the medieval reading of the text thereby making the prince the primary
benefactor of the obligations the commandment enjoined. Tyndale
coopted Luther’s doctrine and gave it an English application.^50 This
notion of religious obligation as enjoined by the ‘law of God’ became a
Protestant response to the traditionalist demands of obedience to the
Pope. It also became, as Richard Rex emphasizes, the basis of Protestant
requests that the Word of God, which makes such demands upon the
good Christian, be translated and distributed throughout the realm. The
juxtaposition of the obedience demanded by the Word of God with the
pretension and betrayal of evangelical law by Papal claims ‘was a
cornerstone of Henrician antipapal rhetoric’.^51 The English monarchy
was yet to receive all its desired prerogatives within the English Church,
but even with the Protestant reliance upon the prince to be the new head
of the Church – as far as the law of God would allow – a new formula
had been established by which Parliament and convocation granted to
the king so many of those properties coveted by his medieval
predecessors.
This adulation should not be seen as a benefaction accorded Henry
VIII by the Protestants alone, for the traditionalists as well took up the
pen to justify the new situation in order to divorce the doctrine of
obedience from the Protestant interpretations then circulating, which
coupled obedience to adherence to the evangelical doctrine of
justification by faith alone.^52 Stephen Gardiner’s De vera obedientia,
taking as its premise St Paul’s obedientia fidei, made faith and obedience
works arising from charity, and thereby he far more closely identified
them with medieval monastic virtues, sundering them from any
Protestant associations. Furthermore, he drew extensively from
Marsiglius of Padua,^53 ironically, one of the authors Luther was damned
for citing. Cuthbert Tunstall as well tied obedience to the king to
obedience to traditional ceremonies and rights, distancing obedience
from the Protestant notion that saw submission built on faith.^54
The rift in Henry VIII’s church which pitted traditionalists against
Reformers still did not preclude both sides using the doctrine of the royal
supremacy. For Gardiner and other traditionalists, the royal supremacy
proved an effective weapon, when wielded by a traditionalist monarch,
to check the spread of heresy, despite the archbishop of Canterbury. For
18 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^50) David Daniell, ed., William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man(New York:
Penguin Classics, 2000). Cf. Rex, ‘Crisis’, pp. 866–67.
(^51) Rex, ‘Crisis’, p. 882.
(^52) Rex notes that Cromwell’s pamphleteers linked obedience to the king to both the
‘Word of God’ and to the evangelical doctrine of justification by faith, ‘Crisis’, pp. 880–91.
(^53) Dickens,English Reformation, pp. 173–74.
(^54) Rex, ‘Crisis’, pp. 887–88.
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