JEWEL, JOHN

Bishop of Salisbury and first official apologist of the new Elizabethan Church; b. Buden, Devonshire, England, May 24, 1522; d. Monkton Fairleigh, near Wiltshire, Sept. 23, 1571. After being educated at Merton and Corpus Christi Colleges, Oxford, he became a fellow of Corpus Christi in 1542, and a renowned teacher. With Mary Tudor's accession (1553), those suspected of Protestantism were dismissed from Oxford. Jewel lost his fellowship. Seeking refuge in Frankfort, he supported John Foxe in his controversy with John Knox. Later he met Peter Martyr Vermigli in Strasbourg, and together they visited Zurich and Padua. Their letters, written between 1553 and 1555, provide a valuable source of historical data. Upon the accession of Elizabeth I (1558), Jewel returned to England and was sent in 1559 as disputant to refute the Roman Catholics at the Conference of Westminster. On Jan. 21, 1560 he was consecrated bishop of Salisbury, and he soon challenged the Catholics on three different occasions to show that certain Catholic practices could be proved by Scripture or the writings of the Fathers. His Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562), the first official pronouncement of the position of the Church of England, was answered by Thomas Harding (1516–72), a Louvain exile and former chaplain of Bishop Stephen Gardiner. For three years a bitter controversy continued between the students at Louvain and the Protestant divines in England, during which theological works gave way to political tracts. Jewel's writings were published in 1609 by Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, and later edited by J. Ayre (4 v. London 1845–50).

Bibliography: j. jewel, An Apology of the Church of England, tr. j. e. booty (Ithaca, N.Y. 1963). w. m. southgate, John Jewel and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority (Cambridge, Mass.1962). m. creighton, The Dictionary of National Biography from the Earliest Times to 1900 10:815–819. f. l. cross, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church 726. m. schmidt, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3:663–664.

[m. a. frawley]