a prince whose will would support the Church and one whose religious
proclivities would not change with the fortunes of politics. It also
entailed a religion purified of the medieval doctrine that the spiritual
estate was over the temporal, which would make Jewel’s view of the
prince untenable. Jewel discovered, however, that those who questioned
his view of the constitution of society came to call in guises other than
Catholic, Anabaptist or Unitarian.
That Catholic apologists had lumped the magisterial Reformers with
the Reformation’s more radical manifestations, had been a
commonplace. But for Jewel the more radical elements included some
from his own country and national Church, whose doctrine, while not
anti-Trinitarian, nonetheless imbibed political radicalism. While other
Reformers had to fight a war on two fronts, one against Rome and the
other against the Anabaptists, Jewel in his struggle found himself
defending the English Protestant Settlement from being defaced even by
someone who had once been a chaplain to Edward VI, namely John
Knox. Like Jewel, Knox had also repudiated the Anabaptists: they were
more wicked than the papists, as they denied the basic Christian nature
of the commonwealth and made purity a precondition of the true
Church.^110 Knox was also keenly aware that Catholic writers painted the
Reformers with the same brush as they painted the Anabaptists.
Formerly, thereby have the conjured enemies of Christ’s truth taken
a boldness to blaspheme the same as a diabolical doctrine, which
looses the bridle of all impiety. For the pestilent Papists, perceiving
the licentious and inordinate life of some professors, did not only
judge the whole number to be likewise infected, but also did neither
fear nor shame to accuse the doctrine as the principal cause of such
enormities. And thus, alas! do we expose the sacred and blessed
word of God to opprobrium and rebuke by our inordinate lives.^111But this revulsion of Anabaptist practice and belief about the nature of
the Christian society did not hinder Knox from venturing into the
forbidden political waters of both popular revolution and regicide.^112
Jewel needed to repudiate Knox, but at the same time his denunciation
is also one of Harding and the Anabaptists, and even of the Puritans and
Presbyterians, all who questioned Jewel’s notion of the right of the Godly
prince.
Harding pressed the matter of sedition and rebellion when he asked
‘What meant ye when ye laid your heads together being at Geneva in
A PRELATE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 189
(^110) John Knox, A Warning against the Anabaptists, a Letter to his Brethren in Scotland,
December 1557. Ed. with introductory essay by Kevin Reed (Dallas, 1984), p. 22.
(^111) Knox,Against the Anabaptists, pp. 25–26.
(^112) For a collection of all Knox’s tracts treating the subject of rebellion and political
resistance, see Roger A. Mason, ed. John Knox, On Rebellion(Cambridge, 1994).