Polemics with Catholic authors, most notably with the Louvain
professor and former Salisbury canon and treasurer Thomas Harding,^33
who was also a frequent suppliant with Jewel of Peter Martyr while all
were in Oxford, consume the bulk of Jewel’s writing and scholarship. Of
the 2,452 pages comprising the four volumes of the Parker Society
edition of Jewel’s works, those that treat specifically with Harding
encompass some 1,700 pages, though the reproduction of Harding’s
treatises for the purpose of argumentation encompass many of these
pages. Harding and Jewel crossed polemical pens throughout the decade
of the 1560s over two formally different matters and circumstances.
Materially though, the confrontations were very much the same, for
both addressed the question of the legitimacy of the disputants’
respective communions, that is, whose was the innovator or whose had
a claim to the Faith professed by the ancient Church. In viewing Jewel’s
arguments in the debates with Harding and in his several other polemics
that involved Catholic claims, it should be remembered that these were
not merely dogmatic, but also rhetorical and oratorical controversies, for
Jewel a public aspect of his duties as an English bishop. Consequently,
the audience addressed by Jewel’s writings was not so much Harding per
se, as the faithful of England.
The first apologies for Elizabethan religion: Jewel in 1559 and 1560
Jewel had only ever known an Erastian ecclesiastical and political order,
in which the civil government – in Jewel’s case the monarch – exercised
judicial and, in many ways at least, a tacit magisterial authority over the
church.^34 This had been the case with the Church of England at least
since the early 1530s when Henry VIII assumed the title of Supreme
Head of the Church of England. Henry’s assumption of the supremacy
coincided with Jewel’s earliest days as a student at Oxford. The civil
magistrate exercising authority within and over the Church was as well
the case in the Zurich where Jewel lived during his exile from 1556 to
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 59
(^33) Harding had been Stephen Gardiner of Winchester’s confessor, and it was by
Gardiner’s request that Harding was first made treasurer of Salisbury, 17 July 1555, and
then later canon-residentiary. He was formally deprived of both on 6 November 1559,
though he had as early as August 1559 refused to swear the oath to Elizabeth as governor
of the Church.
(^34) Tacit, in that the prince retained the right to materially silence, suspend and depose
recalcitrant bishops. The most notable example is Elizabeth’s 1577 suspension of Edmund
Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury from 1576–82. See Patrick Collinson, Archbishop
Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church(London and Berkeley, 1979),
pp. 233–52.