thears humanitatis, theology and Aristotelian logic,^28 and coming to
Oxford with a reputation already established from his time in
Strasbourg, Martyr became the magisterfor Jewel that Parkhurst could
never be. Though 25 when Martyr came to England, already a Master of
Oxford and a College reader in Humanity and Rhetoric, and as well as
soon to be ordained under Archbishop Cranmer’s new ordinal, it is only
with Martyr’s arrival that Jewel assumed his public and polemical
persona. Yet before looking at this development in Jewel, some things
should be noted about Jewel’s England that bear particularly upon the
formation of his thought and his later polemical works, and things which
the arrival of Martyr only accentuated.
Protestant fortunes during Henry VIII’s reign seemed tied to the
fluctuations of the king’s amorous exploits. While Henry VIII neither
formally nor materially sympathized with Protestantism, and while such
things as the Statute of the Six (Bloody) Articles were to the detriment of
the evangelical movement,^29 nonetheless to varying degrees and at
different times Henry VIII countenanced certain Protestants: Cromwell
within his council, Cranmer and Ridley in his church, and Anne Boleyn,
Anne of Cleves (almost)^30 and Catherine Parr in his bedchamber. And
while Protestantism alternately flourished and floundered, Catholic
religion (not to say Catholicism), though also faced with shifting and
unstable tides, survived well. Numerous individuals in high ecclesiastical
JEWEL TILL 1558 13
(^28) John Patrick Donnelly, Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man
and Grace (Leiden, 1976). Marvin Anderson, ‘Peter Martyr: Protestant Humanist’ in
Joseph McLelland, ed. Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform(Waterloo, Ontario,
1980), pp. 65–84, and Joseph McLelland, ‘Peter Martyr Vermigli: Scholastic or Humanist’
in McLelland, Italian Reform, pp. 141–51. McLelland, though sympathetic to the concerns
Anderson raised, nonetheless falls out more on the side of Donnelly, all the while warning
against facile hard and fast distinctions between scholasticism and humanism. For more
recent discussions see Frank A. James, Peter Martyr Vermigli and Predestination(Oxford,
1999); Carl Trueman, Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle,
Cumbria, 1999); especially, Frank A. James III, ‘Peter Martyr Vermigli: at the crossroads
of late medieval scholasticism, Christian humanism and resurgent Augustinianism’. Also
Bryan D. Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology: Sacraments and Salvation
in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker, Drew University Studies in
Liturgy No 9 (Lanham, Maryland and London, 1999, pp. 27–34); and Brian Armstrong,
Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in
Seventeenth-Century France(Madison, 1969), pp. 32 ff.
(^29) These acts enjoined belief in transubstantiation, that communion in one kind is as
efficacious as communion under both elements, clerical celibacy, the use of private mass,
and auricular confession. Cf. Henry Gee and William John Hardy, eds., Documents
Illustrative of English Church History(London: Macmillan, 1921), pp. 303–20.
(^30) Anne of Cleves was a Catholic, although the intended end of the arrangement of the
marriage by Cromwell was a closer alliance to the German Lutheran princes. Technically
Henry never married Anne as the marriage was never consummated.