Nicholas Sander took the same argument against Jewel’s and
Protestantism’s notion that the Church of Christ had deserted the truth:
To say that this church or kingdom of Christ did lie privie, or was
hidden any one hower (after that he had planted it in all Countries
by his Apostles) is to make Christes kingdom more obscure than
ever the synagoge of the Iews were, or then ever the monarchies of
the Assyrians, or of the Persians, or of the Grecians, or of the
Romans were.^78Sander’s clear reference here is to the prophecy of Daniel and the four
kingdoms, but the more immediate reference is to the opening of Jewel’s
Apologia which noted that truth wandered from place to place, a
vagabond, little regarded and quickly assailed by those ignorant of it.
The Protestant repudiation of the medieval Church had compelled Jewel
to cast his argument in this way, but it was a double edged argument. On
the one hand, he wished to assert that catholicity and universality is
something that the Catholics do not have, and further that it was no
mark of the Church. And thus he could scarcely argue Protestantism’s
universality since he had damned the previous immediate 900 years of
the Church’s history for superstition and being under the domain of
Antichrist. Thus, since catholicity is no sign of the truth, contrary to
all previous Christian opinion, this then creates a necessity for the
place of the prince and the regional Church in the preservation of the
Christian faith. For Jewel, history becomes the struggle of the monarchs
and emperors who defended the pure faith, pitted against the tyranny
of Rome and its wayward entourage of prelates. So for Jewel,
Thomas A’Becket becomes a traitor to Henry II, while King John
becomes a champion of England, a victim of the despotism of Innocent
III.^79
Jewel’s doctrine and that of England, the Catholics asserted, destroyed
all concepts not only of the catholicity and universality of the Church,
but also the integrity of doctrine. Stapleton, in his response to Horne,
condemned Horne’s attempts to get Feckenham to swear to the oath of
Supremacy, arguing that would Feckenham have done so he would have
denied the communion of saints and the unity of the Holy Catholic
Church. He would have broken the communion of saints in that he
would have severed himself from the fellowship of the Church in all
nations, of which England until recently had itself been part. He would
have renounced the Holy Catholic Church by swearing that part of the
oath that renounced the authority of all foreign bishops. Yet the very
concept of the unity of the Church demanded fealty in faith to the
152 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^78) Sanders,The Images of Christ, f. NA.
(^79) For Beckett, Jewel, Works, III, pp. 374 ff.; for John, IV, p. 687.
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