Bishop John Jewel and the Catholicity of the Church of England, 1535-1599 Angela May Ranson

280 Pages·2014·1.9 MB·English

‘Because Thy God Loves England’:
Bishop John Jewel
and the Catholicity of the Church of England,
1535-1599

Angela May Ranson

Doctor of Philosophy
University of York
Department of History

October 2013
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Abstract

John Jewel (Bishop of Salisbury 1559-1571) became the champion of the
Church of England mere months after the formation of the Elizabethan religious
settlement. He preached a sermon at Paul’s Cross that challenged the Roman Church
to prove that certain traditions had existed in the early church; a strategy that allowed
him to portray the Church of England as the true inheritor of the apostolic church,
due to its pure doctrine and right administration of the sacraments. This sermon
started a decade of controversy, which influenced the development of demarcation
lines between the Church of Rome and the Church of England.
This thesis argues that Jewel’s work as a polemicist and apologist for the
Church of England was a key factor in the development of a Protestant self-identity
for the Church of England. Using a unique methodology and a vast knowledge of
patristic and Biblical sources, Jewel re-defined the term ‘catholic’ in a way that
enabled him to argue for the catholicity of the Church of England while still
separating it from the Catholic Church. He gave the English Church authority and
legitimacy by portraying it as both part of the true universal church, and yet
distinctly English.
Drawing on Jewel’s own works, as well as the works of the men who fought
for and against him, this thesis demonstrates that Jewel made a significant
contribution to the establishment of the Church of England as a national institution.
It shows that Jewel was an active, popular leader who was involved in many of the
defining moments of the early Elizabethan church. Also, it shows that his popularity
did not end with his death in 1571. Rather, his work continued to influence the
development of the Church of England throughout the reign of Elizabeth and
beyond.
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Table of Contents

Abstract .................................................................................................................................... 2
Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... 3
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. 5
Author’s Declaration ................................................................................................................ 6
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 7
Chapter One: Forming a Reformer ....................................................................................... 23
Birth of a Reformer ............................................................................................................ 26
Reformations of the Universal Church (1530-1547) ......................................................... 35
Training a Reformer ........................................................................................................... 43
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 48
Chapter Two: John Jewel and the Community of Reformers ............................................... 49
Foreign Influence and Domestic Faith ............................................................................... 51
The Myth of Martyr ........................................................................................................... 55
Part One: Conflict and Communion in Oxford ................................................................. 58
Communion and Reform ................................................................................................ 64
Part Two: Conflict and Crisis in Exile .............................................................................. 67
Troubles in Frankfurt ..................................................................................................... 70
Community in Exile ....................................................................................................... 75
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 81
Chapter Three: Thundering and Enlightening ...................................................................... 84
The Path of the Controversy .............................................................................................. 86
Historiography of the Jewel-Harding Controversy ............................................................ 89
The Challenge in Context .................................................................................................. 93
The Challenge .................................................................................................................... 97
Between the Lines ............................................................................................................ 101
The Prize of Soul and Body ............................................................................................. 106
The National Universal Church ....................................................................................... 117
The Nation and its God .................................................................................................... 123
The Nation and Its Future ................................................................................................ 125
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 128
Chapter Four: Textual Communities and Catholicity ......................................................... 131
Identity and Catholicity .................................................................................................... 133
Authority and Catholicity ................................................................................................ 138
Two Textual Communities .............................................................................................. 140
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Unity in Texts .................................................................................................................. 143
Follow the Leaders ........................................................................................................... 146
Re-defining ‘Catholic’ ..................................................................................................... 152
The Universal Church of England ................................................................................... 160
Governor of a National Universal Church ....................................................................... 162
Past, Present and Future ................................................................................................... 168
Print and Pulpit ................................................................................................................ 171
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 178
Chapter Five: Sword and Shield ......................................................................................... 180
Readers and Listeners ...................................................................................................... 186
The Polarization of the Faith ............................................................................................ 190
Response of the Divines ................................................................................................... 194
Response of the Laity ....................................................................................................... 200
Internal Conflicts 1559-1571 ........................................................................................... 208
The Parliament of 1571 and its Results ........................................................................... 211
Internal Conflicts 1572-1599 ........................................................................................... 216
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 228
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 230
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 238
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Acknowledgements

