University upon the occasion of her accession, and having for a brief
time been an interim president of Corpus Christi, none of these hardly
merit an episcopal appointment. He had but one clerical charge prior to
1558, the modest parish of Sunningwell, whose religious needs he
attended to every other week while still a student at Oxford.^37 Patrick
Collinson has noted that the path to preferment generally ran through
the universities, and that one who governed their hall or college well
would merit advance.^38 The real reason for Jewel’s preferment rests
probably with Elizabeth herself, who plucked her bishops mainly from
the returning exiles, and who set them up as the foils to Marian
Catholicism. Had Elizabeth wished a Henrician church it is possible that
she could have possessed it. Such individuals existed who could more
than adequately have made up her bench, for example, Andrew Perne,
but she chose not to go that route.^39 The controversy fostered by the
government in 1559 had a clear aim, and its intents and ends could
hardly be said to be driven by anyone but Elizabeth.
Within weeks of his return to England he found himself in the thick
of the religious controversy then consuming Parliament regarding the
alteration of religion: he had been chosen along with seven other former
exiles and also Edmund Guest, the future bishop of Rochester, to defend
three peculiarly Protestant propositions in a disputation with a similar
number of traditionalist Marian clergy. The attempts to change by
statute the religion of England had run into the obstacle of the House of
Lords, dominated still by the conservatives led by the bishops, despite
the episcopal depletion at the end of Mary’s reign.
The bishops greatly impede us, since they are, as you know, among
the chief individuals and nobility in the upper house, and none of
our men there are able by open speech to refute their deceit and
arrogance; they reign alone among unlearned and ignorant men, and
they easily hem in our enfeebled lords (paterculos) by either their
numbers or the reputation of their learning.^40On the Catholic side were five bishops, White of Winchester, Watson of
Lincoln, Oglethorpe of Carlisle, Scott of Chester and Bayne of Coventry;
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 61
(^37) Humphrey, Vita Iuelli, p. 45.
(^38) Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants. The Church in English Society,
1559–1625(Oxford, 1982), pp. 60–61.
(^39) Patrick Collinson, ‘Andrew Perne and his Times’, in Cambridge Monograph Series
no. 11, Andrew Perne. Quatercentenary Studies(Cambridge, 1991), p. 2.
(^40) ‘Magno nobis impedimento sunt episcopi: qui cum sint, ut scis, in superiori conclavi
inter primores et proceres, et nemo ibi sit nostrorum hominum, qui illorum fucos et
mendacia possit coram dicendo refutare, inter homines literarum et rerum imperitos soli
regnant, et paterculos nostros facile vel numero vel opinione doctrinae circumscribunt.’
Jewel, letter to Peter Martyr, 20 March 1559, in Works, IV, p. 1199.