JEWEL, JOHN (1522-1571), English divine, bishop of Salisbury, son of John Jewel of Buden, Devonshire, was born on May 24, 1522, and educated at Merton college, Oxford. He became a fellow (1542) of Corpus Christi, made some mark as a teacher, and was after 1547 one of the chief disciples of Peter Martyr. He became public orator of the university, in which capacity he composed a congratulatory epistle to Mary on her accession. In 1554 he acted as notary to Cranmer and Ridley at their dis putation, but in the autumn he signed a series of Catholic articles. He was, nevertheless, suspected, fled to London, and thence to " Frankfort, where he sided with Coxe against Knox. He soon joined Martyr at Strasbourg, accompanied him to Zurich, and then paid a visit to Padua.
Under Elizabeth's succession he returned to England, and tried to secure what would now be called a low-church settlement of religion. Indeed, his attitude was hardly distinguishable from that of the Elizabethan Puritans, but he gradually modified it under the stress of office and responsibility. He was one of the disputants selected to confute the Romanists at the conference of Westminster after Easter 1559; he was select preacher at St. Paul's Cross on June 15, and in the autumn was engaged as one of the royal visitors of the western counties. In 156o he became bishop of Salisbury.
Jewel now constituted himself the literary apologist of the Elizabethan settlement. He had on Nov. 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. He repeated his challenge in 156o, and Dr. Henry Cole took it up. The chief result was
Jewel's Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562), which in Bishop Creighton's words is "the first methodical statement of the posi tion of the Church of England against the Church of Rome, and forms the groundwork of all subsequent controversy." Thomas Harding, an Oxford contemporary whom Jewel had deprived of his prebend in Salisbury Cathedral for recusancy, 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. He was consulted 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. He wrote an attack on Cartwright, which was published after his death by Whitgift. He died on Sept. 23, 1571, and was buried in Salisbury Cathedral.
Jewel's works were published in a folio in 5609 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 ; other editions appeared at Oxford (1848, 8 vols.) and Cambridge (Parker Soc., 4 vols.). See also Gough's Index to Parker Soc. Publ.; Strype's Works (General Index) ; Acts of the Privy Council; Calendars of Domestic and Spanish State Papers; Dixon's and Frere's Church Histories; and Dict. of Nat. Biography.