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lists with a clear definition of the term ‘universal church’ in mind. These definitions differed, and this distinction became a central theme that pervaded the various doctrinal and structural issues that were under debate. Both sides wanted to claim catholicity, but by the end of the first stage of the controversy in 1571, one side rarely claimed to be Catholic. The writers who were defending the English Church gradually started to describe the universal church as the church of Christ or the invisible church, rather than as the ‘catholic’ church. This was part of the process of separating themselves both theologically and psychologically from the Roman Church, and drawing strong demarcation lines between the two confessions.

In their contributions to the controversy, both the defenders and their challengers worked collaboratively with their like-minded fellows. Their

publications revolved around the works of two charismatic leaders, John Jewel and Thomas Harding, and echoed them in both style and content. Also, both the defenders and their challengers aimed to expand upon those texts, and use them to persuade a wider audience. These features make it possible to define these two groups of men as distinct textual communities, with one element in common: a concern for universality. The community inspired by Harding was concerned with physical universality, while the one Jewel inspired expanded upon the Edwardian and Henrican ideas of spiritual universality. Its members came to identify themselves with the continental reformed churches, while still maintaining a sense of their own unique nationality. This chapter will examine the works of these two communities, building on the discussion in chapter three about their self-awareness and sense of purpose.

The works of Jewel’s textual community show how Jewel’s concept of a national universal church spread over the course of the 1560s. Its members

developed Jewel’s argument that their church was simultaneously distinct from, and connected to, the greater reformation movement. The difference in their church leadership, embodied in the royal supremacy, set them apart. At the same time, similarities in doctrine and in their use of the sacraments connected their church to the primitive, apostolic true church. This led them to reject the Roman Church as thoroughly as Jewel had, and further re-define the term ‘catholic’, completing the shift that had started during the Henrican reformation. As we have seen, ‘catholic’ had been used in the early years of Henry VIII as synonymous with ‘Christian’. By

the later years of the Jewel-Harding controversy, it was strongly associated with the Romanists. Jewel himself was occasionally using ‘catholic’ in a pejorative sense, and other writers in the controversy were openly referring to themselves as Protestant.1

This development can be traced through the major works of the Jewel- Harding controversy that were published while Jewel and Harding were still alive. Thus, the sources for this chapter begin with the first respondent to the Challenge Sermon, Henry Cole, whose letters were published in 1560. They end with the last publication of a defender of the English Church, Edward Dering, whose A Sparing

Restraint appeared in 1568. During this time, the writers of the controversy were

constantly responding to one another, and encouraging public interest in the debate through preaching and publishing their letters. They had a clear understanding of their audience, and used various methods of persuasion, born of experience with rhetoric and disputation, to spread their ideas. The controversy was active and immediate, and had a direct effect on the religious atmosphere. The writers

gradually shaped a national universal church in the form of the established Church of England, through defending the royal supremacy, finding a place in the history of the church, and promoting the value of the individual.

After the deaths of Jewel and Harding in 1571 and 1572 respectively, the energy of the controversy fizzled out. No one contributed a new work until 1577, when it became more of a passive academic exercise. William Fulke, the head of St John’s College Cambridge, wrote the majority of the works. He responded to various Catholic publications from the original 1560s debate, and only one person made a new contribution in return: the priest Richard Bristow. He wrote to defend Cardinal William Allen against Fulke’s attack. Six works were published in total, the last of them in 1586. They were written and published in a very different historical context, for a different purpose, and had a different audience. For this reason, they will be discussed in the next chapter, which will examine the later years of Elizabeth’s reign.

Because the writers of the Jewel-Harding controversy have never been studied as two distinct textual communities, this chapter will begin with a detailed examination of the communities themselves. It will look at the historiography of confessionalization in the 1560s, and return to the question of whether or not the early Elizabethan church established a via media religion. Then, it will examine the

communities’ views of catholicity, and how greatly their views were inspired by the works of Jewel and Harding. This will lead to a discussion of their re-definition of the term ‘catholic’, and how that influenced the development of a national universal church. The chapter will conclude by studying the perceived audience of these communities, in preparation for the discussion of reception that will be central to the final chapter.

Identity and Catholicity

In the historiography of the Elizabethan settlement, it is argued that it took a long time for the various elements that made up the Elizabethan Church of England to solidify into a recognizable form. Felicity Heal and Peter Holmes suggest it took more than ten years; Diarmaid MacCulloch argues that the real shape of the

settlement did not become clear until a half a century had passed.2 Peter Marshall considers the settlement a starting post, rather than a finish line, for a race of self- definition which took two generations to complete.3 This chapter will challenge this interpretation, by incorporating evidence from ecclesiastical debates that has not been prevalent in most studies of the settlement.

As Arnold Hunt has argued, studies of the settlement have focused on ‘legal, liturgical, and doctrinal documents, which creates an imbalance, with more attention paid to the way that the settlement was constructed on paper than on the way it was mediated’.4

Hunt’s work attempts to correct this imbalance through an examination of the way the settlement was disseminated through preaching. This chapter will take up a similar examination, but it will look at how the various combatants in the Jewel-Harding controversy employed both preaching and publication. It will expand on the argument in chapter three that Jewel’s whole-hearted defence presents the settlement in a much more positive light than it has been assigned in the past. He and his colleagues from the community of reformers began to work for its defence as soon as its terms were settled, and the popularity of their work suggests that it had some immediate effect.

