of it. In the event, the line between these two causae belli, at least as they
pertain to Shaxton, seems nonexistent, as the bishop employed his
privileges to effect evangelical change. Shaxton enforced the
proscriptions against the veneration of images, and saw to the
termination of the observance or night watch for St Osmund’s day. The
mayor and members of the town council, not to be stripped of their
devotion, appealed to Henry VIII asking allowance to keep the feast and
the vigil.^5 Shaxton pushed the Royal Supremacy, had it preached by his
chaplains, and when he published the king’s writ granting a dispensation
from Lenten fasting the decree was pulled down. Tensions rose when
neither the mayor nor the sheriff would act to find out who did it. John
MaDowell, one of Shaxton’s chaplains complained to Thomas Cromwell
that neither the mayor nor the bailiff was the king’s subject: the mayor
getting wind of this threw MaDowell into the city jail. The bishop now
had to take up his case with Cromwell through his under bailiff John
Goodall. The under bailiff wrote Cromwell that priests were still
counseling penitents not to eat white meat during Lent, not to read the
New Testament, and not to keep company with those of the new
learning. Matters only grew worse when on Easter afternoon, 1539,
Goodall came into the cathedral to find the choir filled with people
venerating and kissing a monstrance. The monstrance had been placed in
a ‘tomb’ on Good Friday, and was now resurrected for Easter, an
unremarkable aspect of Catholic devotion. Goodall cited the injunctions
against images in ordering the faithful to desist, and when they would
not, he grabbed the monstrance, the host falling out in the process. Both
Goodall and the mayor, who accused Goodall of being a sacramentary,
brought the matter to Star Chamber. Only the intervention of Shaxton,
who asserted that Goodall had acted out of zeal for the injunctions, and
that he was not a sacramentary, spared the under bailiff any
consequences for his action.^6 A resolution to the situation was denied by
circumstances: Shaxton refused to enforce Henry VIII’s Act of the Six
Articles, and renounced his office in 1539. Ironically, Shaxton would
later become one of the more vocal Catholics in England.
The Diocese then fell to John Capon or Salcot. Jewel labeled Capon a
profligate as regards money; though he was generous in his provision of
the Cathedral’s choristers.^7 His incomplete altar tomb can still be seen in
the cathedral nave, though he is not buried in it. Matters seem to have
been more settled under Capon and there is no record of trouble. The
vacancy of the see brought by his death in 1557 during Mary’s reign
206 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^5) Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 398.
(^6) Ibid., pp. 421–22.
(^7) Roberston,Sarum Close, p. 123.
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