A comprehensive modern study of John Jewel is long overdue. The two monographs upon which historians perforce rely both appeared more than forty years ago and, as their titles imply, the authors had little interest in Jewel beyond his writings.Footnote 1 As we approach the 450th anniversary of the publication of his most celebrated work, Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562), one would have thought that a completely accurate biographical account of Jewel was a sine qua non of any attempt to replace those fading studies and to set the celibate scholar-bishop firmly in historical context.
Gary Jenkins falls at every hurdle. This volume is so old-fashioned in tone that after reading his essentially Eltonian interpretation of Henry viii's reformation I turned to the bibliography. The list of secondary sources, running to an awesome twenty-one pages, cites only twenty studies published since 1995; fewer than ten of these were published in the present century.Footnote 2 If a week is a long time in politics, a decade is a very long time indeed in the field of Reformation studies. The last four years, moreover, have seen the appearance of the Oxford DNB and of the John Foxe Project's on-line edition of the relevant sections of Actes and monuments. From neither of these two monuments to modern scholarship has Jenkins apparently managed to profit. Footnotes and bibliography alike cite only the old DNB and the Victorian editions of Foxe. Whilst in his preface Jenkins thanks John Craig for providing a copy of his entry on Jewel in the Oxford DNB, and Thomas Freeman, author of the entries on Foxe and Laurence Humphrey, for help and encouragement, it is difficult to fathom what he has actually gained from any of them.Footnote 3 Freeman's entry on Humphrey, the fullest and most balanced account of his life ever printed, puts his slanted Ioannis Iuelli … vita & mors (1573) into its proper context and should surely have prompted Jenkins into considering at the outset the reliability or otherwise of this basic source of information. As anyone who has consulted it knows, the volume is a brief, impressionistic hagiography, to be treated with considerable caution, and not as an objective, let alone chronological, biographical account.Footnote 4
In Jenkins's first chapter, Jewel's life until his return from exile in 1559 is covered in some detail but – his mentor John Parkhurst excepted – without reference to those of his Oxford contemporaries who were forcing the pace of religious change within the university in the 1540s. Most important for the future was a group of young dons at Magdalen College who can without serious distortion be described as a ‘Foxe circle’. They included not only the martyrologist himself but also Laurence Humphrey and Dr Henry Bull, later one of Foxe's principal collaborators in the publication of Letters of the martyrs and of the Actes and monuments. The group also embraced four Thomases – Bentham, Bickley, Cooper and Godwin – who, like Jewel, would later clamber into episcopal garb with various degrees of reluctance and accommodation in order to ensure that Elizabeth's fragile settlement did not fall into the hands of less worthy recipients. Another Magdalen Fellow at this time was Robert Crowley, who aided and abetted Humphrey and Thomas Sampson during the Vestments controversy of the mid-1560s, long after Jewel and Archbishop Matthew Parker had capitulated to Elizabeth's wishes in the matter.
In other words Jenkins has not chosen to ‘compare and contrast’. A long chapter (forty-five pages) thus lacks perspective and the subterranean links with Jewel's Oxford past which informed his last fifteen years of life – as exile, bishop and apologist – are denied the definition which attention to recent research would have provided. How, for example, did Jewel's years in Salisbury compare with the efforts of the four Thomases, coping in other dioceses? What correlation is there between Jewel's writings and Thomas Cooper's Answer in defence of the truth against the apology of private mass, alluded to only in passing?
Jenkins ends his consideration of Henry viii's reign with animadversions upon the disputes between traditionalists and evangelicals during Henry's final, bewilderingly diverse, years: ‘What both sides would soon enough come to learn was that death had no cardinal clergy, and the new supreme head may not abide by what they considered the truth’ (p. 19). What can this mean? The account of Jewel's fortunes under Edward vi lays particular stress on his friendship with Peter Martyr Vermigli, his ‘spiritual father’, and the later fortunes of Protestantism in England are therefore assumed to have owed more to Martyr than to any other contemporary European theologian who set foot there. The possibility that Jan Laski and Martin Bucer may have been equally influential is ignored.Footnote 5 The erroneous assertion by older writers that Jewel was appointed archdeacon of Chichester in 1551 is not even accorded a footnote and a vital episode in Jewel's career is recorded thus: ‘Jewel, according to Strype, served as the notary for Cranmer and Ridley at their Oxford disputation in April 1554’ (p. 38). According to Strype? Historians have for more than a generation tried to circumvent John Strype's meandering miscellanies and his often garbled quotations by seeking out the original sources which he used and quoting them verbatim.