I could not have asked for a better supervisor, so great thanks must first go to Dr
John Cooper, who always managed to balance helpful criticism with equally helpful
encouragement. He has also given me teaching opportunities that proved both enlightening
and amusing, which simultaneously added to my teaching experience and enhanced the
experience of teaching. For all of his leadership, I am very grateful.
Further thanks go to the brilliant scholars on my advisory panel, Dr William Sheils
and Dr William H. Sherman. They always brought out new ideas and helped me to look in
different directions, and the diversity of their areas of expertise made TAP meetings richly
rewarding. I am also grateful for the encouragement and support of my examiners, Dr Brian
Cummings and Dr Kenneth Fincham. Their insight into my work has proved invaluable.
Latin and I have had a long and tumultuous relationship, and I am still not entirely
sure that we will stay together. However, through our struggles we have had help from
many great people: my tutors Elizabeth Shields and Marian Wernham, my friends Paul
Simpson and William Grant, and my dear friend and fabulous flatmate Bianca Brajuha.
Gratias vobis ago. Your help meant that I could discover nuances in Jewel’s work that I
never thought possible.
My dear friends Nia and Andrew Passmore, Casey Smedburg and Sam Stadlen have
been incredibly supportive in a dozen ways, and I cannot thank them enough. For fondue
parties, lunches at Bettys, suppers at the Red Chili, drives in the countryside, endless cups of
tea, study parties, Josh Groban concerts, the guilty pleasures of Viking Kitchen and
celebrations at McDonalds, I thank you. You bring bright colour to my life whenever it gets
grey.
Last but never least, I want to thank my family for their prayer cover, their humour,
their encouragement and their support. Thanks to my mom for reminding me that if
Cranmer can go through the fire, so can I. Thanks to my sister for hours spent giggling on
Skype, to my brother Andrew for really fun conversations about Gordon Ramsay shows, to
my brother Paul for his fascinating insight into the Church of England, and to my sisters-in-
law for their cheer and their interest. I love you all very much.

Except we take heed, except we look about, except we put to study and diligence,
all things will easily slide and fall into their former estate.
A lamp, except you put oil often in it, will soon be out.
The victory is kept even by such means as it is gotten.
- John Jewel, 1551
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Author’s Declaration

Some of the material presented in this thesis has been published in the following
paper:
1. ‘The Challenge of Catholicity: John Jewel at Paul’s Cross’. In Paul’s
Cross and the Culture of Persuasion, edited by Torrance Kirby. Leiden:
Brill Publishing, 2013.

In addition, the following paper has been submitted for consideration:
1. ‘Separating the Universal Bishop from the Universal Church in the Jewel-
Harding Controversy’. In Sin and Salvation in Reformation England, edited
by Jonathan Willis (submitted April 2014).

All the work contained within this thesis represents the original contribution of the
author. It has not been submitted for examination at this or any other institution for
another award.
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Introduction

