question at Augsburg (Jewel altered the quote both in the Defence of the
Apology and in his Reply unto Harding), but more importantly,
everything that Cajetan said following ‘ut credat’ Jewel edited out,
changing the entire context and meaning of what Cajetan was arguing.^38
One of Jewel’s more blatant abuses of a text was when he asserted in
theApologiathat papal canonists had declared that fornication was not
a sin. As was the case with the question of images, Jewel would not allow
the Catholics a distinction which they made in regard to certain matters
relating to sexual morality: whether it were better for a priest to fall into
sexual sin, or to take a concubine, than to break their vows of celibacy
and oaths as priests, and to marry. To Jewel this distinction was nothing
short but a rejection of the institution of marriage, and cited St Paul’s
warning against apostates who refused people to marry. For Catholics
the distinction arose over which was the greater sin, to fall into
fornication, which was never not considered a sin, or the breaking of a
religious oath or vow. The question was personal for Jewel. Peter Martyr
had been a Augustinian monk, and upon repudiating the papacy and
embracing Protestantism had also renounced his vows of celibacy, along
with monasticism, had married, and this not only once. Martyr’s
presence in Oxford with his wife had evoked not merely consternation,
but public denunciations. Richard Smith, Martyr’s nemesis, had written
two tracts against Martyr and the whole question of clerical marriage
and the breaking of monastic vows. By the 1560s it was a given that
Protestants would do this, since Martin Luther himself had repudiated
his vows and had married a nun. Jewel never addressed per se the
question of vows, he simply accepted that Martyr had the right to break
his, all the while damning Catholic contentions that they would rather
countenance fornication than allow their priests to marry. His citation of
canonists on this was proof enough.
The only problems were that those he cited were not canonists, and
that fornication was never countenanced by Rome. Jewel would not
yield on the question that this was a problem of greater or lesser sins.
Harding hit back. ‘In my Confutation I saie that this is a grevous offence,
and worthy to be pounished.’ But Harding’s claims are not merely
personal pieties professed in opposition to other Roman Catholics: Jewel
had misrepresented the facts. First, the author he cited as a canonist,
THE CATHOLIC REACTION TO JEWEL 133
(^38) Jewel cites the passage as ‘Fides non est necessaria accessuro ad eucharistiam’ which
appears in both Reply to M. Hardings Answer,Works, II, p. 751, and in Defence of the
Apology,Works, III, p. 556. For Luther see Werke, Weimar edition, II, p. 13. Jewel’s use
of the text has an afterlife appearing in the Anglo-Catholic writings of B.J. Kidd and Eric
Mascall. The matter is treated at length by Francis Clark in The Eucharistic Sacrifice and
the Reformation(Westminster, MD, 1960), pp. 365–79. Clark confused Jewel’s Defence
for the Apologia.