"Jenkins’ basic thesis is that in Jewel’s mainly controversial and polemical works we have the public figure of the faithful and loyal bishop, but in his private correspondence, mainly with his Swiss reformer friends, we see a frustrated academic with distinct puritan leanings, bemoaning the lack of reforming progress in his native England. Jenkins terms Jewel as ‘an iconoclast in a prelate’s vestments’ and puts this observable dissonance down to the underlying tension in many of the English reformers—a pronounced Erastian worldview giving the godly prince, in this instance Elizabeth, sovereignty in both civil and ecclesiastical realms, yet solidly maintaining the traditional Protestant sola scriptura as the final arbiter in doctrinal authority. This would inevitably lead to the bloodshed of the Civil War in the next century, as the English church had no recourse after the monarch’s undisputed sovereignty."
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