John Jewel

Clergyman, born in Berrynarbor, Devon, SW England, UK. He studied at Oxford, and absorbed reformed doctrines early in his career. On Mary I's accession he travelled through Europe, staying in Frankfurt, Zürich, Strasbourg, and Padua, returning to England when Elizabeth I became queen. He was appointed Bishop of Salisbury in 1560, and published his famous Apologia pro ecclesiae Anglicanae (Apologia for the English Church) in 1562.

John Jewel (sometimes spelled Jewell) (May 24, 1522 - September 23, 1571), bishop of Salisbury, son of John Jewel of Buden, Devon, 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;

Under Elizabeth's succession he returned to England, and made earnest efforts to secure what would now be called a low-church settlement of religion; His congé d'élire as bishop of Salisbury had been made out on July 27, but he was not consecrated until January 21, 1560.

He now constituted himself the literary apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement. He had on November 26, 1559, in a sermon at St Paul's Cross, challenged all comers to prove the Roman case out of the Scriptures, or the councils or Fathers for the first six hundred years after Christ. The chief result was Jewel's Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae, published in 1562, which in Bishop Creighton's words is the first methodical statement of the position of the Church of England against the Church of Rome, and forms the groundwork of all subsequent controversy.

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 his Zwinglian simplicity did not satisfy his unpromoted brethren, and Jewel had to refuse admission to a benefice to his friend Lawrence Humphrey, who would not wear a surplice.

He was consulted a good deal by the government on such questions as England's attitude towards the Council of Trent, and political considerations made him more and more hostile to Puritan demands with which he had previously sympathized. Thomas Hooker, who speaks of Jewel as the "worthiest divine that Christendom bath bred for some hundreds of years," was one of the boys whom Jewel prepared in his house for the university; and his Ecclesiastical Polity owes much to Jewel's training.

Jewel's works were published in a folio in 1609 under the direction of Bancroft, who ordered the Apology to be placed in churches, in some of which it may still be seen chained to the lectern; by Bishop Creighton).

A house at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury named for him.