Jewel, who had wished the Scots the best in their fight first with Mary of
Guise and then later with Mary Queen of Scots, in no wise distanced
himself from Knox and the Scottish enterprise, even though his past
interaction with Knox and Goodman at Frankfurt had hardly been
cordial. At Frankfurt the premises of arguments later employed by Jewel
were championed by the Coxians: the right of regional Churches to
establish their own liturgies and order. Knox’s activities in Scotland
created no trouble for Jewel’s English conscience, but his writings that
impugned the validity of Elizabeth’s reign did. Jewel’s arguments,
consequently, are not merely for a Protestant, Elizabethan realm as
opposed to that envisioned by the Recusants, as it is an apology by
Protestant England against Harding’s slander in lumping all Protestants
as rebellious and bent on insurrection. Knox and Goodman needed
repudiation on two counts: that a female could not function as the head
of a realm and that an ungodly prince could be deposed. Jewel here
explicitly answered the first of these; the correlative questions of political
resistance and sovereignty he answered tacitly. The point here pertains to
Elizabeth’s right to rule despite her sex: it is a matter of lawful
inheritance, or of property. By making this point Jewel moved the
discussion away from such concepts as federated states (Elizabeth would
never have used the word ‘state’ in its modern sense), and returned it to
concerns more apropos a feudal realm than to a modern state. When
Jewel asserted that the status of Elizabeth as ruler she owed to her
inheritance from her father, he evaded and muted Knox’s assertions that
the royal title rested on the assent of the nobility or the Estates as God’s
Lieutenants.
The same is the duty of the nobility and estates by whose blindness
a woman is promoted. First, in so far as they have most heinously
offended against God, placing in authority such as God by His Word
hath removed from the same, ... with common consent they ought
to retreat that which unadvisedly and by ignorance they have
pronounced, and ... to remove from authority all such persons as by
usurpation, violence or tyranny do possess the same. For so did
Israel and Judah after they had revolted from David and Judah alone
in the days of Athaliah.^117Inasmuch as Knox’s appeal was to Scripture, so too was Jewel’s; but
more importantly as it pertains to Harding more than to Knox, Jewel
had also appealed to St Augustine. In Knox, like the Anabaptists, Jewel
A PRELATE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 191
(^117) Knox,The first Blast of the Trumpet, in Mason, John Knox: On Rebellion, pp.
43–44. For Knox, Goodman and Ponet, Cf. J.W. Allen, Political Thought in the Sixteenth
Century(London, 1928), pp. 106–20, and also Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of
Modern Political Thought. Vol. II. The Age of Reformation(Cambridge, 1978), pp.
227–38.