Like the Epistola, the Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanaealso came at the
request of the Elizabethan establishment, this time Lord Keeper Bacon as
well as archbishop Parker.^131 Though like the Epistolaanonymously
written, that Jewel played the primary role in this work none ever
questioned, and it was often asserted even in his own lifetime.^132 Ye t
unlike the Epistola, which though probably published in England was
sent to France, and from France to obscurity, the Apologia, published in
a Protestant country with the support of the establishment, enjoyed
notoriety from the time of its first publication. Jewel’s Challenge Sermon
was probably conceptualized and constructed during his months on
Visitation in the late summer and early fall of 1559, then preached in the
fall and spring, 1559–60. Jewel had just finished the last of his replies to
Cole three days before he left for Salisbury in May of 1560, sending the
whole correspondence off to John Day on 18 May. On 21 May he dined
with Cecil and several others, including the Lord Keeper Bacon, Robert
Horne and Thomas Young, just appointed to York. It seems that the
Apologiawas given its conceptual birth at this meeting.^133 By April 1561
upon his return to London Jewel had completed the Apologia. Again
citing, but more fully, what Cecil on 8 May 1561 wrote to
Throckmorton in Paris:
I have caused the Bishop of Sarum to fayne an epistle [the Epistola]
sent from hence thither, and have printed it secretly, and send you
herwith certen copyes, if more be printed there, the matter shall have
more probabilite. I have caused an apology to be wrytten but not
prynted in the name of the whole clergy, which surely is wisly
lernidly eloquently and gravely wrytten, but I staye the publishing of
it untill it may be furder pondered, for so is it requisite.^134At some point after this the sixth section on the Council of Trent was
added, a chapter dissonant with the rest of the work.
In the Apologia Jewel bends his primary energies against the
traditionalist accusations that the English Church is guilty of novelty,
that it has no claim to either catholicity or antiquity, and much like the
themes touched on in the Epistola, that it is a Church sundered within
itself, not just from other Protestants. Jewel’s text is further animated by
his defense of the English refusal to take part in the reconvened council
at Trent. To answer such accusations, Jewel again takes up the questions
88 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^131) Booty, Jewel as Apologist, pp. 45–55. Cf. Strype, Life and Acts of Matthew Parker
(Oxford, 1821), I, p. 197.
(^132) Cf. the letter of Peter Martyr to Jewel, 24 August 1562, in The Zurich Letters, I, pp.
339–41, in which Martyr commends his protégé for his work.
(^133) Calendar of State Papers Spanish, Elizabeth, I, p. 201.
(^134) Calendar of State Papers, 1561–1562, p. 104. This letter is quoted in both Southgate
(pp. 56–57) and Booty (p. 40).
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