constructed the council as he did in light of making Edward’s nearest
blood kin, namely his uncles, his closest guardians and council.^58 For
whatever reasons Henry VIII constructed Edward VI’s regency council as
he did, the religious result was the ascendancy of Protestantism as the
dominant factor in the realm.
The regency council’s plans for the religious makeup of England
became clear from the outset, as in February 1547 it decided that the
jurisdiction of all bishops had lapsed with the passing of Henry VIII. The
royal injunctions of 1547 enjoined Cranmer’s Homilies, and as this
included the one on justification by faith, it clearly contradicted the
King’s Bookand the Statute of the Six Articles, as Stephen Gardiner
quickly pointed out. For his contumacy Gardiner found himself in the
tower, but not without pen. By the end of the year Parliament had swept
aside the King’s Book, the Six Articles and as well any legal ground for
Gardiner to stand on. Eventually Gardiner’s catholic conscience got the
best of him as he could not bind it by subscribing to the new liturgy, that
it was ‘good and godly’. He was duly deprived of his see, and so closely
did he see royal supremacy tied to Protestantism that upon the accession
of Mary in 1553 he even denounced his Henrician notions of
supremacy.^59 Despite Gardiner’s vacillation with the new regime, the
notion of supremacy survived, and under the Protestants assumed new
and more ecclesiastically arbitrary and irresponsible forms.
Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries established an economic
interest in the royal supremacy, and unintentionally, at least on Henry
VIII’s part, the success of the Reformation as well. For the evangelicals,
it also set a wonderful precedent. Edward VI’s government continued the
Henrician enterprise of putting church lands to crown use, but on a
different theoretical foundation. Certainly the dissolution of the
monasteries had served Protestant ends, but the justification employed
had not been extracted from any Reformation premise, but was based
solely on the goal of the correction of monastic vices, albeit all to the
king’s benefit.^60 The dissolution of the greater houses, carried out from
20 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^58) David Loades, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. 1504–1553(Oxford, 1996),
pp. 86–89.
(^59) Gardiner at first modified his assertions on supremacy, that its limits were constrained
by traditional doctrine. He even employed the Protestant notion of adiaphora: that
chantries, monasteries, episcopal appointment were indifferent in matters of salvation;
transubstantiation and justification by faith were not. Loades, Politics and the Nation, 5th
edn. (Oxford, 1999), pp. 166–68; Elton, Reform and Reformation, pp. 339 ff.
(^60) ‘Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal, and abominable living is daily used ... to
the high displeasure of Almighty God ... and to the great infamy of the King’s highness ...
{and in light of the fact that the visitations of the last two hundred years have effected no
change} ... In consideration whereof ... that it is and shall be much more to the pleasure of
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