translator, a gentleman named Brent, obtained it, is not known, but as
Ayre notes, ‘there can scarcely be any reasonable doubt that Jewel was
the author’.^183 The work follows the main lines of Jewel’s arguments
(though not marred by the pedestrian and pedantic addition of one
source upon another), quotes most of the same sources, uses the books
that were in Jewel’s library, employs phrases found in a letter to Martyr
in which Jewel had proposed such a work^184 and even makes the identical
mistakes in his attribution of authors and historical facts.^185 Booty in his
work on Jewel does not even mention the letter.^186 Southgate says that it
can only be studied in conjunction with Jewel’s other writings, as he
doubts that he ever went to Padua, although he confesses that the work
probably is his.^187 Regardless of Jewel’s other travels, in one sense he had
merely picked up his Oxford studies in another setting. At Strasbourg he
had heard Martyr lecture on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethicsand the
Book of Judges; at Zurich he would also hear him lecture on St
Augustine.^188 Jewel’s life in Zurich, despite being an exile, was
nonetheless, upon recollection, one he cherished and later greatly missed,
even when his own fortunes would seem to be at their highest: ‘O
Zurich! Zurich! how much more often do I now think of you than ever
I thought of England when I was in Zurich!’^189
At the end of the 1550s Christian Europe was, given the century,
relatively at rest. The long struggle that had pitted first Spain against
France in Italy, begun in 1494 and inherited by Charles V and Francis I,
and that devolved into the struggles following Francis’s death in 1547
between Henri II and Charles V, and then after 1555, between Henri II
and Philip II (and with Philip, his wife’s England), were now coming to
48 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
Paolo Sarpi and some of his English Friends: 1606–1700(Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1972).
(^183) Jewel,Works, IV, p. 1094, fn.1.
(^184) Ad Scipionem, p. 1097, Letter to Martyr, 7 February 1562, Works, pp. 1245–48.
(^185) See Jewel, Works, IV, p. 1098, fn. 2; and fn. 2 p. 1100.
(^186) Booty, John Jewel as Apologist. This lacuna begs the question of Booty’s view of the
work’s authorship.
(^187) See Southgate, Doctrinal Authority, pp. 22–23, 129. Southgate explains the initial
part of the letter addressed to Scipio as perhaps a commonplace of a mythical address,
though this seems strained. Southgate also notes that Jewel’s name does not appear with
the English students at Padua, and Humphrey does not mention him going there.
Humphrey gives merely a page to the year Jewel spent in Strasbourg and only a few pages
to the time he spent in Zurich, so the omission of a journey to Padua should hardly rule
out the possibility. Besides, Humphrey never gives dates and is chronically imprecise with
the arrangement of his facts. And that Jewel’s name does not appear in the student lists is
possible of numerous explanations. It would seem, based on the literary evidence, the
harder explanation would be who other than Jewel could have written it.
(^188) Humphrey, Vita Iuelli, p. 88.
(^189) Jewel, undated letter to Martyr, Works, IV, pp. 1210–11.
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