Protestants it had severed them from the Pope, yet this blessing was not
unmixed, for Henry VIII proved little more than a new form of the old
misery. But with the Pope gone, in the mind of the English Reformers, so
many other evils that attended Rome had as well been removed: canon
law, monasticism and, hopefully, even chantries. What both sides would
soon enough come to learn was that death had no cardinal clergy, and
the new supreme head may not abide by what they considered the truth.
Jewel and the Edwardian Reformation
John Jewel was 24 when Henry VIII died in January 1547, and he had
been at Oxford for almost 12 years, four of them under Parkhurst at
Merton, but the bulk at Corpus Christi. Yet Jewel may have labored on
in relative obscurity were it not for the change of religion that came upon
England under Edward VI. Even this, however, may have proved
inadequate to bring Jewel to any public notice, despite having had the
well-placed Parkhurst as a teacher. Parkhurst was a man of self-professed
limited abilities, and, according to Humphrey, upon one of his returns to
hear Jewel lecture, commented ‘Olim discipulus mihi, chare Iuelle, fuisti,
Nunc ero discipulus, te renuente, tuus’.^55 It would remain for someone
else to give Jewel direction, this direction coming with the change of
political winds, both in England and in the Empire in 1547.
Henry VIII’s reign ended with the leading Catholics, nobility and
clergy, outside of Henry VIII’s favor: the Duke of Norfolk was in the
tower awaiting death, his son, the Earl of Surrey had already been
executed and Stephen Gardiner, the bishop of Winchester, had been
excluded from Edward VI’s regency council for his purported resistance
to an exchange of lands.^56 Lacy B. Smith sees Henry VIII’s decisions
concerning Edward’s regency prompted by politics, and not religion per
se. Henry, according to Smith, feared that a council dominated by
Catholics would play into the hands of Charles V, a situation that may
prompt Francis I to attempt to take Calais from the English. Henry VIII,
Smith writes, wanted a pacified, even a frightened Francis I, so that the
French king, in fear of the emperor, would be happy to seal an alliance
with England by a marriage between Edward and Mary of Scotland. But
why a Protestant regency council would go through with this marital
plan Smith does not make clear.^57 It seems far more obvious that Henry
JEWEL TILL 1558 19
(^55) Humphrey, Vita Iuelli, p. 29.
(^56) Elton,Reform and Reformation, p. 330. Cf. fn. 33 and E.W. Ives, ‘Henry VIII’s Will’,
p. 912.
(^57) L.B. Smith, ‘Triumph of Protestantism’, pp. 1254 ff.