Many historians of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age question when the religious majority in England shifted from Catholic to Protestant. Susan Wabuda

2

Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500-1700 (London: McMillan, 1994), 359; Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England 1547-1603 (London:

MacMillan Education Ltd, 1990), 6.

3 _{Peter Marshall, ‘Introduction,’ in The Impact of the English Reformation, edited by Peter Marshall}

(London: Hodder Headline Group, 1997), 232.

4 _{Arnold Hunt, ‘Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement,’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern}

suggests that Protestantism may have taken hold either in the 1570s or under James I, due more to generational shifts than any immediate conversion.5 Christopher Haigh and John Bossy lean toward the 1570s as the beginning of the shift, because they see the death of medieval Catholicism in the 1560s and its rebirth as modern Catholicism with the advent of seminary priests and Jesuit missionaries.6 Nicholas Tyacke suggests that the majority altered with the generations: as the people who had known Catholicism in its pre-1534 manifestation died off in the early years of Elizabeth, the majority of the population became Protestant, in some form.7

All of these historians suggest not only different times for this change, but different reasons for it. This chapter will contribute to this scholarship by examining when the religious leaders of the English Church started to think of themselves as Protestant. This development is often lost in the debate about whether the

reformation in England was, as Scott Wenig phrases it, ‘a political event or a religious process’. Wenig is unique in his consideration of the role of ecclesiastical revolution in the movement that became the English Reformation.8 Many other historians consider the political, social, spiritual and economic factors that influenced the gradual acceptance of reformed religion in England, but few discuss the self- identity of the clergy who made up the new Church of England.

This seems a considerable oversight, considering the role of the clergy in late sixteenth-century England. These church leaders were different from the priests of late-medieval England, whose ‘decisive identity’, as David Aers and Sarah Beckwith phrased it, was based on their ability to convert bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood.9 Instead, sixteenth-century clerics were expected to be, as Jewel described them, ‘pastors, labourers and watchmen’, with direct influence on their dioceses, churches, and local government.10 They were expected to be preachers, who carefully and continuously presented their arguments to various segments of the population. Thus, when they developed a Protestant identity, it is very likely that

5 _{Susan Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University}

Press, 2002), 4, 5.

6

Christopher Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation,’ Past & Present no 93 (1981), 37.

7 _{Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism 1530-1700 (Manchester: Manchester University}

Press, 2001), 54.

8 _{Scott Wenig, Straightening the Altars (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1.}

9 _{David Aers and Sarah Beckwith, ‘The Eucharist,’ in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and}

Renaissance in Literary History, edited by Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 157.

10_{John Ayre, ed, The Works of John Jewel vol 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1835),}

their congregations were affected. If so, the 1560s saw the beginning of the trend toward confessionalization, not the later years of Elizabeth’s reign.

These later years still receive most of the attention in Elizabethan studies. Often, the 1560s are forgotten. A good example of this can be found in Deborah Shuger’s Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance. She claims that she intends to study ‘the dominant culture of the period between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War, between…the consolidation of this dominant culture and its

dissolution’; in actuality, her focus is on the years between 1580 and 1630.11 No particular reason is given for this, other than that she considers these years to be the ‘central’ ones. Other historians provide a clearer reason for not considering the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign. D.M. Palliser, for example, considers the ‘Elizabethan Age’ to begin with the 1570s, after the Elizabethan government faced the challenge of the arrival of Mary, Queen of Scots. Until that point, he claims that the

Elizabethan government was focused on stability, making the 1560s essentially nothing but a case study in survival. He also considers early Elizabethan religion to be completely unsettled, because theological positions were ‘not yet sharply or irrevocably defined’ until after the 1570s.12

This dismissal of the 1560s reflects revisionist historiography, which denies that there was any immediate response to the Elizabethan settlement. Christopher Haigh suggested that during the ‘transitional period’ of the 1560s and 1570s, ‘the Church of England was not immediately protestantized in its clergy, furnishings, services [or] the beliefs of its people’.13

Similarly, Eamon Duffy argued that the 1560s saw just the ‘stripping away of familiar and beloved observances, the

destruction of a vast and resonant world of symbols’, while the new system of ritual and faith did not take hold until the 1570s and 1580s. Then, according to Duffy, the constant repetition of Cranmer’s prayer book and the new Book of Homilies started having an effect, as did Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Duffy included Jewel’s

Apology in the list of works that helped develop a new national identity for the

members of the English Church, but he did not consider the wider controversy or

11 _{Deborah Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California}

Press, 1990), 4.

12

D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England Under the Later Tudors, second ed (London: Longman Group UK Ltd, 1992), 23; D. M. Palliser, ‘Popular Reactions to the Reformation During the Years of Uncertainty,’ in The English Reformation Revised, edited by Christopher Haigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 94.

