his own, it must be with the recognition that his ... Apology... erected
all its defences on one flank only and allowed not so much as a suspicion
that the ... settlement could be threatened from a protestant corner’.^54
This oversimplifies Jewel’s answer to Traditionalist accusations: his basic
contentions about the right of the monarch to order the life of the
Church apply equally to those from the left who also argued for
universal uniformity, albeit one based on premises other than Rome’s.
Jewel’s 1562 anonymous Epistolarebuts a French libel that England’s is
a fractured ecclesiastical state, one at odds with itself both doctrinally
and ceremonially, and one which saw the faithful in contention with
crown and convocation.^55 Jewel admits a liturgical liberality of long
standing in England, as ‘indeed always our particular churches –
Salisbury, York, Hereford and Bangor – have offered public prayers to
God different from one another’;^56 a diversity mirrored among the
ancient Syrian, Egyptian, Roman and African Churches.^57 But Jewel
insisted that the English Church had a greater unity than the
traditionalists. Concerning the gospel, there was no dissent.^58 The several
assertions concerning the English Church in Jewel’s Epistola– the
unanimity on essentials (de re vero ipsa), the indifferent character of
liturgies and vestments, and most importantly the reality that the English
Church was well ordered – all recur in his Apologia, where Jewel
subordinates the final two categories to the right of the prince, and
through the prince to the national Church; that is, royal prerogative in
ritual and liturgical matters.^59 As noted in dealing with Rome, questions
170 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^54) Collinson,Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 61.
(^55) ‘Nos omnes, studiis et contentionibus, in factiones et sectas distractos esse: nihil apud
nos esse certi: non Episcopos inter se, non Concionatores, non Ecclesiarum ministros, non
homines singulos, vel de doctrina, vel de Ceremoniis convenire: quenque sibi pro sua
libidine Ecclesiam suam fabricari.’Epistolain John Booty Appendix, Jewel as Apologist,
p. 210.
(^56) ‘Semper enim Ecclesiae nostrae particualres ut sunt Sarisburiensis, Eboracensis,
Herfordiensis, Bangoriensis, aliter atque aliter publicas Deo preces persoluerunt.’ Epistola
in Booty, p. 220.
(^57) Epistolain Booty, pp. 220–22. In his Challenge Sermon, Jewel had already used this
diversity and seeming lack of uniformity in liturgical practice against those who would
argue for the necessity of the unity brought by the Roman rite. Cf. Jewel, Works, I, p. 23.
(^58) ‘De re (Euangelii) vero ipsa, nihil inter nos est dissidii.’ Epistolain Booty, p. 218: As
for England and vestments, says Jewel, we are all agreed, from the prince down, that such
things are neither holy nor polluted in and of themselves; such things are adiaphora.
(^59) Cf. Bryan D. Spinks, Western Use and Abuse of Eastern Liturgical Traditions(Rome
and Bangalore, India, 1992); cf., the review of Jewel and the Greek liturgies, G.J. Cuming,
‘Eastern Liturgies and Anglican divines 1510–1662’, in Derek Baker, ed. The Orthodox
Churches and the West: papers read at the fourteenth Summer Meeting and Fifteenth
Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society(Oxford, 1976), pp. 231–39,
especially 234–35.
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