her Church, while neither merely nor purely a public matter, exists
largely within the purview of his public discourse.
But the private Jewel, the one who corresponded with foreign divines,
never exuded the regard for England that his public writings did. Thus
Jewel, this image of moderate Elizabethan Protestantism, whose pen
writes his own icon on the pages of polemical tract and sermon, assumes
a different visage in his personal missives: no less the Protestant, but in
many ways less the defender of the Supremacy, more precisian and far
from the assured scholar, the master of all the facts. This dissonance
arises because Jewel expressed different concerns to two different
audiences, concerns nonetheless which at best must be labeled
incommensurate. He seemingly posited the Apostolic Church as an ideal,
and publicly defended the English Church for having apprehended this
archetype in contrast to Rome. Yet all the while that Jewel is trumpeting
England’s piety, his writings to Zurich complain that in truth, the Church
of England had attained only a modicum of so grand a state as that of
Zurich, let alone Apostolic purity.
Jewel’s public persona presents an English bishop who embraced not
only the Protestant settlement of religion, but the right of his prince to
effect this change; whereas the private Jewel, while commending English
efforts, also voices disaffection. Is there a difference between the Erastian
Jewel, the author of the Apologia, on the one hand, and the ecclesiastic
who lamentingly agreed with Peter Martyr that the vestments of the
English clergy were the ‘relics of the Amorites’, on the other? Further-
more, Jewel was not at all pleased with either the extent or the pace of
English Reform, again lamenting to Martyr:
How much more delicately and gently is truth now fought for, than
lies were defended some time ago! Our hasty adversaries acted
always without precedent, without authority, without law; we do
nothing except with circumspection, prudence, consideration, and
calculation, as if without our edicts and precautions God himself
could hardly keep his authority; so that many leisurely and
scurrilously joke, that, as Christ was once cast out by his enemies,
so now he is kept out by his friends.^2In February 1562, Jewel wrote Peter Martyr, concerning the linen
surplice, that it, along with the very rubbish and dust of error, had not
yet been removed.^3 This difference between the public and private Jewel
156 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^2) ‘Quanto nunc mollius et remissius veritas propugnatur, quam pridem defendebantur
mendacia! Adversarii nostri omnia praecipites, sine exemplo, sine jure illo, sine lege; nos
nihil nisi circumspecete, prudenter, considerate, callide; quasi sine nostris edictis et
cautionibus Deus ipse vix possit auctoritatem suam retinere: ut multi nunc otiose ac
scurriliter jocentur, “Chistum, antea ejectum ab hostibus, nunc excludi ab amicis”.’ Jewel
to Martyr, 14 April 1559. Works, IV, p. 1204.
(^3) Jewel, in Works, IV, p. 1245.
http://www.ebook3000.com