signaled that Jewel’s busy but happy Oxford life had drastically changed,
along with that of every other Protestant in England. On 6 July 1553
Edward VI died of tuberculosis, and whatever Northumberland might
do, the Catholic daughter of Catherine of Aragon, Mary, was to take the
throne.^126 Neither Jewel nor England would ever be the same, though at
the time none could perceive the full implications of Mary’s reign. The
course that Jewel had set for himself, his attachment to Peter Martyr, and
the content of his teaching and orations, would now all have profound
consequences, ones that like his time at Oxford during Edward VI’s
reign, would adumbrate his life as an Elizabethan apologist.
Exile: Mary Tudor and the gestation of an Elizabethan Protestant
Edward VI’s later government under Northumberland had not elicited a
happy response from the people of England. While the duke held all the
resources, and while even the foreign ambassadors believed that Mary
could not succeed against him, very few of the nobility, regardless of
religion, were willing to stand against her: Protestants were the ones who
informed her of Edward’s death, nobility more concerned about the law
than Mary’s religion.^127 Certainly those nobles who Northumberland
could coerce, those nobles and clerics who had been most vociferously
behind the Reformation – Nicholas Ridley denounced her from Paul’s
cross on 9 July, and the London Council sent out letters to dissuade
any from supporting Mary – would stand for Lady Jane Grey. But
Northumberland was his own worst enemy: he let Mary escape from his
watch; to most of the nation he was highly unpopular. By the end of July
Mary held the throne, and did so with the aid and consent of such
Protestants as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Peter Carew and Sir Nicholas
Throckmorton.^128
Jewel’s life during Mary’s reign falls into two parts: the first entails the
difficulties endured while remaining in England, the second the journeys,
controversies and relationships formed while exiled on the continent.
Most of what Jewel has to say about this period of his life is from
retrospection, though some letters do exist. Most of the events he never
mentioned at all, as though the significance of them had never dawned on
36 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^126) David Loades, Mary Tudor, A Life(Oxford, 1989), pp. 171–90; Dudley, pp.
230–73.
(^127) Elton,Reform and Reformation, pp. 374–75.
(^128) Loades,Dudley, pp. 261–65; Mary Tudor, pp. 171–81; Politics and the Nation, pp.
240–41. It should be noted that Carew, Throckmorton and Wyatt all joined in the debacle
that was the attempted armed resistance against the Spanish match, cf. Loades, Mary
Tudor, pp. 211–15.
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