CHAPTER FOURA prelate public and private:
Jewel caught between Puritans
and princes
Janus as an English bishop: public sentiment and private bias
As regards to the two ecclesiastical worlds, England and Zurich, which
formed and informed his thought and life, his deference to them and
their respective theologies as absorbed and modified by him, John Jewel
incarnates a Janus figure: his public face addressed his English audience
of literate commoners, clerics, nobility and her Majesty; his other,
private face peers through his intimate correspondence with Zurich
where resided his Oxford mentor Peter Martyr, as well as a number of
other notable figures integral to the Reformation in Zurich and even in
England. Fixed in the doorway, he faced on the one side the life and
duties of an English Protestant prelate; and on the other, that of a
sheltered, pilgrim emigre, who had dutifully, albeit belatedly, followed
his teacher into exile, and who still looked to his mentor and his mentor’s
colleagues for answers and advice. When interrogating Jewel the prelate,
the public image, one is answered by a confident defender of the
Elizabethan Settlement: armed with his two swords of Scripture and the
Patristic writers (as Jewel apprehended them), he challenged any to
contradict that the English Church as defined by the 1559 Settlement,
stood within the most ancient Catholic tradition as defined by the
Scriptures and the Patristic writers of the Church’s first 600 years.^1 The
English bishop showed himself the dutiful servant of her Majesty, his
writings aimed at that great threat to England, the Antichrist of Rome.
But even though Jewel’s polemical writings exude a dogged support for
his prince and for the 1559 Settlement, his enthusiasm for England and
(^1) The parameters Jewel set in his ‘Challenge Sermon’ were ‘any old catholic doctor, or
father, or out of any old general council, or out of the holy scriptures of God, or any one
example of the primitive church, whereby it may be clearly and plainly proved that there
was any private mass in the whole world at that time, for the space of six hundred years’.
Jewel,Works, I, p. 20. These boundaries though, are problematic (does Jewel ever use them
to define the parameters of English belief?) and will be treated in the conclusion. Cf.
Apologia, in Works, III, p. 77.