John Jewel and the English National Church

The Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer

Gary W. Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754635857
• eBook ISBN: 9781317110675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

John Jewel (1522-1571) has long been regarded as one of the key figures in the shaping of the Anglican Church. A Marian exile, he returned to England upon the accession of Elizabeth I, and was appointed bishop of Salisbury in 1560 and wrote his famous Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae two years later. The most recent monographs on Jewel, now over forty years old, focus largely on his theology, casting him as deft scholar, adept humanist, precursor to Hooker, arbiter of Anglican identity and seminal mind in the formation of Anglicanism. Yet in light of modern research it is clear that much of this does not stand up to closer examination. In this work, Gary Jenkins argues that, far from serving as the constructor of a positive Anglican identity, Jewel's real contribution pertains to the genesis of its divided and schizophrenic nature. Drawing on a variety of sources and scholarship, he paints a picture not of a theologian and humanist, but an orator and rhetorician, who persistently breached the rules of logic and the canons of Renaissance humanism in an effort to claim polemical victory over his traditionalist opponents such as Thomas Harding. By taking such an iconoclastic approach to Jewel, this work not only offers a radical reinterpretation of the man, but of the Church he did so much to shape. It provides a vivid insight into the intent and ends of Jewel with respect to what he saw the Church of England under the Elizabethan settlement to be, as well as into the unintended consequences of his work. In so doing, it demonstrates how he used his Patristic sources, often uncritically and faultily, as foils against his theological interlocutors, and without the least intention of creating a coherent theological system.

CHAPTER ONE
Oxford and exile, Jewel till 1558

Jewel’s early years and Oxford till the death of Henry VIII

Though meager when compared to the last 13 years of his life, the sparse evidence regarding Jewel before the accession of Elizabeth nonetheless reveals an individual whose Protestant outlook has already developed along lines peculiar to his life as an English bishop. The idiom he affected in his apologetics, the methods he embraced, the positions he endorsed, and the postures he assumed during Elizabeth’s reign, had already obtained real clarity before Jewel had even set foot again in England following his years in exile. The few literary remains, amplified by his circle of friends, benefactors and teachers at Oxford and abroad, make Jewel’s actions and associations over his last 13 years more easily understood. The three together – the writings he produced, the actions and pursuits he followed, and the associations he formed – present at times an enigmatic person, but one whose life and thought nonetheless follow a clear and consistent trajectory. The period from his arrival in Oxford till his return to England from exile in 1559 spans almost 24 years, nearly half of Jewel’s life, informs the last 12 years of his life, and gives his thought roots heretofore overlooked. These years, so sparsely documented, nevertheless present an individual in which can already be discerned the nascent idioms which would produce the Challenge Sermon and the Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae.¹

The world of Jewel’s youth is a little better known than John Jewel’s youth itself. Born in March 1522 at Buden or Bowden farm in the parish Berrynarbor on the north coast of Devon, Jewel was one of ten children. Baptized in the Berrynarbor parish church of St Peters, about a mile from his home, all record of his baptism has been lost, torn from the parish record book at an unknown point some years ago. If it had the sad fate to have found its way to the cathedral in Exeter, then in almost all likelihood it was lost in the Blitz. Both Bowden farm and St Peter’s church still stand, the church dating back to Anglo-Saxon England, with the arch of the western door dating to at least 1090, and many parts of the church predating that. The church itself was built over a spring, making for a rather damp sanctuary. As a number of burial mounds are near both the church and atop the hills of the Steridge Valley, the location of Bowden farm, it would seem safe to assume that before the church was built, the place was probably the site of pagan worship. Descendants of the Jewel family still live in nearby Combe Martin and Ilfracombe. Though Jewel’s childhood predates the coming of the Reformation to the area, once it did arrive, the area itself proved slow in conforming or converting. Even the Bowden farm has evidence of a priesthole, the room being discovered just a few years ago during some renovations. Arlington Manor, some seven miles from Bowden farm, was the home of a notorious recusant family who willingly paid their yearly fine to Elizabeth to function as Recusants as opposed merely to being Church Papists.

