Milton, though hardly thinking Anglicanism an Elizabethan creature,
credited Jewel with a legacy to the Church of England of Patristic
authority, for
the appeal to the authority of the primitive church was, of course,
the basic argument of Jewel’s Apologyof the Church of England
and the ‘Challenge’ debate which it provoked (sic), in which the
Church of England laid claim to the writers of the fist six centuries
of the church. Later divines continued to urge that the Church of
England essentially preserved entire the true doctrine of the early
church.^13
Jewel certainly made an appeal to the early Church, and while he was
happy to contend that certain aspects of the English church coincided
with the Fathers’ teachings, he was more concerned that England’s
doctrine was that of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Heinrich Bullinger.
This English/Swiss axis formed a substantial part of Jewel’s
intellectual and ecclesiological makeup, but for those seeking the roots
of Anglicanism in the sixteenth century it has proven a major dissonance.
How could someone who defended the prerogative of Her Majesty,
episcopacy, and the use of vestments at the same time privately carp
about these same vestments? This very question was asked in another
vein by Charles Webb Le Bas, who wondered how it was that archbishop
Parker and bishop Sandys could ask someone so contentious about
vestments as Laurence Humphrey to write Jewel’s biography, even
though Jewel himself had little love for these ‘relics of the Amorites’.^14
Yet while Jewel possessed little affection for cope or surplice, he had an
unending commitment to the notion that the magistrate held a
paramount authority within the Church. Jewel knew no other polity. He
came to Protestantism in the reign of Henry VIII, matured under Edward
VI, and even when he took flight from Mary I, his ultimate destination
was to that Erastian haven of Zurich, a city whose magistrates and
pastors resided in equipoise. This image of what could be Jewel carried
with him back to England at the beginning of 1559, for though Jewel
loved Zurich, he was always English, and for him there was a great
burden to defend its Protestantism.
Despite Jewel’s intellectual and theological status among and even
above the other members of Elizabeth’s earliest bench, there is no
Jewellian theology. Whatever theology Jewel possessed was entirely
derivative, absorbed from that most notable of his mentors, Peter Martyr
Vermigli. The Italian theologian’s thoughts and arguments faintly echo
4 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^13) Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in
English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640(Cambridge, 1995), p. 272.
(^14) Le Bas, Charles Webb, The Life of Bishop Jewel(London: J.G. & F. Rivington, 1835),
pp. 241–42, ‘reliquiae Amorrhaeorum’, Jewel, Works,IV, p. 1222.
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