Jewel, contradicting himself in the letter of 6 April, maintained, on the
one hand, that the disputation was to pick up where it had left off the
previous Friday and, on the other, that the rebuttals of the first day’s
proceedings were to be given on the third day, and that it had already
been determined that the disputants would treat the second point
touching the authority of regional churches on the second day. Jewel is
echoed in his initial assessment by the account of the Recusant Nicholas
Sander.^50 The altered record of the privy council also bears out that the
Catholics’ claim of fraud and deceit (this voiced also both by Il
Schifanoya and Feria) at the least seems justified, especially as the format
of the disputation had already been changed twice previously. Dickens
argues that whichever side may have been justified, the second point,
touching the authority of local churches, likely would never have been
touched by the traditionalists, for to have affirmed it would have meant
denouncing Rome, and to deny it would have involved them in treason.^51
Yet this did not stop them from so arguing after the debate. Both A.G.
Dickens and Norman Jones point out that the disputation served to
contravene any assertion by the bishops that they had not been given a
hearing, as well as to curtail their power within the House of Lords
where they had thus far stymied any attempt at restoring Protestantism.^52
This is clearly Jewel’s sentiments in his 20 March letter to Martyr.
Whether the bishops and the other traditional clerics hoped to avoid the
Tower by avoiding a denial of the second proposition became academic,
as both White and Watson were arrested for contumacy on 6 April. The
bishops having been cowed, the Elizabethan Settlement subsequently
passed through Parliament.^53
With regard to Jewel, the matter of the second point on the
prerogative of regional councils demands some further thought. In his
letter to Martyr on 20 March 1559, prior to the disputation, Jewel sets
out the three points for debate, but the substance of the second as he
related it to Martyr differs from that recorded by Foxe, Burnett,
Holinshed and Cardwell. Jewel’s version, ‘that every provincial church,
even without the bidding of a general council, has power either to
establish, or change, or abrogate ceremonies and ecclesiastical rites,
64 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
though both Foxe, Actes and Monuments, V, VIII (1563), pp. 692–93, and Holinshed,
ChroniclesIV (1587), p. 182, list it as contempt.
(^50) Nicholas Sander, Report to Cardinal Moroni, in Catholic Record Society Miscellanea.
I. London, 1905, p. 30.
(^51) Dickens,English Reformation, p. 301.
(^52) Norman L. Jones, Faith by Statute, pp. 123–29; Jones, ‘Elizabeth’s First Year: the
Conception and Birth of the Elizabethan Political World’, in Christopher Haigh, The Reign
of Elizabeth(Athens, GA, 1987), pp. 42–43.
(^53) Jones,Faith by Statute, pp. 129–37.
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