontiff. The raising of the tenor of Jewel’s
rhetoric matches the heightened political situation that the papal bull
both entered and elicited.^185 To Jewel, as the title of the treatise
proclaims, the action of the Pope was seditious. The traditionalist
accusations that Protestants were seditious Jewel had rebuffed in his
previous writings, but here it is manifestly the Pope who was the
fomenter of sedition. Whereas Pius claimed Elizabeth had usurped the
throne, Jewel contends that she had the throne by right of inheritance, as
she was descended from both the house of York and of Lancaster.
Furthermore, her right of inheritance was granted by the assent of the
council in the days of Henry VIII. In opposition to the sedition that came
from Rome and Pius V personally, Elizabeth embodies the essence of
what it was to exercise the oversight of the spiritual estate of her people.
This duty she discharged more perfectly and piously than the Pope in his
duties, even if she were guilty of the abuses of her position that Pius
claimed:
He imagineth that her majesty preacheth in the pulpits, that she
adminstereth the sacraments, that she sitteth in the consistories and
heareth all spiritual causes. Which if she do, she doth more than the
pope doth. It were monstrous to see the pope in a pulpit, and it is
monstrous to see antichrist sit in the temple of God, to see a bishop
girded with the swords, to see a priest take upon him the rule of
heaven and earth, the servant of servants advanced above all the
princes of the world.^186
Jewel is not merely concerned with showing Elizabeth as pious, even
in the hypothetical context of the papal slanders; instead he defines what
he does see as her role. Hers is not a position novelly assumed, but was
also that of ‘Moses, Joshua, David, Salomon, Josias, Jehosaphat, as
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 105
(^185) Jewel makes reference to the Northern rebellion of 1569, blaming the whole event
upon Pius V. Seditious Bull, in Works, IV, p. 1146. Jewel had earlier noted that Pius ‘hath
conference with traitors in England, with traitors in Ireland, with traitors in Germany’, p.
1138.
(^186) Ibid., p. 1144.