There follows the first of a series of sly statements which attempt to put the Marian regime in the right and everyone else in the wrong. Of Jewel's flight abroad in 1554 Jenkins writes:
Humphrey's account … raises a huge question: why was Jewel imperiled [sic] if he had subscribed and if … he had attended Mass. Apart from Cranmer, no one who subscribed and even did the minimum faced any reprisals, and it is difficult to think that Jewel was singled out in this regard. Edmund Guest … as well as Matthew Parker, both remained in England, and largely untroubled in their lives (pp. 38–9).
It is also difficult to think that any serious historian could so distort the facts. Apart from Cranmer, ‘no-one faced any reprisals’? Naturally those who conformed were welcomed back into the fold but one of the major points to notice about the Marian regime is not its ‘tolerance’ but its complacency. Many besides Guest and Parker – the future bishops Thomas Cooper and William Alley are only the tip of the iceberg – were allowed to disappear into obscurity within the British Isles on the naïve assumption that if the government barked loudly enough Protestantism would just ‘go away’. In other cases the Marian regime was forced to make judicious accommodation with men whom, despite their religious allegiance, it simply could not afford to alienate – in particular the London mercantile community, whose willingness or otherwise to lend the government money was a vital element in ensuring its survival.
But on we merrily go. William Whittingham appears as ‘Wittingham’ on page 41 and so continues throughout. Sir John Cheke, not unknown to fame, becomes ‘Richard’ (p. 47). Humphrey's statement that Jewel lodged in London with the merchant Francis Goldsmith before his flight is omitted, despite Goldsmith's known connections with London's godly community.Footnote 6 The possibility that before quitting Oxford Jewel managed to communicate with Cranmer and was the bearer of the archbishop's last letter to Peter Martyr is not discussed.Footnote 7
Chapter ii, ‘Jewel and the struggle for the Elizabethan Church’, begins quite properly with a discussion of the factors, political and religious, which paved the way for a Protestant settlement of religion in the parliament of 1559 but its peculiar selectivity can only alert the reader to some of the flagrant distortions which are to follow. No mention is made of the loss of Calais, a body-blow to English pride, or in truth to the Marian burnings, which are swept under the carpet with the bizarre observation that ‘the ruthless and at times cruel suppression of heretics [sic] had bolstered sympathy for evangelicals’ (p. 53). At times? Jewel's elevation to the bench is attributed entirely to the whim of Elizabeth ‘who plucked her bishops mainly from the returning exiles’ (p. 61).Footnote 8 Jenkins seems completely unaware that Jewel was not the government's original choice for Salisbury – it was originally offered to William Bill, Elizabeth's first Lord Almoner, who had not gone into exile – and that the creation of the first bench of bishops was a matter of intense negotiation at the council table which involved considerable haggling over episcopal finances.Footnote 9 The arresting fact that, at thirty-eight, he was the youngest man appointed passes without comment.Footnote 10
If Jenkins's unfamiliarity with recent scholarship is to be regretted, his failure to make use of original sources which could have fleshed out the meagre details of Jewel's life, both public and private, is to be deplored. British Library, ms Egerton 2533 was cited as long ago as 1980 by Felicity Heal, who extrapolated from it the fact that Jewel was lent the entire sum necessary to discharge the first instalment of his first-fruits for the bishopric of Salisbury by his ‘frend Mr Heton’.Footnote 11 To chase up Egerton 2533 is to discover a fascinating cache of letters from Jewel to Edward Nicolas, steward of his estates in Salisbury. They present him in unbuttoned mode: witty and warm and full of fun.Footnote 12 These short missives might have illuminated the otherwise bland and generalised account of his life as a diocesan contained in chapter v. Both Thomas Heton and his brother George, leading London merchants, have entries in the Oxford DNB, where it is suggested that it was Thomas who was Jewel's benefactor with regard to his first-fruits. These entries would also have alerted Jenkins to the close alliance between the families of Heton and Culverwell and thus prompted him to incorporate the one vital clue we possess as to Jewel's immediate whereabouts after his return to London in 1559. Humphrey specifically states that he was welcomed into the household of Nicholas Culverwell sex fere menses'.Footnote 13 The Culverwells (who also have an entry in the Oxford DNB) were in their turn closely linked with another leading exile family, that of John Bodley, father of Sir Thomas, who alone had the queen's licence to distribute the Geneva Bible in England.
