Henry of France, who rarely concealed his contempt for Master Jacques, as he called him, said to the English ambassador, on receiving from him one of the King’s books, and being asked what he thought of it—­“It is not the business of us kings to write, but to fight.  Everybody should mind his own business, but it is the vice of most men to wish to appear learned in matters of which they are ignorant.”

The flatterers of James found their account in pandering to his sacerdotal and royal vanity.  “I have always believed,” said the Lord Chancellor, after hearing the King argue with and browbeat a Presbyterian deputation, “that the high-priesthood and royalty ought to be united, but I never witnessed the actual junction till now, after hearing the learned discourse of your Majesty.”  Archbishop Whitgift, grovelling still lower, declared his conviction that James, in the observations he had deigned to make, had been directly inspired by the Holy Ghost.

Nothing could be more illogical and incoherent with each other than his theological and political opinions.  He imagined himself a defender of the Protestant faith, while hating Holland and fawning on the House of Austria.

In England he favoured Arminianism, because the Anglican Church recognized for its head the temporal chief of the State.  In Holland he vehemently denounced the Arminians, indecently persecuting their preachers and statesmen, who were contending for exactly the same principle—­the supremacy of State over Church.  He sentenced Bartholomew Legate to be burned alive in Smithfield as a blasphemous heretic, and did his best to compel the States of Holland to take the life of Professor Vorstius of Leyden.  He persecuted the Presbyterians in England as furiously as he defended them in Holland.  He drove Bradford and Carver into the New England wilderness, and applauded Gomarus and Walaeus and the other famous leaders of the Presbyterian party in the Netherlands with all his soul and strength.

He united with the French king in negotiations for Netherland independence, while denouncing the Provinces as guilty of criminal rebellion against their lawful sovereign.

“He pretends,” said Jeannin, “to assist in bringing about the peace, and nevertheless does his best openly to prevent it.”

Richardot declared that the firmness of the King of Spain proceeded entirely from reliance on the promise of James that there should be no acknowledgment in the treaty of the liberty of the States.  Henry wrote to Jeannin that he knew very well “what that was capable of, but that he should not be kept awake by anything he could do.”

As a king he spent his reign—­so much of it as could be spared from gourmandizing, drunkenness, dalliance with handsome minions of his own sex, and theological pursuits—­in rescuing the Crown from dependence on Parliament; in straining to the utmost the royal prerogative; in substituting proclamations for statutes; in doing everything in his power, in short, to smooth the path for his successor to the scaffold.  As father of a family he consecrated many years of his life to the wondrous delusion of the Spanish marriages.