Gary W. Jenkins - John Jewel And The English National Church The Dilemmas Of An Erastian Reformer

fashion, to the employing of that redemption .... The commoditie of

prayer is allwayes common: but it the acte of praying is more oft

private then common. The receyving of the sacramente is a personall

and singular action: but the commoditye, when it foloweth, is

communicated with the whole bodye.^74

While Catholics defended the doctrine of papal primacy and universal
jurisdiction, they wrote far more about the unity of the Church existing
as a consequence of the sacraments, and most importantly of the
Eucharist, the consummation of the Christian’s life in Christ. While the
visible head of the Church was certainly the pope, the real unity of
the Church was predicated upon the benefits of the Incarnation, benefits
distributed through the sacraments. Jewel on the other hand, through the
doctrine of the Royal Supremacy and Eucharistic receptionism, had
effectively made these Catholic contentions nullities.
When Jewel posited the monarch as the center of his ecclesiastical
polity he was following in the footsteps of his immediate English
predecessors, but unlike them gave it a far more substantial rationale, so
much so that all subsequent defenders of it based their assertions on
Jewel. Claire Cross notes that:

Jewel stands foremost among these early English Erastians: to a very

considerable extent the arguments he put forward in 1562 to justify

the crown’s authority within the church retained their cogency

throughout the reign. Later writers defending the royal supremacy

explored his ideas in greater depth, they did not seriously modify

them.^75

Yet it was not only Jewel’s vision of an English polity with its singular
place for the prince within the Church, but also his concept of the nature
of Church authority in regard to councils, his definition of the
communion of the saints, and his emphasis on the relationship of the
sacraments to the visible Church that marked him out for the measure of
Catholic polemical fury. While certainly the center of Catholic polemical
attention, Jewel was hardly the lone malefactor: bishop Robert Horne of
Winchester emerged as a target in the pages of Stapleton’s ponderous
Counterblaste to M. Hornes vayne Blastte. Horne had sought to
vindicate the necessity for bishops and all clerics to swear the oath of
Supremacy in response to Feckenham’s refusal to be converted by his
persuasions. Feckenham had already penned a justification of his stance
that he delivered to Horne while the bishop had the former abbot in his
care at Winchester. Yet while Stapleton’s Counterblast defended
Feckenham, as he focused his invective on Horne, Stapleton concerned

150 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH

(^74) Ibid., ff. 112b–13a.
(^75) Claire Cross, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church(London, 1969), pp.
27–28.
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