Parker’s attempts at uniformity, and to seek both mediation and
vindication from Zurich. Their joint letter of 1566 shows a marked
development from Humphrey’s 1563 epistle. Humphrey initially asked
whether an adiaphoron could still be so after having been so long
contaminated by superstition and used to beguile the ignorant; and
whether the ‘command of the sovereign ... for the sake of order’ is
sufficient to remove any material offense’?^51 By 1566, the questions had
expanded into both a direct questioning of the right of the prince to
prescribe the wearing of vestments, and as well the denial that the
surplice was even a thing indifferent.^52 To Humphrey, the superstitious
abuse of the vestment by Rome had rendered its use completely
detrimental, and now a matter beyond civil jurisdiction. To Humphrey
abusus tollit usum.
Ifabusus tollit usum be granted, then by definition adiaphora, having
no meaning, drives those who use it to a reductio ad absurdumversion
of the pure Church.^53 Once the indifferent thing has been abused to the
point that it is now either harmful, or even arguably so, there would
eventually be nothing, not even the most banal conventions, that would
not fall prey to such a liturgical rubric. This should not, however, be
understood as the Puritan position, since for them there was a canonical
limit to their assertions, sola scriptura. Yet even this category or canon
begged the question of who should consider a thing an abuse just as
much as it begged the question of whose prerogative it was to interpret
Scripture.Abusus tollit usum was not, however, found only among the
more precise, but also among the defenders of Elizabethan policy, in
particular Jewel. For these another canonical constraint emerged, that of
the supreme governor of the Church. Both the expansion of adiaphora
and the reductionist employment of abusus tollit usum, served the
establishment’s end which posited the prerogative of national churches
and their respective princes to alter rites and customs, and to define the
limits of conscience. Thus the edict of the prince could revivify a use once
destroyed by an abuse, rendering the question of abuse mute.
It has been shown how Jewel’s doctrinal minimalism and liturgical
diversity became the prolegomena of the royal prerogative, but this is not
only when his polemics addressed Rome. This is not always seen.
Collinson notes that ‘if we are inclined to place ... Jewel ... in a class of
A PRELATE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 169
(^51) These two appear in Humphrey’s 1563 letter, Zurich Letters, Vol. I, p. 134.
Humphrey does distinguish the tyranny of the pope from that ‘just and legitimate authority
of the queen’.
(^52) Humphrey et al. to Bullinger, July 1566. Zurich Letters, Vol. I, pp. 157–66.
(^53) Flacius ended his life ironically, in a monastery. Sampson was deprived of his office,
and many of the other deprived clergy proceeded to begin their own voluntary church.
Humphrey conformed, but only after Jewel denied him a benefice in Salisbury diocese.