John Jewel (alias Jewell) (24 May 1522 – 23 September 1571) of Devon, England was Bishop of Salisbury from 1559 to 1571.
Life
He was the youngest son of John Jewel of Bowden in the parish of Berry Narbor in Devon, by his wife Alice Bellamye, daughter of Richard Bellamye. He was educated under his uncle John Bellamy, rector of Hampton, and other private tutors until his matriculation at Merton College, Oxford, in July 1535.
There he was taught by John Parkhurst, afterwards bishop of Norwich; but on 19 August 1539 he was elected scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He graduated BA in 1540 and MA in 1545, having been elected fellow of his college in 1542.
He made some mark as a teacher at Oxford, and became after 1547 one of the chief disciples of Pietro Martire Vermigli, known in England as Peter Martyr. He graduated BD in 1552, and was made vicar of Sunningwell to the south of Oxford, and public orator of the university, in which capacity he had to compose a congratulatory epistle to Mary on her accession.
In April 1554 he acted as notary to Cranmer and Ridley at their disputation, but in the autumn he signed a series of Catholic articles. He was, nevertheless, suspected, fled to London, and thence to Frankfort, which he reached in March 1555. There he sided with Coxe against Knox, but soon joined Martyr at Strasbourg, accompanied him to Zürich, and then paid a visit to Padua.
Reign of Queen Elizabeth I
Upon Elizabeth's succession he returned to England, and made earnest efforts to secure what would now be called the Elizabethan Settlement. His attitude was strongly distinguishable from that of the Elizabethan Puritans, as he gradually formulated it under the stress of office and responsibility. In his last sermon his strongly argued against the Puritan faction as worse than the Roman Catholic disputants he was opposing.
He was one of the disputants selected to confute the "Romanists" (the Roman Catholics) at the Westminster Conference of 1559 after Easter 1559; he was selected preacher at St Paul's Cross in London on 15 June; and in the autumn was engaged as one of the royal visitors of the western counties. His appointment as Bishop of Salisbury had been made out on 27 July, but he was not consecrated until 21 January 1560.
He now constituted himself the literary defender of the Elizabethan Settlement. He had on 26 November 1559, in a sermon at St Paul's Cross, challenged all comers to prove the Roman Catholic case out of the Scriptures, or the councils or Fathers of the first six hundred years after Christ. He repeated his challenge in 1560, and Dr. Henry Cole, priest, took it up. The 'Great Controversy' that followed would give rise to sixty-four polemical exchanges and it set the tone and content of much subsequent debate between English Reformers and Roman Catholic writers. One of the chief result was Jewel's Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae (the Apology of the Anglican Church), published in 1562, which in Bishop Mandell Creighton's words is the first methodical statement of the position of the Church of England against the Roman Catholic Church, and forms the groundwork of all subsequent controversy. Jewel continued to present the case for the Church of England from public pulpits, particularly Paul's Cross, in the year's following 'the Challenge sermon'.
A translation of the Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae into English by Anne Bacon to reach a wider audience and was a significant step in the intellectual justification of the Church of England.
Later years
A more formidable antagonist than Cole now entered the lists in the person of Thomas Harding, an Oxford contemporary whom Jewel had deprived of his prebend in Salisbury Cathedral for recusancy. He published an elaborate and bitter Answer in 1564, to which Jewel issued a "Reply" in 1565. Harding followed with a Confutation, and Jewel with a Defence of the Apology in 1566 and 1567; the combatants ranged over the whole field of the Anglo-Roman controversy, and Jewel's theology was officially enjoined upon the Church by Archbishop Bancroft in the reign of James I.
Latterly Jewel had been confronted with criticism from a different quarter. The arguments that had weaned him from the Puritan Zwinglian worldviews did not satisfy his some English nonconformists, and Jewel had to refuse admission to a benefice to his friend Lawrence Humphrey, who would not wear a surplice.