had used against his traditionalist detractors.^13 The order which saw the
monarch sitting over the Church Jewel always maintained, just as much
a bludgeon against Rome as against Geneva.
Jewel had spent virtually his whole life in a realm where the monarch
governed the Church. Even upon abandoning the realm as an exile from
1555 to 1559, he resided for the bulk of that time in Zurich, a city
explicitly Erastian in its polity, and among the chief proponents of that
political theory. The particulars of Jewel’s own doctrine drew from the
specifics of the Elizabethan Settlement, and was at once a defense of both
Elizabeth and the Protestant character of official English religion.
Nonetheless, the axioms that guided Jewel did not arise from his making
a virtue of an Elizabethan necessity. Many of the essentials have already
been discussed, but one point should be further emphasized, namely
Jewel’s comparison of Elizabeth’s godly ordered regime with Mary’s
superstitious and ignorant one: ‘It is incredible even to hear, what a
pasture and forest of superstition everywhere emerged in that darkness
of Marian times.’^14
Though worried about the sad condition of religion within England,
and though cassock and surplice troubled his conscience, nonetheless
Jewel saw England’s need for order outweighing any concern that may
have troubled him about things not materially pertinent to the Faith,
what he had termed in the Epistola,de re vero ipsa.^15 For Jewel, order
was the required ingredient necessary for reform; an order, however
disconcerting the prospects may have been, that flowed from Elizabeth,
England’s prince and her Church’s Supreme Governor. This reliance
upon the monarch is a key to understanding Jewel’s attitudes and actions
as regards the Puritans and Presbyterians. A key to this can be seen in
Jewel’s view of the international question of religion and the dangers,
real or supposed that threatened England. The cause of this concern,
both as a threat to the intrinsic stability of the English religious life and
as an ever-present military danger, was Rome: not only a fomenter of
religious ignorance, but of sedition and rebellion as well. Jewel felt
keenly the threats that popish monarchs were to Protestantism: the
religious wars that Charles V prosecuted against the Schmalkaldic
League had initially brought Bucer and Martyr as exiles to England;
Catholic Mary had subsequently sent Martyr packing again, with Jewel
as the exile soon following. But it was not only Catholic or traditionalist
influences that caused Jewel consternation: he often showed an almost
160 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^13) Jewel,Defence of the Apology,Works, III, pp. 187 ff.
(^14) ‘Incredible tamen dictu est, in illis tenebris Mariani temporis quanta ubique
proruperit seges et sylva superstitionum.’ Jewel, Works, IV, p. 1216.
(^15) Jewel,Epistola,in Booty, John Jewel as Apologist for the Church of England.
London, 1963, Appendix, p. 218.
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