Great emperor.^61 What on the one hand Jewel denied – the right of the
papacy to confer sovereignty – he was quick for England to apprehend,
by saying that the prince has the authority of empire, since the various
princes, and England’s among them, had assumed the prerogatives of the
empire.^62 It would seem then that his prince’s authority would be doubly
illegitimate (there is a wicked pun here, though none intended), for since
Rome had usurped what it did not have, how could the prince now
arrogate the same from Rome? For Jewel, the answer lay first in the
prince’s authority apart from Rome. Whether Rome was a usurper was
immaterial, for its usurpation over the Greeks was effected after the
establishment of the English Church, which likewise had existed before
the mission of St Augustine of Canterbury; that is, within the first 600
years of the Church’s existence, and prior to the introduction of so many
of the errors Jewel challenged.^63 Augustine of Canterbury represented the
incursions of Rome into England, and with it the first persecutions
attendant upon the Roman religion in that Augustine was not merely
party to the murder of the monks of Bangor, but its instigator.^64 When
Jewel strikes at Rome using the first 600 years as some form of canonical
parameters he on the one hand destroyed the authority of a Patristic past
(the prelate as iconoclast), cutting away not only any claim by Rome to
this past, but cutting away the past itself as a canon. On the other hand,
he introduced a new set of canons, categories in which the order of the
realm as governed by the queen became paramount. Jewel’s sola
scriptura(one of these new canons) has given him David, Hezekiah,
Josiah and Moses as patterns of civil authority over the Church. Jewel’s
commonwealth appears seemingly a prototypical divine right monarchy.
Jewel’s negative canon whereby he excised the Fathers of Romish notions
has likewise yielded emperors who had wielded prerogatives over the
Church, for example, Justinian, Constantine and Maurice, inter alia.
Here Jewel’s positive assertions come not so much as a foundation for his
Protestant doctrine, but more as a buttress for the prerogative of the
monarch, since the prince now assumed a right arrogated previously by
Rome.
The Jewel that has arisen from this study is both a Puritan and a
Prelate: he at once affirmed the authority of Scripture and the primacy
246 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^61) Jewel,Apologia, in Works, III, p. 75.
(^62) ‘Since the powers of the empire are weakened (imminutiae sunt vires imperii), and
kingdoms have succeed to the imperial power that right is common to christian kings and
princes.’ Jewel, Ad Scipionem, in Works, IV, p. 1098.
(^63) In this Jewel is following the lead of John Bale and his Image of the Two Churches.
(^64) Jewel,Works, IV, pp. 778 ff. Ironically, 12 times Jewel cited Gregory the Great’s
denunciation of any bishop calling himself a universal bishop, all the while happy to
denounce Gregory’s missionary, Augustine of Canterbury’s tyranny.
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