wherever it may seem to make for edification’,^54 is certainly an expansion
on ‘Every particular church hath authority to institute, change, and
abrogate ceremonies and rites in the church, so that to edify’. For Jewel,
the added proviso ‘even without the bidding of a general council,’
qualifies even further the extent to which the larger church can exercise
jurisdiction over a regional church. This motif recurs in Jewel’s
controversies with Harding, wherein Jewel de factodenied the power of
general councils both by playing their decrees off those of local and
regional councils, which contradicted them, and by citing the acts of
certain councils which discredit specific dogmas which the traditionalist
Harding avowed.^55 Jewel’s granting regional churches such autonomy, an
independent sovereignty largely deposited and realized in the prince,
recurs in almost all of his writings and controversies.
By July of 1559 Jewel had been selected to be the bishop of Salisbury.
Echoing such worthies as St Augustine and St Anselm, Jewel found the
appointment a bother, telling Martyr that ‘I have positively decided to
shake off this burden’.^56 But the matter could hardly have been avoided,
even though to Jewel and to many of the other new bishops, a number
of whom had also been exiles, the office had been tainted. Martyr had
counseled the former exile Thomas Sampson that it were better that the
godly take the offices than that others – wolves and antichrists – should
possess them:
In the first place I exhort you, by reason of the great want of
ministers in your country, not to withdraw yourself from the
function offered you: for if you who are as it were pillars, shall
decline taking upon yourselves the performance of ecclesiastical
offices, not only will the churches be destitute of pastors, but you
will give place to wolves and antichrists. By remaining without any
office you will be so far from amending those things which you
dislike, that you will hardly retain what is now conceded.^57Sampson did not heed Martyr’s advice, turned down the bishopric of
Norwich, and it subsequently was given to Jewel’s former mentor
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 65
(^54) ‘Quamvis ecclesiam provincialem, etiam injussu generalis concilii, posse vel instituere,
vel mutare, vel abrogare ceremonias et ritus ecclesiasticos, sicubi id videatur facere ad
aedificationem.’Works, IV, p. 1199.
(^55) In the first instance Jewel cites the Council of Nicaea as maintaining the propriety of
clerical marriage over against Carthage which denied it; in the second instance he names
the Councils of Basle and Constance as being opposed to the authority of the bishop of
Rome in that both deposed popes. Jewel, Works, IV, p. 1053. This will be further discussed
below.
(^56) Jewel, letter to Martyr, 1 August 1559, Works, IV, p. 1214.
(^57) 1 February 1560, in the Zurich Letters, pp. 38–39. Given Martyr’s letter to Hooper,
one wonders why Sampson wrote to him at all.