Geneva is to marginalize the formative influence of both Peter Martyr
and Heinrich Bullinger, to say nothing of Jerome Zanchius, upon the
English theological mind. Martyr’s status in England following
Elizabeth’s accession has been given short shrift, but it is evident that he
was widely read at the universities, and that his Common Places, both in
Latin and in English, which went through 14 editions,^36 were widely
disseminated. Collinson has noted that ‘English theologians were as
likely to lean on Bullinger of Zurich, Musculus of Berne, or Peter Martyr
as on Calvin or Beza ... But if we were to identify one author and one
book which represented the center of theological gravity of the
Elizabethan church it would not be Calvin’s Institutesbut the Common
Places of Peter Martyr’.^37 Given the priority of Martyr’s work on
predestination to Calvin’s for the mind of England, the far greater logical
cogency of his system, that Martyr was lecturing on Romans in England
in 1550–52, with his commentary on Romans and the extended essay on
predestination published in Zurich in 1558 while the exiles were still
present, the deference paid to him both before and after his death and
finally the continued influence and presence of the corpusof Heinrich
Bullinger and the other Reformers associated with him in Zurich, the
real influence in English thought at the universities and among the higher
clergy, and the dominant one at that, is Zurich. Martyr, Bullinger,
Musculus, Zanchius, inter alioscould never be imputed with advocating
freewill or slighting the monergy of divine grace as both efficient and
final cause of the Christian’s salvation. Given the place that their own
doctrines of predestination played in their thought, and how those who
opposed them on this they so quickly demonized, it must be wondered
why someone would assume that their friends and compeers who had
lived with them and whom they had sheltered would be of another mind
on this issue?
With the publication of Peter White’s Predestination, Policy, and
Polemic, the question of Jewel’s relation to the predestinarian debate
became explicit.^38 White contends, contrary to Tyacke (ironically, Tyacke
was once White’s student), that there never was a consensus of Calvinism
in any form in the Tudor/Stuart Church, and holds forth a number
of English ecclesiastics to verify his thesis. But White’s conceptual
framework begs too many questions: he makes the definition of
Calvinism roughly equivalent to a caricature which might have been
238 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^36) TheLoci communeswas first published in 1576 and again in 1583, and the English
translation was also published in 1583.
(^37) Patrick Collinson, ‘England and International Calvinism: 1558–1640’, in Menna
Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism: 1541-1715(Oxford and New York, 1985), p. 214.
(^38) Peter White, Predestination, Policy, and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the
English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 69–74.
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