both political and religious dissent from abroad. Against their assertions
Jewel would exert the greater part of his intellectual and academic
activities over the next years of his life. On seven separate occasions
Jewel, both by public sermons and in print, defended the Elizabethan
Settlement: at the 1559 Westminster Disputation; in his Challenge
Sermon, preached in the fall of 1559 and the spring of 1560, and as well
in its subsequent literary, polemical aftermath; in the composition of the
Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae and the running debate which it
engendered; in his anonymous Epistola, written at the behest of William
Cecil and ostensibly disseminated in France; in his epistle to the Venetian
Scipio, defending England’s absence from the Council of Trent;^28 in his A
View of a Seditious Bull, written upon the occasion of Elizabeth’s
excommunication by Pius V; and in his short tract ‘An Answer to Certain
Frivolous Objections against the Government of the Church of England’,
which he composed in response to the views and actions of the
Presbyterians in the 1571 Parliament, defending the threefold order of
the ministry of the Church of England. All these controversies, the last
excepted, involved Jewel in disputes with Roman Catholics over the
nature of what is a properly constituted ecclesiastical order; and even the
dispute with the Presbyterians concerned this matter as well. As will be
seen, in his debates with the more precise of his Protestant
acquaintances,^29 Jewel adopted the same posture concerning the duties of
the individual to the prince, and employed basically the same arguments
against them as he had done in his quarrels with Rome.
Jewel’s polemic revolved around several themes recurring throughout
his writings. First among these is the supremacy of the godly prince
within his domain to effect ecclesiastical reform and to order the Church,
provided this exercise of authority by the prince has the limitation of the
Word of God. Next and correlative to the first, though subordinate to it,
is the authority and autonomy of regional churches to order their own
rites and polity. This is a necessary extension of the first, for in
England, though the monarch is the supreme head, and in Elizabeth’s
case the supreme governor – whatever this change of wording entailed –
of the Church of England, the clergy drew their authority directly from
the ordinance of God (though always at Elizabeth’s pleasure), and they
in conjunction with their sovereign ordered the life of the Church.^30 As
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 57
(^28) The Epistle to Scipio was seemingly unknown in England, and was culled from a set
of documents printed in connection with the Council of Trent.
(^29) This would include the Vesterian controversy of the mid 1560s as well as the 1571
Admonition Controversy.
(^30) Richard Hooker in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity(VIII.4) saw no real distinction,
speaking of the supremacy as a necessary attribute of any polity: ‘Now besides them ... is
required a universal power, which reacheth over all importing supreme authority of