made his boast, Jewel asks Bullinger to authenticate his claims. The
second point concerns the nature of the 794 Council of Frankfurt. As
noted, Jewel, as had most Protestants, had maintained that the council
had condemned the Seventh Ecumenical Council, held in 787 in Nicaea
to defend the veneration of Icons; and as other Protestants, Jewel took
little note of the mistranslations of texts that affected and effected so
many of Frankfurt’s decisions. For this he was duly taken to task by his
Catholic detractors, though Harding in his work against the Apologia
proved equally as confused about the exact nature of the medieval
justification of icons as had most Protestants. Nonetheless, Jewel having
made his boast must now scurry to check his sources and cover his
assertions.
Another piece of evidence which betrays the private nature of Jewel’s
correspondence appears in a series of letters to Martyr in 1559 and 1560
in which Jewel repeatedly referred to Elizabeth by the pseudonym
Glycerium, the deflowered waif in Terence’s Girl from Andros, whose
dubious paternity stands as one of the play’s central motifs. Along with
this, Jewel gives to the Earl of Arran the patronymic of Crito, one of
Glycerium’s suitors in the play: Arran had been one of Elizabeth’s suitors
before his slide into insanity.^83 Given Elizabeth’s paternity, its ostensible
status before both the papal court, and even for a time English law, and
given the brazen rumors about her and the younger Seymour, and then
those making the rounds about her and Leicester, this hardly seems the
classical character with which to flatter her. Conjecture alone can
provide why Jewel used such a tawdry sobriquet of his monarch, though
perhaps it may have arisen from Jewel’s friendship with Parkhurst who
was with him and Martyr in Zurich. Parkhurst, as was previously noted,
had been the chaplain to the dowager queen Catherine Parr when
Elizabeth had been placed in her house, and when she had become the
object of the less-than-honorable affections of Parr’s husband, Thomas
Seymour. Catherine eventually, for all intents and purposes, threw
Elizabeth out of her house.^84 It may be posited that she had made
Parkhurst privy to the whole matter. This is also a far cry from the Jewel
who would later extol Elizabeth’s lineage as coming from both the
houses of Lancaster and York.^85 This impolitic allusion, the question
about Greek Eucharistic practices and the nature of the Council of
Frankfurt, disparaging remarks about vestments, and the complaints
treating the tardy progress of religion, inform us that the audience for his
letters was far different than the audience for his public works. Indeed,
A PRELATE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 177
(^83) Jewel,Works, IV, pp. 1224, 1228.
(^84) Starkey, Elizabeth, the Struggle, pp. 66–71.
(^85) Jewel,Seditious Bull, in Works, IV, p. 1144.