the 1571 Parliament. The analysis suffers from several flaws concerning
Jewel both historically and theologically. Further, insofar as it follows
Southgate’s interpretation of Jewel as one of the founders of that protean
beast called Anglicanism, it fails to discern that he was doing nothing
new in 1571. Southgate’s assumptions that Jewel’s views on Puritanism
in 1571 are the product of a slow development, and that Jewel was a
defender of a via media, fails to see that what Jewel was doing in 1571
was completely commensurate with the rest of his polemical efforts. It is
also blind to how Jewel’s theology was nothing other than that embraced
by the rest of the previous English Reformers, and more importantly, of
almost all of the Continental ones, the Lutherans excepted. One of the
chief, if not the chief problem with Southgate’s appraisal of Jewel is the
notion that what Jewel was facing in 1571 was Puritanism, pure and
simple, when in fact it should be seen as another creature altogether.
Collinson has pointed out that 1571 and 1572 saw not the old Puritans
in a new phase, but new men who, taking the impetus from Puritanism,
and being animated by a different though kindred spirit, sought a whole
new basis for the Church of England, namely Presbyterianism.
Presbyterianism certainly shared with the Puritans a revulsion for the
number of ceremonies and rites retained by the English Church, but for
them, these things were but secondary when considering the real causes
of the failure of reform in the English Church, primarily the continued
existence of episcopacy and all its accouterments, as well as the
submission of the ministry of the Church to the laity, whatever its rank.
The Puritans were quite content to live with both Her Majesty as
Supreme Governor and bishops as administrators of the Church: for
them it was a matter of the half-reformed measures that had been
flowing from the arrangement, not the arrangement itself. For
Presbyterians, the arrangement needed to go, root and branch:
A great reproof it is to all the learned, who have made some ado
about shells and chippings of popery, but that which beareth up
Antichrist chiefly, they have said little or nothing of it ... th’ awful
ministry of th’ word and the right government of the church, ...
matters of far greater weight and importance than ceremonies, and
therefore more earnestly to be sought for and quickly pursued
after.^133
The spirit of reform had pervaded the English Church throughout its
ranks in the 1560s, with Jewel being no small part of this, as he, like
most of his fellow bishops, desired alterations in the 1559 Settlement.
Bishop Horne of Winchester had written to Rudolph Gualter in 1565
about the aspirations of many who wished to see the ornaments clause
196 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^133) John Field quoted in Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 101.
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