years after his encomium appeared, Archbishop William Laud, to the
anger and consternation of England’s Calvinist clergy, cited Jewel in his
defense of prelacy. Having become a point of contention between Laud
and his detractors, Jewel’s exact legacy within the Church of England,
more precisely, how Jewel used the Church Fathers and what this entailed
for the Church of England’s doctrine and organization, became part of the
battle among England’s various ecclesiastical factions. This ambivalence
can be seen in the nineteenth-century publication of Jewel’s works. The
first attempted appropriation was by the high church cleric William Jelf,
who saw in Jewel’s use of the Fathers a foil to the evangelical party.^8 The
exact opposite intent and end animated the evangelical Parker Society
with its more well known editions, seeing in Jewel a brake on Anglo-
Catholic attempts to foist medieval piety on the English faithful. Despite
Jelf’s attempts, the Anglo-Catholics, most notably Froude, Pusey and
Newman, saw correctly that Jewel was no friend to their enterprise; a
view they held of all the English Reformers. In the mind of the Oxford
Movement, Jewel was little better than Zwingli or Calvin; the Parker
Society probably thought this happily true. Thus by the 1850s the Oxford
Movement and the Anglo-Catholics saw Jewel as barely more than a shill
for the continental Reformers, while the Evangelicals saw him as a
defender of the Biblical faith of the Protestant Reformation.
By the second half of the twentieth century, this assessment of Jewel
had largely been set aside as Jewel got caught up into the ‘myth of the
English Reformation’, as historians and theologians coopted Jewel into
that protean and malleable creature Anglicanism.^9 In this scenario Jewel
becomes one of the founders, arbiters, creators, patrons – take your
choice – of a via media.Wyndham Southgate, the author most guilty of
this charge, in his 1962 John Jewel and the Problem of Doctrinal
Authority, cast Jewel as the forerunner of Hooker.^10 The following year
John Booty, though a bit more restrained, none the less moderately
seconded Southgate, noting that a study of Jewel’s life will reveal ‘some
of the ways by which Anglicanism came into being’.^11 Hylson-Smith sees
in Jewel ‘a theologian who had contributed to a nascent High
Churchmanship despite his definite Protestant leanings’.^12 Even Anthony
INTRODUCTION 3
(^8) The Works of John Jewel D.D. bishop of Salisbury, ed. Richard Wm. Jelf D.D.
(Oxford, 1848).
(^9) Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The myth of the English reformation’, Journal of British
Studies1991, 30 (1), pp. 1–19.
(^10) Wyndham Southgate, John Jewel and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority
(Cambridge, MA, 1962), p. 99.
(^11) John Booty, John Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England(London: Society for
the Preservation of Christian Knowledge, 1963), p. ix.
(^12) Kenneth Hylson-Smith, The churches in England from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, Vol
1,1558–1688(London, 1996), p. 135.