Gregory VII.^208 Jewel quotes extensively from all the contemporaries who
treat the life of Gregory, both those whose ad hominem arguments
labeled the pope a sorcerer and murderer, such as the cardinal Beno, and
others whose pro-Gregorian stance in reporting Jewel still uses in an
anti-Gregorian sense.^209 Jewel employs accusations labeling Hildebrand a
simoniac and a heretic. He quotes the Council of Brixen, called by the
German emperor Henry IV, which avowed Hildebrand as not the pope,
but a false monk.^210 By siding with the imperial advocates, Jewel in his
role as an English apologist, strikes at Rome in three distinctly calculated
ways. First, he attacks papal claims of universal jurisdiction of
ecclesiastical oversight. With this denial he bolsters the 1559 Elizabethan
Settlement by his assertions of the right of local polities to establish the
forms of religion for their own country. Second, and as a corollary to
the first blow, he also undercuts those, like Harding, who would fault the
right of Parliament to establish England’s religion, and thereby marks the
Recusants as being as seditious as the Gregorians. Third, Jewel’s revision
of canonical norms necessitates a doctrinal standard for the Church
other than the magisterium or the papacy: having denied to the papacy
its universal magisterial prerogative, he has begged the question – the
canonical question – whether this magisterial authority is found in any
permanent, universal, ecclesiastical institution. For Jewel, the answer is
no. It instead lies in the Scripture, but is administered by the regional
Church.^211
While the other Reformers embraced the civil magistrates as their
protectors and integrated them in various ways into their schemes of the
godly society, Jewel made the place of the prince paramount in that the
prince, as supreme governor, did not only stand as moral guardian of
the temporal realm, but of the spiritual also. Like the imperial and royal
antagonists of the Gregorians, Jewel established a Church dependent on
the crown; paradoxically, like the monks who were the protagonists of
the Gregorian Reforms, Jewel retained a piety which though not overtly
Donatist,^212 still divorced Christian piety from the sacerdotal,
sacramental system integral to the existence of the medieval concept of
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 111
(^208) Following Jewel’s normal modus operandi, he spends several pages in his Defense of
the Apologyviciously attacking Hildebrand, yet this does not stop him from quoting
Gregory VII that truth takes precedence over custom. Works, I, 49.
(^209) Beno was the most prominent member of the Roman cardinalate who sympathized
with Henry IV. See Morrison, Tradition and Authority, pp. 319 ff.
(^210) Jewel,Works, III, pp. 345–48.
(^211) Cf. the following discussion on Jewel’s use of the Greek liturgies.
(^212) This accusation could have been leveled at Jewel by the Recusants. Jewel’s assertion
that when the pope fails to act like a bishop he is no longer one certainly embraces that
heresy.