Featley’s efforts, unanimity about Jewel and his work was short-lived.
The liturgical and theological unpleasantries that led up to the English
Civil War illuminate the esteem and status that Jewel had obtained
within the Church of England. Aside from the status of having his
Apologiain every church, the publication of his full works in 1609
and their dissemination, archbishop Laud managed to pull Jewel into
the polemics and controversies that embroiled England leading up to the
Civil War. Laud’s interlocutors used both Jewel and Foxe to condemn the
use of the communion table as an altar, noting that this altar-wise use
was a Catholic innovation. Laud injudiciously responded that if that
were the best use that could be made of Jewel and Foxe it would be best
to take them out of the parishes. The remark was quickly made into the
thirteenth of the 14 charges made against Laud under the heading of
‘ceremonial breaches’.^16 Yet Jewel was not only to be a trouble for the
archbishop, for Laud was able to show that Jewel admitted that
reverencing the altar and the consecrated elements was permissible, as
long as the people were rightly informed that this was not the body and
blood of Christ.^17 Laud also cited Jewel when denouncing that prelacy
spawned the papacy and popish dogmas. Yet, Laud noted, according to
Jewel the papal Church existed nowhere prior to 600, and that
episcopacy was universally held. Indeed, 30 of the bishops of Rome were
martyred before the year 300, and none affirmed either the supremacy
or universal jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome.^18 Granted, Laud’s use of
Jewel is a bit disingenuous here, for Jewel never argued that no popish
or Catholic dogmas predated 600 (Jewel would never have condoned the
cult of the saints or prayers to and for the dead, though he did not deny
their existence), but that since the Catholic faith, as then practiced, had
features not to be found in the first 600 years it lacked a claim to
catholicity. Laud also cited Jewel against his antagonists’ defamation of
the term ‘unbloody sacrifice’, for Laud’s accusers had damned him with
THE IDENTITY OF THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH 229
Wood, he died in prison in 1644. He had been a witness against archbishop Laud, but
could not subscribe to the Covenant. When his reasons, which he had penned to bishop
Ussher of Armagh, were discovered, he was branded a traitor, degraded and imprisoned.
(^16) William Laud, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God William Laud,
Sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Vol 4, Life & Troubles of Archbishop Laud,
Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Oxford, 6th ed. 1869. pp. 226, 405.
(^17) Laud,Library, VI, p. 58. Laud is actually stretching the point, for Jewel never
specified either altar or host in his comments, just that ‘kneeling and bowing, stand up, and
other like, are commendable gestures and tokens of devotion, so long as the people
understandeth what they mean, and applieth them unto God to who they by due’, in
Replie, in Works, I, p. 319. Though Laud may be associating particular actions to Jewel’s
words, ‘and applieth them unto God to whom they be due’ could have been pulled from
the decrees of the Seventh Ecumenical Council.
(^18) Laud,Library, III, p. 384.