When Bishop John Jewel became the first apologist of the Elizabethan
Church of England, he was defending a church that was still coming into existence.
The work of creating a living church out of the terms of the Elizabethan Settlement
had barely begun when he preached his famous Challenge Sermon of 1559, but that
sermon provided a badly needed impetus. It sparked a controversy which inspired
many of Jewel’s fellow divines to join his efforts to make theirs a legitimate church
in the eyes of their fellow countrymen. The result was a fresh awareness of the
importance of catholicity and new criteria for membership in the true universal
church. This led to the development of strong demarcation lines between the Church
of England and the Catholic Church of Rome, which many English divines no longer
considered a ‘catholic’ church at all by the early 1570s.
In the Challenge Sermon, Jewel portrayed the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559
as a return to the doctrine of the early church, and gave Queen Elizabeth credit for
restoring the true faith in England.1 Ten years later, in a sermon preached in
response to the papal bull which had excommunicated Elizabeth, Jewel maintained
the same message. He reminded his listeners that Elizabeth had become queen
‘because thy God loves England’, not due to an upset of the natural order or as a
punishment.2 Such divine approval for crown and country was the basis for Jewel’s
defence of the Church of England. He portrayed it as a legitimate heir of the
apostolic church due to its right administration of the sacraments, and the doctrine
‘which we receive from God and learn by the word of truth’.3
As this thesis will argue, this emphasis played a major role in the
development of a unique self-identity for the English Church, and helped establish
the Church of England as an institution that was recognized both by its members and
its enemies. Jewel claimed that the Church of England was both an English
institution with its own unique structure, and truly ‘catholic’. It was, essentially, a
national universal church. Jewel defended this paradox for his entire career as an
Elizabethan bishop, and his work influenced a gradual re-definition of the term

1 John Ayre, ed, Works of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, vol 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1835), 3-5, 7.
2 John Jewel, A viewe of a seditious bul (London, 1582), 73-74. Please note that spelling and
punctuation has been modernized for all sixteenth-century quotations in this thesis. Also, modern
rules of spelling and capitalization have been applied to titles in the text of this thesis, but the titles are
presented in their original form in the footnotes to facilitate retrieval.
3 Jewel, A viewe of a seditious bul, 21-22.
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‘catholic’ in the ferocious debates over the nature of the church that occurred
throughout the 1560s.
The polemical whirlwind of this decade produced several of the defining
documents of the Elizabethan church, many of which have not yet been studied in
context with the debates to which they contributed. In truth, the 1560s are a
neglected decade in Elizabethan studies, and Jewel is a near-forgotten leader, hidden
in the shadow of divines such as John Whitgift and Richard Hooker. Historians of
the Elizabethan church tend to examine the 1559 religious settlement, and then skip
ahead to the controversy over the vestments in 1566 before leaping forward once
again to the excommunication of Elizabeth and the advance of the Jesuit
missionaries. The result is that the meticulous process of defining and defending the
church which took place during its first ten years is overlooked.
In those years, the channels of communication were still open, and the form
of the Church of England was still under negotiation. These channels closed in the
later years of Elizabeth with the advent of new challengers to the church’s authority,
and yet Jewel’s work continued to influence the direction of debate. Many of the
Elizabethan church’s later defenders, such as Richard Bancroft and John Bridges,
worked to preserve the church as Jewel had defined it. For this reason, Jewel needs
to be factored into studies of the English Reformation. If scholars are fully to
understand the Elizabethan church, Jewel must emerge from the shadows and be
returned to his place as a leading figure in its foundation and development.
This thesis intends to provide just such a re-assessment of Jewel’s work and
impact, without becoming a biography of Jewel himself. Although it follows the
development of Jewel’s thought throughout his life chronologically, it is at its heart
an intellectual history of the ideas that formed the early Elizabethan church. Jewel
brought the church out of a defensive position and placed it on the offensive against
the papacy. He influenced a change in its self-portrayal that removed it from the
Catholic Church and placed it in a universal church which was, significantly,
Protestant. He also managed to make the royal supremacy a point of pride, rather
than a weakness. Jewel’s work changed how people thought about the Church of
England.
Thus, focusing on the work of John Jewel makes this a study of the English
Church itself, and its own self-perception. It takes a similar approach to that of Alec
Ryrie in his Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, which focused on the ‘lived
experience of religion’: the way in which abstract doctrines were applied in daily life
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for Protestants of the sixteenth and seventeenth century.4 Where Ryrie focused on
personal writings of individual Protestants, this thesis focuses on the publications of
individual Elizabethan divines, to see how they were affected by the changes in the
core concepts of the Christian faith that developed from Jewel’s work.
This leads us into the three distinct areas of inquiry which will be addressed
in the following chapters. First, how did the work of John Jewel influence the debate
over the legitimacy of the Elizabethan church? To answer, there are two aspects of
Jewel’s work that must be considered: the verbal and the written. Jewel often
preached at court and at Paul’s Cross. He was known for the elegance and
effectiveness of his rhetoric, and this popularity supported his published polemic and
apologetics. Both his sermons and his writings also show an acute awareness of his
audience and their needs, which allowed Jewel to have a direct effect on the debate
over the nature of the church and the development of its authority.
Second, how did the work of John Jewel influence the development of a
Protestant identity for the Church of England? By addressing this question, this
thesis will contribute to the discussion of a common question in recent Reformation
scholarship, one most creatively asked by Patrick Collinson in his famous illustration
of the historically-minded insomniac: when did England become Protestant?5 An
answer can be found in the 1560s. Jewel aligned the Church of England with
Protestant churches on the continent when he created a history for the church that
was based on continuity of beliefs, rather than apostolic succession. He also
encouraged the development of a Protestant identity by infusing it with national
pride, through his defence of the royal supremacy.
Third, how was Jewel’s work used to defend the Church of England?
Jewel’s legacy has not yet been fully studied in its historical context, despite the
continuing use of Jewel by sixteenth and seventeenth-century divines aiming to
defend the Church of England. These divines fashioned Jewel in their own image,
and applied his works to circumstances for which they were not originally meant.
This construction of Jewel has not yet been examined in any detail. It deserves
further study, because of the insight it provides into the self-perception of the early
modern church.

