This indeed grievously afflicts me and is highly absurd, that discord
is springing up among brethren who are for the same faith exiles and
fugitives from their own country; and for a cause indeed which in
your dispersion should like a sacred bond have held you closely
united.^175Jewel as well sought a pure church, the definition of which, as will be
shown, was very Swiss in origin. But certain matters were more
important to him, they assumed a higher place in the hierarchy that
constituted his notion of the godly commonwealth than purity abstractly
considered. Here again is the presence of the godly prince, the one who
orders the Christian commonwealth and sustains the Christian religion.
Perhaps the biggest antinomy in Jewel’s theological index rests in his
persistent carping to his Zurich friends about the state of English religion
on the one hand and his public proclamation of England’s and
Elizabeth’s respective Protestant fervor on the other. But however much
the state of his church may dismay him, Jewel always insisted that the
way to reform was through the order imposed on the Church by the
prince. In this he was very much of a piece with his Erastian friends in
Zurich.
By spring of 1555 Jewel had left Frankfurt and had traveled again to
Strasbourg to join his mentor, Peter Martyr. Martyr had previously
turned down an invitation proffered by the elders of Geneva’s Italian
church, even though in a letter to Calvin he expressed his own personal
gratification for having received such a honor.^176 But by the late spring of
1556 Martyr, embroiled in controversy with Strasbourg’s Lutheran
authorities over the Eucharist, accepted a call to Zurich, and in July
1556 departed Strasbourg for Zurich with Jewel accompanying him. The
three years spent between Strasbourg and Zurich proved formative for
Jewel for several reasons, but most importantly for the expanding circle
of associations in which Jewel now moved. To this point, though
certainly affiliated with persons who had shaped the English
Reformation – Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Cox – Jewel’s life had largely
been consigned to the immediate Oxford circle of Parkhurst and Martyr.
Now Jewel came into full contact with what Winthrop Hudson has
termed the ‘Cambridge connection’.^177 Cambridge University, beginning
in the 1520s had come under the increasing dominance of Protestants
and humanists. If Oxford had been the first of the universities to
embrace humanism, Cambridge’s later endorsement proved more
46 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
be accepted in a Reformed Church.
(^175) Calvin,Letters, p. 117.
(^176) McLelland,Visible Words, p. 51.
(^177) Cf. fn. 41. Richard Cox, of course is Jewel’s first introduction to this circle, but in
Zurich his entrance is complete.
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