John Day – the printer, amongst much else, of Jewel's Epistola and Apologia, of the Actes and monuments and of the metrical Psalms – is casually mentioned once (p. 88), without any attempt to explain who he was. Altogether no effort has been made to explore Jewel's relations with the London godly network, so vital in the preservation of the evangelical tradition during the reign of Mary, so supportive of the new Elizabethan hierarchy thereafter and so deferential towards Jewel himself.Footnote 14
The godly network, moreover, owed a great deal to William Cecil, whose career scarcely needs elaboration here. The reader who knows little or nothing of Cecil will scarcely be enlightened by Jenkins. Incidental references (pp. 47n., 57, 86, 88, 168, 174), from which it could scarcely be gauged that Cecil was a prime mover in encouraging Jewel to write the Apology, are followed by a stunning ineptitude which would not pass muster in an ‘A’ Level essay: ‘what Cecil's sentiments were towards Geneva in 1559 are not clear, as he was someone who supported the more austere forms of Protestantism as evidenced by his support of the puritanically inclined Henry “silver-tongued” Smith' (p. 180). If that is all that Jenkins can dredge up for evidence of Cecil's steady support of evangelical Protestantism in his youth, during his early service at court in the mid-century and then during his forty years as Elizabeth's most trusted adviser then one has to wonder what precisely he has been reading over the last couple of decades.Footnote 15
Above all, Felicity Heal's work on ecclesiastical finance should have prompted a more detailed discussion of Jewel's acceptance of the valuable see of Salisbury, particularly in relation to the Act of Exchange of 1559, a contentious piece of legislation the import of which Jenkins has failed to grasp. Instead we find (p. 214):
By the time the government had appointed Jewel Elizabeth had already left all of the vacant sees inherited from Mary remain so for more than a year in order that she might collect their revenues … [Jewel's letters at this time] refer to both the financial exchange forced upon the English episcopate by Elizabeth, which transferred the bulk of their diocesan revenues to the Crown [sic] in return for permanent stipends; and to the delay between the conge d'elire [sic] confirming episcopal appointments and their eventual enthronement; an interim in which diocesan revenues were further being absconded [sic] by the crown [sic]. The span between the conge d'elire [sic] for Jewel and his enthronement was nine months, though he was one of the last [sic] of Elizabeth's initial appointments to receive the warrant.
