Few things in history are more pitiable than the position of James in regard to Spain.  For seven long years he was as one entranced, the slave to one idea, a Spanish marriage for his son.  It was in vain that his counsellors argued, Parliament protested, allies implored.  Parliament was told that a royal family matter regarded himself alone, and that interference on their part was an impertinence.  Parliament’s duty was a simple one, to give him advice if he asked it, and money when he required it, without asking for reasons.  It was already a great concession that he should ask for it in person.  They had nothing to do with his affairs nor with general politics.  The mystery of government was a science beyond their reach, and with which they were not to meddle.  “Ne sutor ultra crepidam,” said the pedant.

Upon that one point his policy was made to turn.  Spain held him in the hollow of her hand.  The Infanta, with two million crowns in dowry, was promised, withheld, brought forward again like a puppet to please or irritate a froward child.  Gondemar, the Spanish ambassador, held him spellbound.  Did he falter in his opposition to the States—­did he cease to goad them for their policy in the duchies—­did he express sympathy with Bohemian Protestantism, or, as time went on, did he dare to lift a finger or touch his pocket in behalf of his daughter and the unlucky Elector-Palatine; did he, in short, move a step in the road which England had ever trod and was bound to tread—­the road of determined resistance to Spanish ambition—­instantaneously the Infanta withheld, and James was on his knees again.  A few years later, when the great Raleigh returned from his trans-Alantic expedition, Gondemar fiercely denounced him to the King as the worst enemy of Spain.  The usual threat was made, the wand was waved, and the noblest head in England fell upon the block, in pursuance of an obsolete sentence fourteen years old.

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.