The affairs of religion and politics in the reign of James I., as in the preceding one of Elizabeth,[A] were identified together; nor yet have the same causes in Europe ceased to act, however changed or modified.  The government of James was imperfectly established while his subjects were wrestling with two great factions to obtain the predominance.  The Catholics were disputing his title to the crown, which they aimed to carry into the family of Spain, and had even fixed on Arabella Stuart, to marry her to a Prince of Parma; and the Puritans would have abolished even sovereignty itself; these parties indeed were not able to take the field, but all felt equally powerful with the pen.  Hence an age of doctrines.  When a religious body has grown into power, it changes itself into a political one; the chiefs are flattered by their strength and stimulated by their ambition; but a powerful body in the State cannot remain stationary, and a divided empire it disdains.  Religious controversies have therefore been usually coverings to mask the political designs of the heads of parties.

We smile at James the First threatening the States-general by the English Ambassador about Vorstius, a Dutch professor, who had espoused the doctrines of Arminius, and had also vented some metaphysical notions of his own respecting the occult nature of the Divinity.  He was the head of the Remonstrants, who were at open war with the party called the Contra-Remonstrants.  The ostensible subjects were religious doctrines, but the concealed one was a struggle between Pensionary Barnevelt, aided by the French interest, and the Prince of Orange, supported by the English; even to our own days the same opposite interests existed, and betrayed the Republic, although religious doctrines had ceased to be the pretext.[B]

[Footnote A:  I have more largely entered into the history of the party who attempted to subvert the government in the reign of Elizabeth, and who published their works under the assumed name of Martin Mar-prelate, than had hitherto been done.  In our domestic annals that event and those personages are of some importance and curiosity; but were imperfectly known to the popular writers of our history.—­See “Quarrels of Authors,” p. 296, et seq.]

[Footnote B:  Pensionary Barnevelt, in his seventy-second year, was at length brought to the block.  Diodati, a divine of Geneva, made a miserable pun the occasion; he said that “the Canons of the Synod of Dort had taken off the head of the advocate of Holland.”  This pun, says Brandt in his curious “History of the Reformation,” is very injurious to the Synod, since it intimates that the Church loves blood.  It never entered into the mind of these divines that Barnevelt fell, not by the Synod, but by the Orange and English party prevailing against the French.  Lord Hardwicke, a statesman and a man of letters, deeply conversant with secret and public history, is a more able judge than the ecclesiastical historian or the Swiss divine, who could see nothing in the Synod of Dort but what appeared in it.  It is in Lord Hardwicke’s preface to Sir Dudley Carleton’s “Letters” that his lordship has made this important discovery.]