of the Act of Uniformity removed. As we have seen, Jewel certainly
would have agreed with this goal. But the 1566 Parliament proved a still
birth for any ecclesiastical reform, even in regard to such things as the
variegated English clergy were unanimous about, such as a binding
subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Parliament would not meet
again for another five years. In the interim the second vestarian
controversy had already alienated more of the Puritans, and by 1570 the
Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Thomas Cartwright,
had left the country for the more agreeable confines of Geneva.
Cartwright in his lectures on the Acts of the Apostles had divined within
the text a system of government similar to the one propounded by Beza
in Geneva. Cartwright believed the Church should be organized on the
local level around a board of elders, some of them lay in nature, or what
would be termed a ruling elder,^134 while regionally churches would be
organized into classes. The roll of the lay elder was the oversight of
morals and discipline. The threat to the Elizabethan Settlement was
transparent to all who heard: what need is there for a godly prince if his
function can be assumed by the lay elder. Though Cartwright did not
return to England till 1572, his teachings, akin to those then ascendent
in Geneva, and also among the French Huguenots, the Dutch Calvinists,
and in the Palatinate, were already present in England by 1571.
Collinson outlines the origins of this thought, noting that Calvin’s close
associate, Nicholas des Gallars had been the minister at the French
Stranger church in London since the early 1560s. It is this system, just as
opposed to the Ornaments rubric as any Puritan, that opposed the
episcopal polity of the English Church, and with it the Royal Supremacy.
Jewel preached his last London sermon, apparently at Paul’s Cross,
sometime before the conclusion of the 1571 Parliament, as part of an
episcopal campaign against the Presbyterians.^135 The sermon has not
been preserved, but is known from allusions to it made in a Puritan
tract.^136 Jewel defended several items, most notably the use of copes,
vestments, the words in the ordinal for the ordering of bishops, ‘receive
A PRELATE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 197
(^134) Calvin had made a distinction, drawn from his reading of I Timothy 5:17, between
preaching or teaching elders and ruling elders.
(^135) See Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 116–21. Both Collinson
and Southgate date Jewel’s sermon after Parliament, but the tract which informs us of his
sermon clearly says that it was delivered while Parliament had either yet to meet, or was
still meeting.
(^136) The tract is to be found in the Williams Library, London, and is the subject of a brief
precis in Albert Peel, ed. The Seconde Parte of a Register, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1915), I, pp.
79–80. Cf. Southgate, Doctrinal Authority,pp. 102–3, where it appears that Southgate
only knew the contents of the tract that were reproduced by Peel. It is also in the Bodleian
Library, Oxford, Selden Supra 44, Folios 48r–52r. There is also a copy in Cambridge
University Library [MS. Ee. II, 34, fols. 15–18], which had been in Parkhurst’s letter book.