milquetoast affair that vacillated between two alternatives instead of
steering its own course, whatever via mediamay have been, then Jewel
as one of its definers (or ill-definers) must bear some responsibility for
this imprecision. If, however, the Elizabethan Church was aligned with
Zurich, then the failure of the Stuart Church to achieve some form of
doctrinal unanimity stems from the likes of Cosin, Montagu and Laud
‘kicking against the goads’. And if the episcopate of the English Church,
along with the rest of its higher clergy – canons, deans, archdeacons,
university professors – prior to James I stands in a clearly defined
Protestant succession which goes back to Elizabeth’s day, a day when
moderation meant that Protestants were not Anabaptists, nor were they
the fomenters of sedition; a day when ‘moderate’ or ‘mean’^48 bore no
pleasant connotation theologically, and had only a utility against Rome;
then Tyacke’s assessment would seem the correct one. But what if, with
respect to Jewel, it were a matter of both? While the investigation of
these broader questions as they pertain to the English Civil War exceeds
the sphere of this work, nonetheless, Jewel’s arguments with Rome
sought to cast Catholic traditionalists as both subversive and doctrinal
innovators; the Protestants as both the props of the monarch, and the
true heirs of primitive Christianity. Consequently, the methods Jewel
employed to accomplish these twin tasks played into the negative aspects
of both of the above scenarios. Eventually Jewel indicted both Rome and
‘Geneva’ (viz Knox) as seditious, but Zurich was never so implicated.
The question answered the following century was what would occur
when ‘Zurich’ became the subversives.
On the one hand, Jewel professed a doctrine in line with the most
prominent of continental Reformed theologians, and particularly Peter
Martyr and Heinrich Bullinger.^49 On the other, Jewel, to cut out any
claims that the Roman Church had to antiquity, employed a negative
methodology in treating the ancient Church, both to slight the
theological content of the Patristic writers, and to establish a new set of
canonical categories: the chief two of these were the Erastian form of
government of the Church of England with the godly prince at her
242 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^48) Jewel had used the term ‘leaden mediocrity’, as opposed to a golden one, as a
disparaging description of the Elizabethan Settlement and those who were overseeing the
alteration of religion. Letter to Martyr, May 1559 in Works, IV, p. 1210.
(^49) Jewel seldom commented upon Calvin, or mentioned any of the particulars of his
theology. Two important exceptions have been noted and referenced in this study. The
Genevan does appear in the Defence of the Apology, in which, ironically enough, Jewel
defended him from Harding’s grouping him together with the subversive writings of Knox
(something which Elizabeth did not do. Cf. Calvin’s letter to William Cecil, Zurich Letters,
Vol. II, pp. 34–36). The second is the aside in a letter to Peter Martyr where Jewel defends
Calvin from the slander that he is too precise when compared to the English Settlement.
Jewel believes this libel unfair.
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