of obedience to crown and Parliament. John ab Ulmis had written
Bullinger that both Cranmer and Ridley were as opposed to the
vestments as had been Hooper, but that they were only willing to act
against them when consensus was reached among crown, parliament and
people.^28 This is the contrary of the motivation of Parker, though perhaps
in line with the thought of Jewel, who loathed the surplice, but who
would without the Queen, seek to effect nothing. This stance needs to be
remembered in considering the frustration of the Puritans.
Horton Davies posits three reasons why the Puritan agenda failed: the
foremost is Elizabeth’s intransigence; next were those Protestants
concerned less for reform than for the peculiar identity of the English
Church, personified, Davies says, by the ‘avaricious’ Richard Cox and
the Coxians of Frankfurt; finally, those prelates who had fallen from
their pure state of grace as zealous Protestants, and had instead
‘developed a fatty degeneration of the conscience as they became
religious civil servants charged with creating a religiously compliant
people for their sovereign’,^29 by name, Aylmer, Parkhurst, Horne and
Jewel. Yet when considering the apologetical categories of the
sovereignty and unilateral prerogative of national churches as animated
by royal authority, these three factors quickly coalesce, actually emerging
not as some virtue born of necessity, but the coherent, albeit
idiosyncratic, argument of an English Church which had known only
Reformation within an Erastian context.
The Elizabethan idea of the prerogative of the national Church had
been championed at Frankfurt, where the Coxians and Jewel had wished
that ‘they woulde do as they had donne in England, and that they would
have the face off an English churche’;^30 a Church independent of an
intangible entity called the universal Church.^31 Further, the clergy Davies
slights had from 1559 already maintained the prince’s prerogative via
their defense of the third proposition of the Westminster Disputation,
that matters of ceremony, rite and doctrine were subject to the nation’s
perceived needs. Thus whatever degeneration may be imputed to their
later actions, Davies’ decadence seems already to have existed in 1559 in
the cases of Aylmer, Horne and Jewel with the smell of Zurich barely off
their clothes. Though consciences may be pricked, since a bare minimum
164 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^28) Original Letters, p. 426.
(^29) Davies,Worship and Theology, pp. 45–46.
(^30) A Brieff Discours off the Troubles Begonne at Franckford in Germany anno domini
1554 Abowte the Booke off off [sic] Common Prayer and Ceremonies and Contiued by the
Englishe Men Theyre to the Ende off Q. Maries Raigne. Heidelberg: Schirat, 1574, 1575.
Reprinted by Edward Arberas Vol I of ‘A Christian Library’, 1908, p. XXXVIII.
(^31) The response of the Knoxians in Frankfurt was that they would have the face of the
Church of Christ. Brieff Discours, p. XXXVIII.
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