traduced the British Government for taking upon itself the surreptitious
prerogative claiming sovereignty over matters spiritual. Keble knew that
this was no new or imagined power, to use Jewel’s words, but what
Keble attacked was not merely an action of the British government to
relieve its Catholic subjects in Ireland, but the very basis of the Church
of England as then governed, that is, its Erastian nature, an existence
founded in the Reformation and on Reformation piety and doctrine.
The Tractarians rather emphasized the Church of England’s claim to a
Catholic traditional past, one founded on medieval and patristic piety,
but not aligned with Rome. The High Church party had theretofore
looked to Jewel for his defense of prelacy and adoption of vestments,
inter alia; and there were those, for example, Jelf, Churton and
Perceval, who did not want to see Jewel discarded but defended. But it
would only be a short time before the esteem they had for him would be
revised. Jewel, with the whole of the Reformation, was drawn into the
fray, and whereas the Reformation had for earlier members of the High
Church party been seen as a positive, for the Tractarians it became a
scandal. Froude found Jewel’s Defense of the Apologydisgusting, and
saw the Reformation as ‘a limb badly set – it must be broken again in
order to be righted’.^23 E.B. Pusey, however, wished to defend the English
Reformers’ sincerity, noting that they could not as yet preach the
authority they believed they possessed. Pusey also overlooked all of the
English dealings with the continental Reformers, trying always to
maintain that England’s was a singular Reformation that owed little to
foreign influences, and positing what Peter Nockles has called an
evolutionary view of the English Reformation that only came to an end
in 1661. This is where John Henry Newman drew the line. Newman
edited Froude’s Remains and there found how little regard Froude
possessed for Jewel and Cranmer. It was a position Newman embraced:
‘I must say that the historicalcharacter of its agents are such, that one
need not go into their doctrines or motives.’ Though Newman does not
reference Jewel, he took particular aim at certain disingenuous
arguments employed by the English Reformers, contending that ‘when
they would attack some tenet or practice of Rome, they attacked
something which Roman Catholics could and do condemn as much as
their opponents do’, and that ‘without perversions and misrepresen-
tations of this kind the Reformers would not have succeeded’.^24 After his
THE IDENTITY OF THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH 231
the minds of Keble’s fellows at Oxford. It certainly played a large part in Newman’s mind.
Cf. Chadwick, pp. 60–100.
(^23) Quoted in Peter Nockles, ‘Survivals or New Arrivals? The Oxford Movement & the
19th Century Historical Construction of Anglicanism’. Paper delivered at Colloquium
‘Anglicanism and the Western Church: Continuity and Change’, Rome, 2002.
(^24) Ibid.