To Jewel’s public audience, whether the English faithful or Recusant
polemicists, the picture of England was one of harmony, the English
Church united under their one sovereign, agreed as to the essentials of
the Faith, and exercised in charity on things indifferent. This is the clear
message of Jewel in both his Apologiaand especially the Epistola, but in
Jewel’s letters to Zurich, he very much looks like those very English
Protestants whose dispositions the Epistolais meant to slight. How
could Jewel hold such zealously Protestant opinions and still remain the
dutiful subject and defender of both Elizabeth and her Settlement? This
can only be apprehended by seeing in Jewel not some erudite theologian
on the order of his mentor Martyr, but instead someone who could
answer the more precise Protestants with the same reply he gave to the
Papists: the valorizing of the religious prerogatives of the prince at the
slighting of theology. With respect to Catholics, Jewel would restructure
how the Fathers were used; with the Puritans, it was a revamping of the
categories of conscience.
Abusus tollit usum
Past studies of the English Reformation treated adiaphora as a
theological question. Bernard Verkamp’s The Indifferent Mean,^21
explicitly presents adiaphora as a prism through which one can see and
understand that the English Reformation was an exercise in the
definition of a theological via media. Far from a mere ritual heuristic,
adiaphorism was a ‘theory ... found to lie at the very center of the
[English Reformer’s] thinking, profoundly affecting almost every move
they made’.^22 Verkamp limited his study to the Tudors prior to Mary, and
protested the need to expand it into the Elizabethan period, assuming the
two a unity.^23 Verkamp’s emphasis upon the theological and his premise
of the unity of the controversies of John Hooper and Puritanism is
echoed in J.H. Primus’s The Vestments Controversy,which explicitly
links the concerns of Hooper with those of the Elizabethan Puritans.^24
162 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^21) Bernard J. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation
to 1554(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, and Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1977).
(^22) Ibid., p. xvi.
(^23) Ibid., p. 174. Verkamp maintains that the picture of adiaphora remains incomplete,
that is until a study of it is done which treats from Elizabeth to the Tractarians.
Nonetheless, ‘if the Henrician-Edwardine “indifferent mean” outlined above is anywhere
approximate to accuracy, it may rightly be afforded a piece of the praise heaped ... upon
the Elizabethan Settlement.’
(^24) The Vestments Controversy: An Historical Study of the Earliest Tensions within the
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