Only one of those statements is correct and that one irrelevant. The ‘bulk’ of diocesan revenues were not transferred to the crown nor, under Elizabeth, was any bishop ever offered a stipend in lieu.Footnote 16 Bishops continued to derive their income from landed estates, on which they duly paid tax in the form of first-fruits and tenths. After confirmation of his electionFootnote 17 the new bishop was entitled to apply for his diocesan revenues, which were always granted retrospectively, usually from the previous quarter-day, when rents and other revenues were called in, but sometimes even more generously. Thus there is no correlation between the length of a vacancy and the profit which the crown elected to derive from it. Jewel was one of the first of the new bishops to receive a congé d'élire – on 27 July 1559, only weeks after parliament had finished its work in May – and was eventually consecrated on 21 January 1560.Footnote 18 He was then granted his revenues retrospectively from Michaelmas 1559. In financial terms, the date of his enthronement is neither here nor there. Finally, there is no good evidence of exchanges within the diocese of Salisbury: Jewel's taxable income from his estates was stated by the exchequer to be just in excess of £1,367, precisely the figure at which it had been rated in the Valor ecclesiasticus of 1535.Footnote 19
The ‘dismantling of Jewel’ which is Jenkins's ultimate goal finally gets going on page 70, when his Challenge Sermon of 1559 is in theory analysed but in fact comprehensively trashed:
Many of the arguments Jewel used in treating the Mass apply to seeming minutiae … But with such matters Jewel felt he retained the upper hand in debate, to the exclusion of matters with which he could not hope to flourish given the terms and perameters he had adduced … Jewel's answering [Dr Henry] Cole by an obfuscation of metaphors – a commonplace in his writings – betrays either a poor grasp of his opponents' implications, a poor ability to see the extent to which their arguments can be pushed, or a panoply of arguments built more around rhetorical gamesmanship than theological explication (pp. 71–2).
Jewel's response to Cole is presented as essentially negative: he constantly asserted what was not held by the ancient Fathers without ever stating what actually was (p. 73). Jenkins then proceeds to write off the unending debate with Thomas Harding as ‘tedious and pedantic’ on both sides (p. 73); Jewel was once again content to argue from negatives, ‘being less interested in argument and more interested in scoring rhetorical points’ (p. 74). There is much more in this strain but all is used to bolster the thesis that Jewel was consistently guilty of ‘polemical duplicity’ (p. 83). Discussion of Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae is largely confined to catching Jewel out when it comes to his patristic learning (or lack of it) and does not consider the implications of the work for the future of Elizabeth's Protestant England.
Jenkins's third chapter, ‘The Catholic reaction to Jewel’ adds up to little more than a re-rehearsal of the arguments of his avowed opponents Henry Cole, Thomas Dorman, Thomas Harding, John Rastell, Nicholas Sander and Thomas Stapleton and at every point Jenkins implicitly suggests that they had the better case, both as scholars and canon lawyers. There is no analysis here, simply strident polemic. For the student who has never come across the arguments before this may be regarded as a convenient summary but it provides few useful insights into the debates which were actually conducted. What above all is to be noted, however, is that Jenkins finally nails his colours to the mast as an avowed champion of Roman Catholic courses. Those who under Elizabeth were deprived, imprisoned or else fled were ‘a far more substantial group, both ecclesiastically and academically, than their more celebrated Protestant expatriates who endured exile during Mary's reign’. In a curious and sinister shift of emphasis we are then informed that Miles Coverdale was ‘allowed’ to leave for Denmark in 1555 (as indeed he was, but for very specific reasons). ‘The Marian bishops that survived into Elizabeth's reign were never allowed that much liberty’ (p. 117). So the bishops whom Mary inherited were all treated with generosity, were they, while those inherited by Elizabeth were not?
Cranmer, Ferrar, Hooper, Latimer and Ridley all went to the stake. No member of the Marian hierarchy who refused the Oath of Supremacy in 1559–60 was executed. Archbishop Nicholas Heath of York and a number of other survivors of the Marian episcopal bench who would have looked to him for leadership were confined under house arrest – effectively as ‘house guests’ of their Protestant successors – and as far as we know none (not even ‘Bloody Bonner’) was offered physical violence of any kind. (Perhaps, indeed, for some a monkish existence in a remote episcopal residence which provided regular meals seemed preferable to the hazards of wandering around Europe in search of a safe haven or a new cause. Not everyone is cut out to be a martyr.) And then again: ‘The Elizabethan government especially denuded the universities’ (p. 117). Well, yes, it denuded them of men whom it considered would be inimical to its stated policies, as did most governments before the days of so-called ‘democracy’ and as many have done in recent years in so-called ‘people's republics’. What else is new?