13

Christopher Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation,’ in The English Reformation Revised, edited by Christopher Haigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 178.

place the Apology itself in its historical context.14 Thus, by not studying the 1560s in depth, the development of a Protestant identity and a national church that can be traced through the Jewel-Harding controversy is overlooked.

Further examination into the 1560s would assist in understanding Elizabeth’s motivations in the first years of her reign. Norman L. Jones thought that she wanted a via media, an idea that can be supported by the work of A.G. Dickens and John Tonkin. They said that a via media meant that ‘an independent national church, reformed by royal authority along scriptural lines yet retaining an organic connection with the church universal, [could] steer a middle course between stiff Romanist reaction and presumptuous Protestant innovation’.15 This shows that Dickens and Tonkin saw the connection between catholicity and nationality as an attempt to reconcile a paradox, not as a deliberate strategy. To Dickens and Tonkin, the Elizabethan settlement was still an attempt to compromise. D.M. Palliser presented an idea similar to this when he said that the Elizabethan government was trying to avoid antagonizing Catholic subjects during the 1560s, which resulted in the formation of a via media.16

In contrast, Nicholas Tyacke and Anthony Milton suggest that the via media of the Church of England was actually created in the nineteenth century, and

projected backward onto the early Elizabethan church.17 This interpretation seems much more likely when taking the Jewel-Harding controversy into consideration, because the evidence does not support the idea that either side was looking for compromise. Instead, as we have seen in the first three chapters, the writers of both sides were actually concerned with maintaining moderation. They took a deliberate stance that they considered ‘right’, by which they meant properly balanced in opposition to the extremists that they saw as ‘wrong’. It is notable that not only did the writers of the controversy have an adversarial mentality that would not consider a compromise in religion, but that mentality also had royal support. Much of Jewel’s work against the Roman Church was commissioned by Elizabeth’s government, and other church leaders were openly involved in the debate and supported by crown

14 _{Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 second ed}

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 591, 593.

15

Norman L. Jones, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 12; A.G. Dickens and John Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Ltd, 1985), 60.

16 _{Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth, 23.} 17

Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism 1530-1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 176; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought: 1600-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1.

authority. For example, as Brett Usher suggests, Cecil supported Jewel and Nowell in their clerical roles from the beginning, because they had ‘in their own way

contributed toward the preservation of an English church’ while in exile, specifically during the troubles in Frankfurt.18

This developed into a more direct collaboration between Jewel, Elizabeth, and Cecil in 1561, after Nicholas Throckmorton, the ambassador to France, sent a letter to Elizabeth warning her of the negative French Protestant reaction to her possible acceptance of the papal nuncio. She insisted that she had no intention of changing the country’s Protestant religion, and seemed to see the necessity of ensuring that the wider Protestant community was aware of that. Thus, a committee made up of Matthew Parker, Robert Horne, William Cecil, Nicholas Bacon, Thomas Young and John Jewel met at Greenwich ‘by the queen’s command’ to determine how to proceed.

Out of this meeting arose the Epistola, a letter written by Jewel as if by an ordinary Englishman and sent to Throckmorton to be printed and distributed in Paris. John Booty argues that it was a stopgap response, to stave off rumours until the

Apology could be printed and distributed, and it does present essentially the same

arguments as the Apology, albeit in a much shorter form.19 Jewel, as ‘Nicholas N.’, assured the fictional ‘John N.’ of the pure doctrine, peaceful order, and legitimately ordained clergy that could be found in the Church of England. He connected the English Church to the primitive church, and acknowledged that while there was some small diversity in matters of ceremony, the people were still in unity about essential matters of the true faith, such as the scriptures, the sacraments and the means of salvation. Also, they no longer allowed certain aspects of false religion, such as monks and monasteries, idolatry, transubstantiation and the saints.20

This suggests that Elizabeth may have had a different agenda in mind than compromise. While it cannot be denied that Elizabeth did not make clear statements of her intent for religion at the beginning of her reign, which caused some

uncertainty about the form English religion would take, she did allow the promotion of the catholicity of the English Church and its separation from the Roman Church

18

Brett Usher, William Cecil and Episcopacy, 1559-1577 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 28.

19

John Booty, John Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England (London: S.P.C.K., 1963), 37, 40, 42-45. See also Joseph Stevenson, ed, The Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, 1558-1589 vol. 4: 1561-1562 (London: Longman, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1866), 103.

20

The original document can be found the British Library: Anonymous, Epistola cuiusdam Angli qua afferitur consensus verae religionis doctrinae (Paris, 1561). An English translation can be found in John Booty’s John Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England, 210-225.

very soon after her accession. As Marvin O’Connell pointed out, that doctrinal separation from the Roman Church clarified the issue, so ‘the term via media sometimes used to describe it – as though it was a unique middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism – does not really apply’.21 This chapter will show that this doctrinal separation quickly led to a distinct identity for the Church of England.

Authority and Catholicity

One of the major themes of Reformation studies is the quest for legitimate authority. This chapter will look at this quest from the perspective of catholicity, rather than politics or church structure. Thus, it will depart from the discussion of one aspect of authority that is frequently found in studies of church supremacy and the interpretation of scriptures: the use of patristic sources in sixteenth-century