50 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
found in them. Jewel, now almost 36, reentered his former world of
ecclesiastical and religious controversy, one for which the idiom of his
own history, discipline and temperament had well suited him. Despite his
humble, West Country origins, despite the loss of his life at Oxford,^191
despite having weakened and subscribed to ‘papistical’ articles, his past
associations and theological disposition now became the door through
which lay advancement and opportunity, however much he might have
longed to go back through it to return to Zurich. Others had also
endured these circumstances, but Jewel had maintained the life of a
scholar throughout his exile, he had never strayed either from furthering
his education or far from his teacher; and unlike so many of his fellow
English clerics, and certainly to the delight of Elizabeth who preferred
her clergy celibate, he had never married.
John Jewel’s life prior to 1559 reappears throughout his later years, in
his views of what constituted a Christian commonwealth, his ideas on
what basis a church ought to be reformed, in the place granted the
primacy of the prince in the life of the Church and in his attachment to
the person, views, and ideas of Peter Martyr. That repeated Frankfurt
refrain of worshiping as had been done in England also often recurs.
Jewel emerges after 1558 as a committed Protestant, but one who never
lost his English identity within the larger world of Protestantism. His
allegiance to his monarch, however, is tempered by the constraints of
what Jewel repeatedly termed vera religio. For Jewel, Mary Tudor and
her ministers, both civil and ecclesiastical, had shown how they would
treat this religion; they had as well shown of what sort they were morally
and spiritually. That the true faith needed the protection of a godly
prince became a dominant motif in Jewel’s thought, though there was the
small problem of what to do when your prince was not as godly as you
wished her to be?
(^191) In his 1558–59 correspondence Jewel never mentions the possibility of returning to
Oxford, or going back to a scholar’s life.
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