priest.^40 And it was Colet, who in his well-known 1512 convocation
sermon called for sweeping reforms along strict lines, as if animated by
More’s vision of the priesthood in Utopia(the priests are holy, so they
are few). So humanism in the person of Erasmus, inspired by Colet,
made its appearance at Oxford first, and all under the auspices of Henry
VIII and his leading ecclesiastics. Yet Oxford seemed slow to embrace
bonas litteras, for by Jewel’s day Oxford had largely abandoned the
humanism Cambridge then embraced, though as stated, this did not stop
its influence at Jewel’s university.^41
Henry’s reign had a second effect, of greater political significance for
Jewel, one more closely aligned with the matter of the divorce: it
bequeathed to Jewel and the later Protestant apologists the
commonplaces of the political theology of royal supremacy. Various
sources informed both Henry’s notions and those of the polemicists and
controversialists who championed his claims of supremacy over the
English Church. Some of the Henrician assertions of ecclesiastical
sovereignty had been adumbrated in the ecclesiastical and political
wrangling over the episcopal city of Tournai in 1515.^42 Henry VIII,
drawn into war with France, found himself aligned with Ferdinand of
Castile and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian against Louis XII of
France. The only notable thing Henry’s huge war expenditure procured
was Tournai, and seemingly the right to appoint his own episcopal
nominee for the city. Henry chose Wolsey.^43 But the citizens of Tournai,
hardly pleased with the whole affair, and making the most of
equivocations from Leo X, sided with their French bishop-elect,
Guillard. Henry’s letters and communiques to Rome concerning his
prerogatives over Tournai all sound startlingly like 1533–34. Henry
claimed that ‘We ... have never had any superior but God alone’;^44 nor
are Henry’s claims of sovereignty couched in feudal, suzerainty language,
but in language consonant with Henry’s future concepts respecting the
right of a monarch within his own realm, language often drawn from
Gallican apologists.^45
16 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^40) See Erasmus’s 1521 letter to Jodocus Jonas; Cf. Germain Marc’hadour, ‘Erasmus as a
Priest’ in Hilmar Pabel, ed., Erasmus’ Vision of the Church(Kirksville, MO, 1995) Vol
XXXIII, pp. 115–49, especially 123 ff.
(^41) Winthrop Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of
1559 (Durham, 1980), p. 47.
(^42) Thomas F. Mayer, ‘On the Road to 1534: the Occupation of Tournai and Henry VIII’s
Theory of Sovereignty’, in Dale Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge, 1995), pp.
11–30.
(^43) It had been Wolsey who had organized the expedition, some 30,000 strong, and got them
to Calais. The grant of the see came from Leo X. See Elton, Reform and Reformation, 38.
(^44) Mayer, ‘On the Road’, p. 13.
(^45) Mayer, ‘On the Road’, pp. 11–12, 15–16.
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