Young Jewel’s earliest education came at the hands of his maternal uncle, John Bellamie, rector of the parish church in Kentisbury,² just four miles from Berrynarbor. When he was seven, Jewel ‘auunculo commendatur, ut statim principia bonarum artium disceret.’³ The place of Bellamie’s education is not known, his name appearing among the graduates of neither Oxford nor Cambridge. Having given his nephew the rudiments of grammar, Bellamie then sponsored Jewel to the schools at Brampton, South Molton and lastly Barnstaple, all about ten miles distant from Berrynarbor. The school at Barnstaple – reputedly the oldest borough in England – where Jewel was educated ‘sub auspiciis Walteri Bowen’,⁴ still stands next to St Peter’s church. It seems that his teachers at Barnstaple were the ones who got him into Oxford and the well-established and conservative institution of Merton College. Ironically, another Barnstaple student, also from Devonshire, would make his way to New College, Oxford the following year, namely Thomas Harding.

Jewel arrived at Merton College in 1535.⁵ Founded in 1264 by Walter de Merton, then Lord Chancellor and also bishop of Rochester, the college is located along the south wall of medieval Oxford, and was one of the three oldest institutions in the university.⁶ In the first half of the sixteenth century some of the most renowned members of the university came from Merton, and Merton itself was highly inimical to the new learning of Renaissance humanism. Merton had, by conservative likes, the inauspicious honor of being John Wyclif’s college. The century following Wyclif the college reacted with a strong orthodoxy, highlighted by the tenure of Richard Fitzjames as warden. Fitzjames became warden in 1501, having been the bishop of Rochester since 1497, was successively translated to Chichester in 1503 and then London in 1505, resigning his post as warden of Merton in 1507. Fitzjames had cultivated a medieval piety at Merton, and also had taken a hard line against the studium humanitatis. The latter is most clearly seen not only at Merton per se, but in his denunciations of John Colet, the dean of St Paul’s cathedral. Fitzjames charged Colet with heresy before archbishop Warham, as Colet maintained some things that appeared drawn from Wyclif, and thus guilty of Lollardy. Further, per Erasmus’s letter to Jonas Jeremiah, Colet was accused of opposing the worship of images. The strength of Colet’s friends, who included Sir Thomas More and the Mercer Company of London, who had underwritten the costs of Colet’s foundation of St Paul’s school, certainly spared him any real difficulties.⁷ Fitzjames, as the Richard Hunne affair demonstrated (an affair about which Colet was highly critical), was unable always to control matters in London, but his conservative impression upon Merton was indelible. Despite the bishop’s efforts, humanism did come to Merton in the person of Richard Rawlins, warden from 1509 to 1521. Although removed by Warham owing to complaints leveled against him by the fellows of the college, and succeeded first by Roland Philipps and then in 1525 by John Chambers, who remained at Merton till 1544, Rawlin’s tenure, as shall be seen, was not without consequences.⁸

Among Merton’s fellows during Jewel’s days at Oxford were Richard Smith and William Tresham, both of whom would figure in Jewel’s later life at the university. In 1542 Henry VIII appointed Smith the initial Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, but under Edward VI, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer deprived Smith of his post, believing his conversion to the Protestant faith merely outward conformity.⁹ His position was given to the Protestant Italian émigré Peter Martyr Vermigli, who would play such an important role in Jewel’s intellectual and theological formation. Smith was the instigator of the disputation on the Eucharist with Peter Martyr in 1549, with Jewel serving as Martyr’s amanuensis for the affair.¹⁰ With the accession of Mary in 1553, Smith was restored to his chair as Regius Professor, and was one of the disputants with Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer at their trials in Oxford, and was also the preacher at Ridley and Latimer’s burning in Oxford in 1555.¹¹ Tresham, one of the first canons of Christ Church Cathedral, was vice-chancellor of the university under Mary, and took Smith’s place when the latter failed to turn up for the confrontation with Martyr.

