Elizabethan Controversialists. Peter Milward
indulged in the buying and selling of Masses, for having turned to the worship of mere bread under the newly invented name of “transubstantiation”, for having sought to apply the merits of Christ’s death on the cross at Mass, for having abused the doctrine of Purgatory to bring in a plentiful harvest for Mass-mongers, for having devised superfluous ceremonies without number, for having encumbered men’s consciences with the practice of confession, for having multiplied mediators between God and men in the persons of Mary and the saints, for having imposed prayers in a tongue unknown to the majority of the faithful. All these customs and traditions, brought in by the Popes, are (in Jewel’s opinion) mere human inventions not just added but opposed to the clear teaching of the Gospel, which has now at last been revealed. “Let them,” he again challenges his adversaries, “make a proof, let them give the Gospel free passage, let the truth of Jesus Christ give his clear light and stretch forth his bright beams into all parts, and then shall they forthwith see how all these shadows will vanish and pass away at the light of the Gospel, even as the thick mist of the night consumeth at the sight of the sun.” Returning, therefore, to the main point of his Apology, he concludes, “As touching that we have now done, to depart from that Church whose errors were proved and made manifest to the world… We have done nothing herein against the doctrine either of Christ or of his apostles.”
It was after his publication of these two relatively short writings that Jewel went on to engage in his celebrated controversy with the Catholic theologian, Thomas Harding, in defence of both works. Harding was by no means unknown to him, from their days together at Oxford. They had even for a time been united in acceptance of the new ideas of Luther. But Harding had been won back to the old faith in the reign of Queen Mary, and now under Queen Elizabeth he became his former friend’s leading opponent from the comparative safety of Louvain.
In the first place, Jewel found himself confronted with Harding’s impressive Answer to his challenge, which was at last published in 1564, though manuscript versions were already in circulation. This brought great delight to the Catholics, who now began to triumph over Jewel, prompting misgivings even in his fellow Protestants that their champion had gone too far in conceding the first six centuries as material for his challenge. Jewel, however, refused to shift from his chosen ground. Instead, he took a triple line not so much of defence as of attack. First, he warns his readers against the admitted beauty of Harding’s eloquence and his “majesty of words”, while reminding them of St.Paul’s warning against the devil who “can show himself as an angel of light”. Secondly, he presents a detailed list of Harding’s terms of abuse, his “glikes, nips and scoffs”, despite his profession to refrain from such language. Then, after parading them before his readers, Jewel addresses his adversary, “These words be yours, M.Harding, not only for that they be uttered by you, but also for that they pertain directly and properly unto yourself.” Thirdly, he goes on to the more substantial part of his task, criticizing the authorities alleged by Harding as “full of fog and false ground”, and consisting of nothing but “surmises, guesses, conjectures and likelihoods”. He even mocks his adversary with the demand, “Did you imagine, M.Harding, that your book should pass only among children, or that it should never be examined or come to trial?”
Scarcely had he completed this reply to Harding’s Answer, than Jewel found himself confronted with the other’s even more impressive Confutation of his Apology. What specially annoyed him was the discovery that his adversary had dedicated his book to the Queen herself. So while doing the same at the inception of his own Defence, he reminds the Queen of her position as “the only nurse and mother of the Church of God within these your Majesty’s most noble dominions”. Once again he warns his readers that “Satan transformeth himself into an angel of light”, and that “heretics have evermore appareled themselves with the name of the Church”. Once again, too, he presents a list of “the principal flowers of M.Harding’s honest speech”. And once again, with more sustained rhetoric, he maintains against the Church of Rome that “you have mingled your lead with the Lord’s gold, and have filled the Lord’s harvest full of your darnel, that you have broken God’s manifest commandments, to uphold and maintain your own traditions, that you have dammed up the springs of the water of life and have broken up puddles of your own, such as be able to hold no water”. At the same time, so far from having forsaken the Catholic Church, he insists that the Protestants have returned to that Church, “and have forsaken you because you have manifestly forsaken the ways of God”.
There, so far as Jewel was concerned, the controversy came to an end. He left his friend, Edward Dering, to publish a reply to Harding’s Rejoinder in 1568, while in reply to Harding’s Detection he merely issued an enlarged edition of his Defence in 1570. He had had enough of his controversial labours, and in 1571 he breathed his last, leaving the Church to which he belonged not only his literary labours but also a literary successor in the person of his former pupil Richard Hooker. In memory of Jewel the latter uttered words that may well stand as his epitaph, that he was “the worthiest divine that Christendom has bred for some hundreds of years”, no doubt, in Hooker’s intention, since the sixth century.
Bibliographical Note
1 The copy of a Sermon pronounced by the Bishop of Salisbury at Paul’s Cross the second Sunday before Easter in the year of Our Lord 1560, whereupon D.Cole first sought occasion to encounter, shortly set forth as near as the author could call it to remembrance, without any alteration or addition. 1560 (RC 1)
2 The True Copies of the Letters between the reverend father in God John Bishop of Sarum and D.Cole, upon occasion of a Sermon that the said Bishop preached before the Queen’s Majesty and her most honourable Council. 1560 (RC 2)
3 Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae. 1562 (RC 11)
4 An Apology, or Answer in Defence of the Church of England, concerning the State of Religion used in the same. Newly set forth in Latin, and now translated into English. 1562 (also translation by Anne Bacon, 1564) (RC 12)
5 A Reply unto M.Harding’s Answer, by perusing whereof the discreet and diligent reader may easily see the weak and unstable grounds of the Roman Religion, which of late hath been accounted Catholic. By John Jewel Bishop of Salisbury. 1565 (RC 7)
6 A Defence of the Apology of the Church of England, containing an Answer to a certain book lately set forth by M.Harding and entitled, A Confutation of etc. By John Jewel Bishop of Salisbury. 1567 (RC 15)
7 A Defence of the Apology of the Church of England… Wherein there is also newly added an Answer unto another like book written by the said M.Harding, entitled, A Detection of sundry foul errors etc. By John Bishop of Salisbury. 1570 (RC 17)
8 A Sparing Restraint of many lavish untruths, which M.Doctor doth challenge in the first article of my Lord of Salisbury’s Reply. By Edward Dering Student in Divinity. 1568 (RC 10)
b) The Catholic Champion, Thomas Harding (1516-72)
Among scholars there is, it seems, a strange conspiracy of silence about the controversial writings of Thomas Harding. Even C.S.Lewis, who made such an extensive survey of sixteenth-century literature, including some of the controversialists, for his Oxford history, and who devoted a page or two to Jewel, only mentions Harding (giving him the Christian name of John) as Jewel’s opponent without a word on his prose. Even Catholic scholars, specialists on recusant history, oddly neglect him. Yet in his own day he was hailed by fellow Catholics as a kind of Caesar, when his Answer to Jewel’s Challenge first appeared. As the Puritan Laurence Humphrey recalled in 1584, “Hardingi liber a multis emitur, recipitur. Hardingus quasi alter Caesar proclamans Veni, vidi, vici, cum suis triumphat, sed ante victoriam.” (Iesuitismi Confutatio) In the following decade the Cambridge doctor Gabriel Harvey saw in his word-combat with Jewel an English parallel to the classical contest between Aeschines and Demosthenes. (Pierces Supererogation) Even a cursory perusal of his writings should suffice to explain both the enthusiasm with which they were welcomed by his fellow Catholics and the admiration which they elicited from later generations of Protestants if only for his vigorous prose. Even Jewel had to admit the