assault on the established order Archbishop Whitgift had hoped to stop,
and he had suppressed a London edition of the work.^69 That the
Presbyterians sought to use Jewel for their own ends and arguments is
also seen in Whitgift’s printed arguments with Thomas Cartwright. The
substance of their debate revolved around Jewel’s Answere to Certain
Frivolous Objections.^70 Cartwright, confronted by the now deceased
Jewel as his antagonist is left with the retort to Whitgift that, though he
does not deny that the tract was written by Jewel, and that the
sentiments were his, nonetheless, were the bishop of Salisbury still alive,
he would have repented of these errors.^71 Notice has already been made
of the use of Jewel by the Puritan William Fulke, whom some have noted
as Jewel’s successor as the defender of the English Church from Catholic
attacks, and who imbibed for a time of Presbyterian notions,^72 in his An
overthrow of Stapleton’s Fortress. Whether Laud, Cartwright, Fulke and
others held Jewel in esteem, admired his scholarship, approved of his
conclusions or were merely using the bishop as a foil against their own
polemical nemeses, their use emphasizes the problematic question of
who were the heirs of Jewel. The answer lies, I believe in both Jewel’s
Erastianism, and his strongly evangelical faith.
Jewel was foremost a Protestant, with strong affinities to the Swiss
Reformed Churches. While explicitly he linked himself to Zurich, we
have seen that he was not as averse to Geneva as some may think. On
this basis alone, Southgate’s assertion that Jewel was some proto-
Anglican seems highly tenuous at best. Hand-in-glove with Southgate’s
Anglican Jewel is the one that is beholden to the Fathers as normative
guides (the point touched on previously with respect to Peter White).
Southgate quotes Jewel as saying that ‘the fathers were inspired from
heaven’,^73 and then cites Jewel’s Defence of the Apology to this effect.^74
Yet this quote is not directly from Jewel, but from St Athanasius, and
Jewel used it not to enhance, but to diminish patristic authority. St
Athanasius’s reference to the Fathers was to the Apostles and their
immediate predecessors; yet for Jewel, the Fathers to the Fathers (that is,
the Apostles), the real source of authority, were the authors of Scripture.
248 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^69) Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in
English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
p. 382.
(^70) InWorks, IV, pp. 1299–1300.
(^71) In Whitgift, Works, ed. John Ayre. 3 vols. (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1851–53), Vol.
II, pp. 336–45.
(^72) Milton,Catholic and Reformed, pp. 464, 477; and Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan
Movement, p. 108.
(^73) Southgate,Doctrinal Authority, p. 189.
(^74) Jewel,Works, III, p. 238.
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