embrace these accusations, but to throw them back at the critics; in this
case supposed French monks. Jewel noted that the liberality of liturgical
expression within the Church of England had been something of long
standing, as ‘indeed always our particular churches – Salisbury, York,
Hereford and Bangor – have offered public prayers to God different
from one another’.^126 Jewel then shows that this diversity of practice was
not an English idiom, but that divergences of practice occurred among
the ancient Syrian, Egyptian, Roman and African Churches.^127 As for
England and vestments, says Jewel, we are all agreed, from the prince
down, that such things are neither holy nor polluted in and of
themselves; such things are adiaphora. And beyond this, the English
Church now adheres to one form of the administration of the sacrament,
and one form of common prayer.^128 Paradoxically, these divergences
which Jewel trumpets, by which English diversity should be
countenanced, these adiaphora, have all been proscribed by the
uniformity which Jewel himself sought to impose.
Pertaining to matters theological, Jewel insisted that the English
Church had a greater unity than the traditionalists. In fact, concerning
matters that dealt with the truth of the gospel, there was no dissent.^129
Jewel rebukes Rome, for he says, there are vast rents in its fabric:
Occamists against Scotists, Dominicans with the Franciscans, bishop
Fisher’s dissent on the eating of the body of Christ by mice, Thomas’s
disagreements with Lombard.^130 This assertion by Jewel of factions and
parties in the traditionalist camp had already appeared in his previous
writings and will appear again in his controversies with Harding. The
several themes that made up the essential content of Jewel’s Epistola, the
unanimity of the English Church on essential matters (de re vero ipsa),
the indifferent character of liturgies and vestments, the reality that the
English Church was well ordered, all recur in his Apologiaand form part
of the justification for the English polity being centered on the will of its
prince.
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 87
apud nos esse certi: non Episcopos inter se, non Concionatores, non Ecclesiarum ministros,
non homines singulos, vel de doctrina, vel de Ceremoniis convenire: quenque sibi pro sua
libidine Ecclesiam suam fabricari.’ Epistolain Booty Appendix, Jewel as Apologist, p. 210.
(^126) ‘Semper enim Ecclesiae nostrae particulares ut sunt Sarisburiensis, Eboracensis,
Herfordiensis, Bangoriensis, aliter atque aliter publicas Deo preces persoluerunt.’ Ibid., p.
220.
(^127) Ibid., pp. 220–22. In his Challenge Sermon, Jewel had already used this diversity and
seeming lack of uniformity in liturgical practice against those who would argue for the
necessity of the unity brought by the Roman rite. Cf. Jewel, Works, I, p. 23.
(^128) Ibid., p. 220.
(^129) ‘De re (Euangelii) vero ipsa, nihil inter nos est dissidii.’ Ibid., p. 218.
(^130) This same line of argument appears in almost identical form in the Apologia, in
Works, III, pp. 68–69.