It is necessary to hold fast this single clue to the crooked and amazing entanglements of the policy of James.  The insolence, the meanness, and the prevarications of this royal toad-eater are only thus explained.

Yet Philip III. declared on his death-bed that he had never had a serious intention of bestowing his daughter on the Prince.

The vanity and the hatreds of theology furnished the chief additional material in the policy of James towards the Provinces.  The diplomacy of his reign so far as the Republic was concerned is often a mere mass of controversial divinity, and gloomy enough of its kind.  Exactly at this moment Conrad Vorstius had been called by the University of Leyden to the professorship vacant by the death of Arminius, and the wrath of Peter Plancius and the whole orthodox party knew no bounds.  Born in Cologne, Vorstius had been a lecturer in Geneva, and beloved by Beza.  He had written a book against the Jesuit Belarmino, which he had dedicated to the States-General.  But he was now accused of Arminianism, Socianism, Pelagianism, Atheism—­one knew not what.  He defended himself in writing against these various charges, and declared himself a believer in the Trinity, in the Divinity of Christ, in the Atonement.  But he had written a book on the Nature of God, and the wrath of Gomarus and Plancius and Bogerman was as nothing to the ire of James when that treatise was one day handed to him on returning from hunting.  He had scarcely looked into it before he was horror-struck, and instantly wrote to Sir Ralph Winwood, his ambassador at the Hague, ordering him to insist that this blasphemous monster should at once be removed from the country.  Who but James knew anything of the Nature of God, for had he not written a work in Latin explaining it all, so that humbler beings might read and be instructed.

Sir Ralph accordingly delivered a long sermon to the States on the brief supplied by his Majesty, told them that to have Vorstius as successor to Arminius was to fall out of the frying-pan into the fire, and handed them a “catalogue” prepared by the King of the blasphemies, heresies, and atheisms of the Professor.  “Notwithstanding that the man in full assembly of the States of Holland,” said the Ambassador with headlong and confused rhetoric, “had found the means to palliate and plaster the dung of his heresies, and thus to dazzle the eyes of good people,” yet it was necessary to protest most vigorously against such an appointment, and to advise that “his works should be publicly burned in the open places of all the cities.”

The Professor never was admitted to perform his functions of theology, but he remained at Leyden, so Winwood complained, “honoured, recognized as a singularity and ornament to the Academy in place of the late Joseph Scaliger.”—­“The friendship of the King and the heresy of Vorstius arc quite incompatible,” said the Envoy.