a union of the crown and Church, a union repudiated by both Rome and
the later Puritans. Though Knox was not a Puritan,^126 he had denied
royal sovereignty of its unquestioned prerogative, something Jewel could
not embrace. Thus Jewel repudiated the Catholic premise of the
superiority of the spiritual over the temporal along with the Puritan
assumption of their independence. In creating a Protestant
commonwealth, the one sine qua nonwas her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth.
Mary had shown, and the other Catholic countries continually
demonstrated to Jewel, that the godly prince was a requirement for the
preservation of the Gospel. Though partially noted previously, his
comments to Martyr on this matter bear this out
It is incredible even to hear, what a pasture and forest of superstition
everywhere emerged in that darkness of Marian times. We found ...
votive relics of saints, nails with which the infatuated people
dreamed that Christ had been pierced, and ... small fragments of the
sacred cross. The number of witches and sorceresses has ... become
enormous. The cathedral churches were nothing else but dens of
thieves, or worse, if anything worse or more foul can be
mentioned.^127Thus any thought of Knox’s resistance theories Jewel automatically
dismissed as they created situations extraneous and dangerous to the
English crown, for unlike the Empire and its electors, the crown of
England was a matter of inheritance, in a sense, private property.^128 Dale
Hoak likens Elizabeth’s perception of her own state as one of occupying
a post or a room which she alone could possess.^129 With respect to the
Anabaptists, their notions were ungodly in the least, if not subversive of
the kingdom of God in that they undercut the authority of the Church’s
guardian, the prince by making the prince merely a necessary evil of an
evil society. In Jewel’s vision of the English national Church, neither of
these views could be given a place. In fact, both Knox and the
Anabaptists were akin to the Recusants, as they each undermined the
194 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^126) See Gordon Donaldson, The Scottish Reformation(Cambridge, 1960), Chapter VIII
‘The Rise of the Presbyterian Movement’. Donaldson notes that the Presbyterian assertion
that the Church should be independent of the crown appeared in England with Cartwright
before it came to Scotland with Melville.
(^127) Jewel,Works, IV, pp. 1216–18. Jewel ended his Oxford career when he threw his lot
in with Protestantism at the accession of Mary, at the time when evangelical fortunes in
England were at their lowest.
(^128) In private Jewel saw the struggles of Knox and the Lords of the Congregation in
Scotland, as well as those of the Huguenots in France, as all of a piece, and both enterprises
supported by the English; in the case of the Scots militarily. Cf. letters to Martyr, the one
undated,Works, IV, pp. 1226–27; and 14 August 1562, Works, IV, pp. 1254–55.
(^129) Email correspondence relayed to me by Professor William Tighe of Muhlenberg
College, 14 April 1998.
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