a close with effective negotiations taking place at Cateau-Cambrésis even
as Mary Tudor lay dying. Charles V in 1555 had concluded a bitter
peace with Lutheranism, granting to heretics the right to exist, and
giving to heretical princes the option of favoring heresy in their own
domains. Following his initial success at Muhlberg in 1547, and the
death of his most bitter rival Francis I in that year, the future must have
then seemed happy to Charles V: only the Turk and the reform of the
Church to be troubled with. But with the victory of Maurice of Saxony
at Innsbruck, and the subsequent 1555 Peace of Augsburg legalizing
Lutheranism in the Empire, Charles retired to prepare to meet God,
leaving his brother Ferdinand the empire, and his son Philip Spain and
the Netherlands. Already in 1549 the Swiss Protestants, in a rapproche-
ment effected between Calvin and Bullinger, had also come to a
Consensus on the Lord’s supper, allowing them to form a military league,
and also giving their creed a coherent definition in contradistinction to
Lutheranism. 1558 also brought the death of the unhappy Mary Tudor,
and with it the end of exile for many of the English, Jewel among them.
But the end of the decade also saw several other beginnings besides that
of Elizabeth’s reign. By early 1559 the unlooked for death of Henri II
during the tournament to celebrate the new peace brought to the throne
of France the first of the succession of his three sons. The death proved
a portent to France, which would soon be driven by the passions of
religion and the ambition of its nobles into 30 years of civil war. The
same fate awaited the Netherlands. Elizabeth all too happily exacerbated
both situations by her interventions. The end of the decade also saw the
full flowering of the Catholic or Counter Reformation.^190
As for our subject, having survived Mary’s reign, having seen how the
Reformation operated in other cities and principalities and as well
having the luxury of living in domains that enjoyed their Protestantism
in peace – both peace in its lack of threats from without and peace in the
relations of its ministers to the civil magistrates within, consonant with
what the little evidence of his life and thought allows, we see that Jewel
had already clearly arranged his ecclesio-political system around a
Zurich/Elizabethan axis. What Jewel already embraced and professed in
1558 and 1559 could easily be inferred from the facts and details of the
first part of his life. As a bishop and apologist, Jewel would attempt to
hold in equipoise conflicts left over from his earlier years, but now writ
large in his later. His resolutions, though often never explicitly reflecting
his past controversies and writings, nonetheless tacitly retain elements
JEWEL TILL 1558 49
(^190) Chapter Three treats the Catholic reaction to Jewel. While I think the term Counter
Reformation still valuable in describing such affairs as the Recusant response to Jewel, it
hardly suffices in describing the Catholic Church’s renewal in the sixteenth century.