was to strip the papal claims to sovereignty from the pope, and having
done this, to enfeoff them to Elizabeth.^196
Jewel’s main arguments in these two tracts focused on a set of
pretenses and a set of verities: the contrived council in Trent, convened
and mastered by an abomination as its head; these two, head and
members, stand in opposition to the godly synod of English bishops who
truly and rightly reformed religion, and that under the aegis of their
godly sovereign, Elizabeth. Jewel responded to traditionalist inquiries by
the use of Conciliarist arguments, both unalloyed and transformed. But
Jewel and the other Reformers drew not only from the Church’s recent
past, they also looked to other controversies for inspiration in the
defense of their actions and in their attack of papal claims, most notably,
the Gregorian Reforms and the Investiture Contest.^197
The Gregorian Reforms and the subsequent Investiture Contest on the
one hand pitted a tradition of internal piety against a longstanding
tradition of imperial action, such notions arising from two different
views of the Christian commonwealth.^198 On the other hand, they
opposed the established tradition of the imperial oversight in the life of
the Church by a belief that the spiritual power stands above the temporal
power, both of the Empire and of the various European monarchs.^199
Both of these motifs appeared in the writings of Jewel and the other
Reformers, whose respective stances had aspects both of Gregorians and
of imperial controversialists.
With both in mind, the Investiture Contest embraces a twofold
application in the study of Jewel’s thought and agenda. First, the
controversy becomes a motif for Reformation apologists, and especially
for Jewel, as their controversial literature draws both language and
argument from the royal and imperial apologists of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries. This occurs in their own arguments about the right of
magistrates, and in Jewel’s case, the English monarch’s royal supremacy,
expressly as it pertains to the right of the monarch to maintain spiritual
order.^200 Jewel gave to monarchs the right to convene councils, something
canon law only granted to popes.
108 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^196) Jewel had used this explicitly legal and feudal term when noting the pope’s
usurpation of powers from other bishops. Ibid., p. 1136.
(^197) Jewel,Works, III, pp. 345–47.
(^198) Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State, and Christian Society at the time of the Investiture
Contest,trans. with introduction by R.F. Bennett (Oxford, 1959). But see also Tellenbach,
The Church in western Europe from the tenth to the early twelfth century(Cambridge,
1993), trans. Timothy Reuter.
(^199) Morrison,Tradition and Authority, pp. 265–360.
(^200) Jewel used numerous Old Testament analogies in establishing the monarch as the
keeper of both tables of the law, and for the monarch as over the spiritual estate. Cf.
Works, IV, pp. 987–89; and see IV, pp. 703–7 that the pope is inferior to temporal rulers.
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