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 are quite incompatible,” said the Envoy.

Meantime the Advocate, much distressed at the animosity of England bursting forth so violently on occasion of the appointment of a divinity professor at Leyden, and at the very instant too when all the acuteness of his intellect was taxed to keep on good or even safe terms with France, did his best to stem these opposing currents.  His private letters to his old and confidential friend, Noel de Carom, States’ ambassador in London, reveal the perplexities of his soul and the upright patriotism by which he was guided in these gathering storms.  And this correspondence, as well as that maintained by him at a little later period with the successor of Aerssens at Paris, will be seen subsequently to have had a direct and most important bearing upon the policy of the Republic and upon his own fate.  It is necessary therefore that the reader, interested in these complicated affairs which were soon to bring on a sanguinary war on a scale even vaster than the one which had been temporarily suspended, should give close attention to papers never before exhumed from the musty sepulchre of national archives, although constantly alluded to in the records of important state trials.  It is strange enough to observe the apparent triviality of the circumstances out of which gravest events seem to follow.  But the circumstances were in reality threads of iron which led down to the very foundations of the earth.