queen Mary’s days, the faithful brothers of England and Scotland, and
devised a most seditious and traitorous book against the monstrous
regiment of women?’^113 Jewel’s immediate reply was insistently to
distance himself from both Knox and Goodman, whom he names,
though Harding does not. The stratagem assumed, made in the
immediate context against Harding’s assertion that ‘ye laid your heads
together ... the faithful brothers of Scotland and England’, was that far
from a consensus among the exiles, these were but two men. Jewel keeps
his numbers down, for he never mentions the former bishop of Rochester
and Winchester, John Ponet, equally as radical as either Knox or
Goodman. But Jewel was not equivocating: ‘We will defend no man in
his error. Let every man bear his own guilt. M. Calvin, M. Martyr, M.
Musculus, M. Bullinger, and others whom you call the faithful of
England, misliked that enterprise, and wrote against it.’^114
In this section of his Defense of the Apology, Jewel found himself the
apologist for various Protestant endeavors and actions that Harding had
imputed with sedition: the Schmalkaldic League’s war with Charles V,
the deportment of the Germans and Luther respecting the peasants’
revolt, and the endeavor of the Bernese against the Dukes of Savoy. Jewel
handled each in its turn, and with various appeals to the law of arms
(Bern) or the law of nature (the Schmalkaldic League). But with the
matter of Knox he handles things differently: here he turns to a quote
from St Augustine: ‘There was a law made in Rome, called Lex Voconia,
that no man should convey his inheritance unto a woman, no not unto
his only daughter. Than which law I know not what may be more
wickedly thought or spoken.’^115 Having called Calvin et al., to stand as
more representative of Protestant thought than Knox and Goodman, he
now also throws Augustine into the mix. Not only were Knox and
Goodman aberrant, but the truth found in Augustine better affirmed
England’s stance. Jewel also cites Numbers 27: ‘If a man die without a
son, his inheritance shall pass unto his daughter.’ For Jewel, these not
only distance England from Knox’s radicalism, but set the trap for
Recusant views as well.
In various letters to Peter Martyr, Jewel informed his friend of Knox’s
and Goodman’s doings in Scotland, having passed along the information
he had received from his old Oxford benefactor, Thomas Randolph.^116
190 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^113) Quoted in Jewel, Works, IV, p. 664.
(^114) Jewel,Works, IV, p. 665.
(^115) De Civitate DeiIII.xxi. Jewel, Works, IV, p. 665.
(^116) Randolph had been the president of Broadgates Hall Oxford (now Pembroke
College), wherein Jewel took refuge having been expelled from Corpus Christi. Charles
Webb Le Bas, Life of Jewel, pp. 21–22. There are also some letters to Parkhurst, addressed
from Broadgates Hall, and dated at this time. Works, pp. 1190–91.
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