Chapter iv, ‘A prelate public and private: Jewel caught between Puritans and princes’, is Jenkins's attempt to justify the use of the word ‘dilemmas’ in his title. Now it is surely a commonplace that the most influential of Elizabeth's first bench of bishops, Jewel amongst them, were disappointed that the parliamentary settlement of 1559 had not offered more of a sop to their evangelical consciences. All, however, assumed that as the reign wore on it would be possible to introduce further measures of ecclesiastical reform. Meanwhile it was accepted that Elizabeth's accession as a godly prince reflected the divine purpose: if her leading clerics considered that they had a God-given duty to advise her about the true nature of a godly commonwealth (and many did) their ultimate duty was to obey her as Supreme Governor of the Church of England.Footnote 20 Jewel had been long dead by the time that her second archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, discovered the stark consequences of failing to do so.
Jenkins does not choose to see matters in this pragmatic light. Jewel is presented as a unique figure, tossing and turning between doubts and certainties, expressing his doubts to his friends in far-away Zurich and his ‘certainties’ in his writings. And so ‘one is compelled to wonder about the coherence of his thought on the monarch's function and place in the realm’ and ‘one must also question the unity of Jewel's thought on what a Protestant commonwealth should be’. Surely this is to propose a ‘historical problem’ where none actually exists and again we are invited to consider his ‘seeming duplicity’ (p. 157).
The remainder of the chapter seeks to explore this ‘problem’ at some length but provides little illumination and generates a great amount of unnecessary verbiage. It could undoubtedly have been cut to half its length. Do we need, for example: ‘It has been shown how Jewel's doctrinal minimalism and liturgical diversity became the prolegomena of the royal prerogative, but this is not only when his polemics addressed Rome’ (p. 169)? A useful discussion of early nonconformist arguments from the time of Bishop Hooper is followed by the proposition that ‘the Puritans failed … owing to the status of England's Church as a national institution, governed by Her Majesty’ (p. 174) but the question of what ‘Puritanism’ actually meant to Jewel himself is not addressed. It is also assumed that his assertion to Peter Martyr (1 August 1559) that he was determined to refuse the ‘obligation’ (‘onus’) of the bishopric of Salisbury refers to his unwillingness to forego the scholarly life (p. 175). In truth, it may have had more to do with his suspicions about the financial arrangements involved.Footnote 21
Chapter v, ‘Life as a bishop in Salisbury’, begins with a lengthy account of the fabric of Salisbury Cathedral – a subject unlikely to have interested Jewel, not noted for his antiquarian interests – and (equally unnecessary) animadversions upon earlier incumbents of the see. Unaware of Jewel's letters to Edward Nicolas, Jenkins thereafter proceeds with scarcely more than vague inferences as to his episcopate: ‘Whether Jewel had a peaceful life in Salisbury is hard to say’ (p. 209). There is no description or any analysis of his meagre diocesan register (a mere forty-six folios for a tenure of eleven years) and in relaying Jewel's report on the state of his diocese of 1561, Jenkins seems unaware of the true meaning of the phrase ‘mediocriter doctus’ (p. 209). He also perpetrates one of the most common of all howlers, describing the absentee John Foxe as a ‘prebend’ (p. 210) and, as already noted, completely misrepresents Jewel's financial problems. There is no hint that the dean of Sarum was an equal (and possibly opposite) influence within the diocese. Nor is the dean with whom Jewel will have been obliged to work closely, William Bradbridge, appointed in 1563 and consecrated bishop of Exeter in March 1571, anywhere mentioned.Footnote 22 Jewel's relations with his dean and chapter are confined to describing some silly squabbles between the two resident organists and their oversight of the choristers (pp. 211–13) – the worst kind of ‘local history’ stuff, which in a serious monograph should have been relegated to a crisp footnote.
