conversion to Roman Catholicism, Newman was quick to take on
Jewel’s anti-Romanism, seeing in him one of the great problems with
Protestantism, that he was nettled about inconsequential things and
glossed over the substantial issues (cf. Chapter 2, fn. 102).
The Parker Society and its vast publication project arose in opposition
to the Tractarians. Publishing the works of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley,
Hooper, Jewel, Fulke, Grindal, Bale, Coverdale and Whitgift, the Parker
Society sought to make available the works of the English Reformers in
an effort to halt any dispute about the nature of the English Church.
They also published, as if to put the truth to Tractarians’ assertions
about foreign divines, Heinrich Bullinger’s Decades, the purchase of
which, like Jewel’s works, was enjoined on English parishes. Almost
simultaneous to the publications by the Parker Society, Oxford
University Press also published a collection of Jewel’s works, in eight
volumes. The Parker Society editions, however, had the advantage over
the Jelf editions in that the Parker Society had all of Jewel’s
correspondence to Zurich (as well as that of the other English
Elizabethans), which the Society had previously published under a
separate title. The Parker Society editor of Jewel’s works, the Reverend
John Ayre, appended a short biography of Jewel to the fourth volume,
again basically following Humphrey’s life of Jewel.^25
Though published 15 years before Ayre’s biographical memoir,
Charles Webb Le Bas produced the most complete of Jewel’s biographies.
Le Bas followed Humphrey’s script closely, but, as noted in the
introduction, was rather more critical of the author than of the subject,
wondering how someone so petulant about vestments as Humphrey
could write about someone so sainted as Jewel. Nonetheless, this did not
stop him from taking a good bit of Humphrey whole cloth. Le Bas, a
fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and an evangelical, wrote about
Jewel as a champion of the evangelical cause and the English national
Church. Le Bas, far from sharing sympathy with Humphrey’s qualms,
noted of the dread vestments that they were ‘certain innocent and
decorous solemnities which the fathers of our Reformation deemed
worthy to be preserved’.^26 In this he adumbrated the work of the Parker
Society in that his biography was a challenge to those in the High Church
party who wanted to coopt Jewel for their causes. Le Bas had also
232 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^25) John Ayre, ‘Biographical Memoir of John Jewel, sometime bishop of Salisbury’, in
Works, IV, pp. v–xxx. Almost all the biographers of Jewel quote Humphrey’s quip by
Parkhurst, that once Jewel was his student, but now he has become Jewel’s, Vita Iuelli, p.
- Cf. Featley, p. xiv; Southgate, p. 7; Ayre, p. vii. Olim discipulus mihi, chare Iuelle,
fuisti,/ Nunc ero discipulus, te renuente, tuus.
(^26) Le Bas, Jewel, p. 241.
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