penned biographies of that other Merton theologian John Wyclif and
also of archbishop Cranmer.
In the past century two different scholars, already noted in the
introduction, produced studies of bishop Jewel. Both John Booty and
Wyndham Southgate were quite aware that prior to their endeavors
Jewel’s biographies were largely encomia, and both operated under the
assumption that the biography of Humphrey was jaundiced, as if
the Magdalen president and sometime Puritan had somehow duped the
Elizabethan establishment in his portrayal of Jewel, making the bishop
some part of a Puritan fifth column. Wyndham Southgate published his
John Jewel and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority in 1962, an
expansion of his 1948 doctoral work at Harvard University. Southgate
divided his work into two parts: its first section, pp. 3–108, was a précis
of the life of Jewel. As such, Southgate culled material from sources far
more diffuse than that used by previous authors, and filled in many of
the holes left by the earlier biographers who so heavily depended on
Humphrey. The second part treats the subject of the book’s title, the
question of doctrinal authority (pp. 111–216). Southgate departs from
Jewel’s earlier biographers who, according to Southgate, had seen Jewel
as an evangelical to the left of Parker, filled with precisian tendencies,
and trapped into conforming to the will of his archbishop and
sovereign.^27 Southgate’s dissent follows two counts. First, he sees the line
of demarcation as one not between Jewel and his archbishop, but
between Jewel and the hotter sort of Protestants, such as the dean of
Christ Church, Oxford, Thomas Sampson and even Jewel’s biographer
Laurence Humphrey:
In the conventional and generally accepted characterization of
Jewel’s position and that of his colleagues, is it possible that a
fundamental error has been made in blurring the line between them
and the active puritans like Sampson while stressing the difference
between their viewpoint and that of Parker? The vital line ... ought
rather to be drawn between Jewel and his colleagues on the one
hand, and Sampson and the Puritans on the other. The difference
between the Archbishop ... and his bishops who did not love the
vestments yet nonetheless regarded them as non-essentials, was far
less than that between the bishops and the Puritans – perhaps not
superficially, but surely so when the controversy was reduced to its
fundamental issue.^28
Southgate asserts that Jewel’s scruples about the linen surplice – the
cause célèbreof the Puritans in the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign – did
THE IDENTITY OF THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH 233
(^27) This is also the view of the Anglo-Catholic Bishop Mandell Creighton, who wrote
Jewel’s biography in the Dictionary of National Biography.Creighton, of course, saw this
to Jewel’s detriment, all of Jewel’s other biographers to his credit.
(^28) Southgate,Doctrinal Authority, p. 99.