unjust (iniquior) in his indictment, and that the label of preciseness
unfairly portrays how Calvin defined Reform. Jewel’s confession, not
that Baudouin had misinterpreted English attitudes and intent in the
Settlement (though this is implied), but that the French lawyer’s bias had
led him to assess unfairly Calvin’s severity, gives Jewel the face not of the
via mediawhich Baudouin preached, but that program countenanced by
Martyr and Beza at Poissy, and by extension Calvin also. Jewel, if not
having an affinity with Calvin, at least was not inimical to him; for
Jewel, Calvin’s itinerary was not the extreme that Baudouin thought, and
that Baudouin had indeed wrongly divined what the English Reform
entailed. Jewel would never balk at being labeled a moderate as a
Reformer, the main of his polemical work flowed from his denial of
innovation. But by the same token, Calvin would not scruple at this label
either: as already noted, he had written to William Cecil disclaiming any
affinity with the radical views of Knox in the Scot’s First Blast of a
Trumpetor any knowledge of its printing until a whole year after its
appearance.^99 Further, the very dedication and purpose of Calvin’s
Instituteswas to relieve French Evangelicals of the label ‘Anabaptist’,
then synonymous with innovation. Jewel for his part, never lumped
Calvin with Knox. In this regard, Jewel, although clearly having pinned
his aspirations for English Reform on the 1559 Settlement, was not
averse to seeing England becoming more like the cities of Geneva and
Zurich. Further, he clearly sees himself and the Reformation in England
as not incommensurate with Calvin, and at least not as compatible with
the Erasmianism embraced by such as Baudouin and Cassander. It does
affirm that Jewel did not see Martyr’s exactness and Calvin’s as
incommensurate. Further, it implies that the liberality of the Elizabethan
Settlement, in Jewel’s mind, could probably be more narrowly
circumscribed, or perhaps, as this appears the case, that Jewel saw the
Settlement as far more coterminus with the aims of the continental
Reformers than did others, hardly obtaining the Erasmian via media
Baudouin believed.
Life with the Supreme Governor of the Church of England
That differences existed among the English Protestants Jewel
acknowledged as early as his 1562 Epistola.Such disagreements Jewel
portrayed as mere trifles, of little significance when compared with the
greater divisions that separated either Roman Catholics from themselves,
or Rome from Protestantism. Those who quibbled about such matters as
A PRELATE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 183
(^99) Zurich Letters, Vol. II, Letter XV, pp. 34–36.