and Neale assume, especially as the greatest number of exiles involved at
Frankfurt would largely embrace what the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement
later established.^171
Two implications of the Frankfurt incident stand out for Jewel. The
first pertains to the thoughts attributed to Cox’s party, spoken upon that
first Sunday of the confrontation, ‘that they woulde do as they had
donne in England, and that they would have the face off an English
churche’.^172 This theme would later reverberate throughout Jewel’s
writings, the right of a regional church to establish and espouse its own
order and liturgy. This prerogative, inherent in the very concept of the
royal supremacy, became integral to Jewel’s espousal of the Protestant
commonwealth under the godly prince. ‘The prince is the keeper of the
law of God, and that of both tables, as well as of the first, that pertaineth
to religion, as of the second that pertaineth to good order. For he is the
head of the people, not only of the commons and laity, but also of the
ministers and clergy’.^173 For Cox, as well as Jewel and the other exiles,
they did not cease to be English merely because they had fled their
homeland. Perhaps for Knox the perspective was different. As strangers,
the English exiles hoped for the same privileges granted to other Stranger
Churches. Indeed, the very French congregation to which they were
united at Frankfurt had enjoyed liberties in England that the particular
parishes of the Church of England did not. For Cox and the English of
Strasbourg and other cities, it was not a matter of aping the French, but
of retaining their identity as an English Church, an identity distinguished
by the Edwardian Prayer Book.
The second point touches on the first in that it pertains to the very
notion of order itself. The most godly or the most Reformed order,
abstractly or ideally considered, was not the question for Cox. For most
of the other Reformers, an attempt to implement a formal service that
pleased God was essential, but this was not the sine qua nonof Reform.
In John Calvin’s reply to the initial inquiries made by Knox and
Wittingham, though not enthusiastic in any sense about the Book of
Common Prayer, the biggest concern for Calvin was not merely proper
order, but the preservation of unity and peace.^174
JEWEL TILL 1558 45
(^171) For the ideological divisions at Frankfurt which reoccur under Elizabeth, see Ronald
J. Vander Molen, ‘Anglican against Puritan: Ideological Origins during the Marian Exile’,
Church History42 (March 1973), pp. 45–57.
(^172) Brieff Discours, p. XXXVIII.
(^173) Jewel. Sermon in Haggai 1:2–4, Works, II, 997.
(^174) For Calvin, while desiring the weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper for the
Genevan Church, even seeing it as vital, that it never was effected, though many of his
forms of discipline were, betrays a hierarchy in Calvin’s mind of what could and could not