within, and wars prosecuted from without. These deviations and perils
Jewel contrasted with the purity of Christianity in England, the true heirs
of Apostolic and Patristic religion. Of course Jewel also saw this model
realized in Zurich, where, to be sure, the ideal had been far better
apprehended than in England.^10 The martial parallel to the doctrinal
aberrations and liturgical abuses of Rome, were the threats to the life
and limb of English Protestantism, threats reified once in Mary, and
continued in the Catholic powers of Europe. ‘But we truly see ... so
many thousands of our brethren in these last 20 years have borne witness
unto the truth in the midst of most painful torments that could be
devised; and ... princes, desirous to restrain the gospel’.^11 Jewel hardly
had a monopoly on this comparison of Elizabethan piety with Marian
darkness and decadence. Foxe notes that
we shall never find any reign of any Prince in this land or any other,
which did ever show in it (for the proportion of time) so many great
arguments of God’s wrath and displeasure, as were to be seen in the
reign of this queen Mary; whether we behold the shortness of her
time, or the unfortunate event of all her purposes.^12In Jewel’s thought, one of Elizabeth’s chief duties was to protect the
Protestant establishment from the shades of Marian times and the
present threat of the Catholic powers. Consequently, the nature of all his
public discourse, until his last year of life, focused on publicly justifying
the doctrine and polity of the Church of England against its Roman
detractors. Even with the emergence of a defined Presbyterian
movement, Jewel’s most precise apology for the Elizabethan supremacy,
A View of a Seditious Bull, was written in 1570. Having been granted
the privilege to define his communion within the confines of the 1559
Settlement, the bishop of Salisbury orients his agenda for reform in
contradistinction to the Church of Rome, portraying England’s Church
and commonwealth as true to the Scriptures, Fathers and ancient
councils. In all of Jewel’s works there persists the constant theme that
England, and by extension Protestantism, was not the innovator, nor the
inventors of new doctrine. Jewel bitterly denounced the notion that he or
any Protestant ever wanted some radical form of Christianity which
swept away one order for another, as some forms of Anabaptism
explicitly proclaimed. This very libel of sedition and rebellion, often
thrown at Protestants, and certainly at Jewel by Harding, Jewel himself
A PRELATE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 159
(^10) Jewel had noted the identity of religion that existed between England and Zurich, Cf.
letter to Martyr (28 April 1559, Works, IV, pp. 1207–9), in which Jewel boasted that
England’s doctrine did not differ in the slightest from the confession of Zurich.
(^11) Jewel,Apologia, in Works, III, p. 55.
(^12) Foxe,Actes and Monuments, VIII, 625.