Despite Merton’s conservative bent, it was there that Jewel first encountered both humanism and Protestantism, though Jewel was hardly the first at Merton to be so influenced. John Huick, future physician to Henry VIII and a key member of Elizabeth’s government, also became a Protestant while at Merton, sometime around 1530, having just completed his BA. By 1535 he was a fellow of the adjacent St Alban’s Hall, which regularly drew its principals from Merton. Huick found himself expelled from St Alban’s in 1536 for his heresy (though Huick confessed that it was his fellows at Merton who were infected, with Pelagianism).¹² Though discharged as principal, Huick still retained his fellowship at Merton, but left Oxford nonetheless for the less conservative Cambridge in 1536, and received his MD in 1538. But it was not from Huick that Jewel imbibed his heresy, but from a Merton fellow who had begun his education under the auspices of Magdalen College, John Parkhurst. Parkhurst entangled Jewel’s life at Oxford in the questions of the day pertaining both to humanism and, more specifically, to the Reformation. Initially Jewel’s education had fallen under the aegis of the conservative Peter Burrey, later preferred to the vicarage of Croydon. Parkhurst did not scruple to argue with Burrey in front of their wards about the day’s great questions. Burrey had ambitiously assumed to tutor both Jewel and a fellow Devonshire student but proved unequal to the task. (Humphrey opined of Burrey that he was ‘hominem mediocri literatura praeditum’.)¹³ Eventually, with Burrey lacking the ability to tutor both, Jewel found himself as the ward of Parkhurst. Born in 1511, Parkhurst was educated at the grammar school attached to Magdalen College, at that time one of the more humanistically inclined schools at Oxford. He entered Merton probably about 1524, obtaining his BA in 1529 and MA sometime before 1533.¹⁴ Having obtained his MA, Parkhurst was also made a fellow of the college. Parkhurst gave Jewel assignments in reading Coverdale’s and Tyndale’s translations of the New Testament, ostensibly as an exercise in grammar and rhetoric, to compare them for their differences in translation and style. Despite this concession the assignment could not be considered less than provocative.¹⁵ Yet whatever advantages, academically and politically, Parkhurst enjoyed over Burrey, he also showed himself a scholar unequal to his ward, and in August 1539, apparently with Parkhurst’s aid, Jewel moved to Corpus Christi College, where in October 1540 he received his bachelor’s degree.

Corpus Christi, while created to advance philology in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, was certainly not a Protestant institution: Morwen its president, according to Humphrey, once remarked to Jewel: ‘Amarem te Iuelle, si non esses Zvvinglianus: et, Haereticus fide, vita certe videris Angelus, et, Honestus es, at Lutheranus.’¹⁶ Nonetheless, it was far more inclined to humanism than Merton or the rest of Oxford. Its foundation was in part made possible by Merton’s former warden, Rawlins, who leased the lands and apparently some buildings owned by Merton to the new college. More than anything this is probably what brought about the complaints of the Merton Fellows against Rawlins and what led to his removal.¹⁷ Richard Foxe, bishop of Winchester, a close friend of Bishop John Fisher, Sir Thomas More and Erasmus founded Corpus in 1517. No doubt the college’s foundation was a poke in the conservative eye of Fitzjames, and that the college existed on lands it held in perpetual lease from Merton can only be thought to have added insult to any pedagogical injury.¹⁸ Foxe, a friend of the new learning, also certainly had no time for heresy, and while humanist enterprises such as Linacre’s edition of Galen were dedicated to him, so too was...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Oxford and exile, Jewel till 1558
• 2 Jewel and the struggle for the Elizabethan Church
• 3 The Catholic reaction to Jewel
• 4 A prelate public and private: Jewel caught between Puritans and princes
• 5 Life as a bishop in Salisbury
• 6 Jewel and the identity of the English national Church
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index