Jenkins's sixth and final chapter, ‘Jewel and the identity of the English national Church’ begins with a brief account of Jewel's death but, to crown his long list of omissions, he makes no reference whatsoever to Jewel's will, probated on 10 November 1571 and containing not only family bequests but also many to friends, including Gilbert Berkeley, bishop of Bath and Wells.Footnote 23 Thereafter the genesis and writing of Humphrey's Vita are finally discussed (but without reference to Thomas Freeman's recent researches) and then Jewel's later reputation and his vilification by the Tractarians in the nineteenth century. This, and then a consideration of his treatment at the hands of the evangelical anti-Tractarian Charles Webb le Bas and of later biographers, form the most useful part of the volume (pp. 229–36). There follow half a dozen lengthy paragraphs about the ‘revisionism’ of Nicholas Tyacke, Peter Lake and Peter White during the 1980s and 1990s. White's rejection of the notion that there was ever a ‘Calvinist consensus’ within the Elizabethan/Jacobean establishment is rejected in its turn, on the grounds that his ‘conceptual framework begs too many questions’ (p. 238).
In a conclusion of nine pages which is virtually unreadable – an ‘antinomy of conflicting ultimates has formed one of the basic tenets of this book’ (p. 243) – Jenkins does at least manage to frame his final, crushing assessment of John Jewel in a form which is comprehensible. His works
do not present a body of theological literature abundant with insight, but instead give a pedestrian reading of scriptural texts, a prosaic use of the early Church, and a banal approach to its theological topics. Jewel's use of sources is often disingenuous, his logic faulty and his theology in several areas flawed. What Jewel really gives the student of the Reformation is an iconoclast in a prelate's vestments (p. 245).
Jewel's complete incompetence, then, is proven and his bewilderment in the face of an erastian settlement of religion under a godly but not conspicuously evangelical young queen a recipe for disastrous and muddled thinking. The Jewel whom Jenkins has sought to present ‘is both a Puritan and a Prelate: he at once affirmed the authority of Scripture and the primacy of the godly prince’ (pp. 246–7). With a last sideswipe at Peter White – who ‘fails to grasp that Jewel was neither a theologian nor a systematic thinker, nor even a dialectician’ (p. 249) – Jenkins takes his leave of what, to his own satisfaction, he proposes as a debate which he has emphatically won. What he in his turn has failed to grasp is that there was not a single responsible Protestant theologian of European stature who would have been prepared to argue, either from Scripture or from Christian history, that there was no place in the divine scheme of things for the rule of the godly magistrate. Jewel's sole ‘dilemma’, shared with each and every one of his contemporaries who had the wit to ponder the conundrum, was simply that godly magistrates might not prove godly enough. Thus Jenkins should perhaps have paid some heed to Thomas Freeman's careful dissection of the four editions of John Foxe's Actes and monuments published in the martyrologist's lifetime, during the course of which Elizabeth of England is systematically downgraded from the status of Deborah, Josiah and the Emperor Constantine to that of Deborah with feet of clay; and, in 1583, is finally reminded that divine providence cuts two ways: a wrathful God discarded King Saul for betraying the trust placed in him.Footnote 24 Jewel had been dead for over a decade when Foxe took his almost surreal decision to depict Elizabeth as a failed godly ruler. One can only wonder how Jewel would have reacted to it.
A sufficient number of passages has been quoted to give the reader a full sense of Jenkins's prose style (not to mention that he consistently uses ‘shall’ – ‘as shall be discussed below’ – when he means ‘will’). None of this would matter very much if the book had been issued by a minor press with no particular pretensions to academic respectability: in that case it could simply have been ignored. The St Andrews Centre for Reformation Studies, by contrast, has proved one of the most successful scholarly enterprises of the last two decades, issuing a steady stream of distinguished monographs under the title St Andrews Studies in Reformation History in collaboration with Ashgate Publishing Limited. The present volume, however, has not been properly overseen by a commissioning editor who might have noticed that it is a closet-Catholic work with little interest in objectivity; nor by a copy-editor with the expertise either to correct myriad errors, both typographical and linguistic, or to align the original script with in-house rules concerning presentation and style. And should a book published under the auspices of a Scottish university by an English publisher allow American spelling?
In sum, John Jewel and the English national Church is an embarrassing aberration from the norms usually employed at St Andrews. It cannot possibly be recommended to serious practitioners in the field, let alone to unwary undergraduates. Its existence, moreover, may hinder or even in the short term prevent the publication of a much more considered and judicious study of one of the English Reformation's most important representatives.