4 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2-4.
5 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Palgrave, 1988), ix.
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The ecclesiastical historian Bruce Gordon has noted that there is a ‘desperate
need’ for work on late sixteenth-century Protestantism that does not confine itself to
theology: ‘we need to know about scholarly networks, patterns of reading,
preaching, lay education, and personal libraries’. Gordon sees this as a way to move
Reformation studies forward, because ‘until this is undertaken we shall be compelled
to rehearse the same pieties about…Reformed religious cultures’.6 This thesis will
undertake such a study. It will contribute to recent scholarship on early modern
preaching, such as the work of Peter McCullough, Arnold Hunt and Mary Morrissey,
and discuss both lay education and scholarly networks. As will soon be set out in
more detail, such networks are its pivot point. Jewel was not only a controversialist
and an apologist, but also the lodestar for a distinct group of learned divines. This
leadership role has not yet been examined, which means that his active contribution
to sixteenth-century religious culture has not yet been given the attention it deserves.
In most Elizabethan histories, Jewel is considered only through his correspondence
with various continental reformers in the 1560s, as published in The Zurich Letters.
Jewel’s letters to reformers like Peter Martyr Vermigli and Heinrich Bullinger
provide elegant and succinct summaries of various issues that arose with the
establishment of the church, making them very useful to historians looking for
primary sources. However, excluding Jewel’s other works misconstrues the position
he actually held in the Elizabethan church.
The best example of this is the Jewel-Harding controversy. This controversy
began in November 1559, after the Challenge Sermon which Jewel concluded by
challenging the supporters of the Church of Rome to prove the Church of England’s
doctrine wrong. Catholic controversialist Thomas Harding responded, and he was
soon supported by other Catholic divines. Several leaders of the Elizabethan church
were inspired to defend Jewel against them by publishing responses to their works.
In total, twenty-one divines contributed to this polemical debate, publishing sixty-
five works in approximately ten years. The response to this one sermon shows that
Jewel had an active influence on church leadership, and could both persuade and
inspire his audience. Reconsideration of this neglected debate is one of the key
objectives of this thesis.
One of the few historians who considers the full significance of this
controversy is Lucy Wooding, and this thesis picks up some of her ideas. She too

6 Bruce Gordon, ‘Introduction,’ in Architect of Reformation: An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger,
edited by Bruce Gordon and Emidio Campi (Michigan: Baker Academic, 2004), 28.