of a bishop, fully in support of his prince and archbishop’s actions,
remained pristine. In his letters to Parker and others in the English
Church, there is never a hint of dissent. Jewel’s letters to his countryman
presented a model, conforming bishop.
The matter of the crucifix also illustrates Jewel’s perception of
Elizabeth’s place within his Christian Commonwealth. Jewel noted in
The Defense of the Apology that the godly prince had defined
limitations, chief among them the Word of God. But the monarch also
retained the duty of nursing true religion, the establishment of
ecclesiastical laws, the answering of the questions of religion – or the
commitment of them to the learned, and finally the preserving of order
among the clergy. He concludes this list by observing that ‘Greater
authority than Constantinus the emperor had and used our princes
require none’.^105 Thus the government of the Church, while largely fallen
to the prince, still was not hers properly when it pertained to more exact
formulations, nor could it proceed further than God’s law allowed. In
the matter of the crucifix, the queen had overstepped her prerogative: a
crucifix was idolatry. But unlike Mary, Elizabeth had not promoted the
error, but kept it to herself. In this light we should again look at Jewel’s
opposition to vestments. In and of themselves, they were indifferent,
having neither biblical warrant nor prohibition; and they certainly were
not de facto idolatry. To go back to Jewel’s earliest polemic, the
anonymousEpistola, these things were not of the very substance of the
Gospel. Matters like these could be relegated to the monarch’s discretion,
a staple and tenet of English religion since Henry VIII broke with Rome,
and a modus vivendi embraced by Jewel even in Frankfurt. So while
Jewel may have seen his hopes for further reform tied to a vacillating
queen, she was the only hope he had.
Two things thus come into clearer focus. First, Jewel in his letters
quite pointedly excoriated the use of the surplice, yet even the language
used is not that of absolute prohibition. These garments, the ‘relics of the
Amorites’, so much foolery and things hopefully soon discarded, were
not the substance of the Gospel. Not that they were for the bene esse of
the Church either, and Harding caused Jewel some consternation on this
point. Jewel, having stated that what was not for the betterment of the
Church should be abolished, had to answer Harding when the
Louvainist pointed to those who would not wear cassock and surplice
for this very reason. Jewel resolved the point by showing that those
whose consciences were such, were brought to this state only due to the
abuses of Rome. In their case, abusus tollit usum.^106 This would seem to
186 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^105) Jewel,Apologia,Works, III, p. 167.
(^106) Ibid., pp. 614–18.
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