He added that the time for action had not yet come, and that if movements were made before the Synod had finished its labours, “The Gomarists would say that they were all sold.”  He implored the government at Madrid to keep the whole matter for the present profoundly secret because “Prince Maurice and the Gomarists had the forces of the country at their disposition.”  In case the plot was sprung too suddenly therefore, he feared that with the assistance of England Maurice might, at the head of the Gomarists and the army, make himself sovereign of Holland and Duke of Cleve, while he and the rest of the Spanish partisans might be in prison with Barneveld for trying to accomplish what Barneveld had been trying to prevent.

The opinions and utterances of such a man as James I. would be of little worth to our history had he not happened to occupy the place he did.  But he was a leading actor in the mournful drama which filled up the whole period of the Twelve Years’ Truce.  His words had a direct influence on great events.  He was a man of unquestionable erudition, of powers of mind above the average, while the absolute deformity of his moral constitution made him incapable of thinking, feeling, or acting rightly on any vital subject, by any accident or on any occasion.  If there were one thing that he thoroughly hated in the world, it was the Reformed religion.  If in his thought there were one term of reproach more loathsome than another to be applied to a human creature, it was the word Puritan.  In the word was subversion of all established authority in Church and State—­revolution, republicanism, anarchy.  “There are degrees in Heaven,” he was wont to say, “there are degrees in Hell, there must be degrees on earth.”

He forbade the Calvinist Churches of Scotland to hold their customary Synod in 1610, passionately reviling them and their belief, and declaring “their aim to be nothing else than to deprive kings and princes of their sovereignty, and to reduce the whole world to a popular form of government where everybody would be master.”

When the Prince of Neuburg embraced Catholicism, thus complicating matters in the duchies and strengthening the hand of Spain and the Emperor in the debateable land, he seized the occasion to assure the agent of the Archduke in London, Councillor Boissetot, of his warm Catholic sympathies.  “They say that I am the greatest heretic in the world!” he exclaimed; “but I will never deny that the true religion is that of Rome even if corrupted.”  He expressed his belief in the real presence, and his surprise that the Roman Catholics did not take the chalice for the blood of Christ.  The English bishops, he averred, drew their consecration through the bishops in Mary Tudor’s time from the Pope.

As Philip ii., and Ferdinand ii. echoing the sentiments of his illustrious uncle, had both sworn they would rather reign in a wilderness than tolerate a single heretic in their dominions, so James had said “he would rather be a hermit in a forest than a king over such people as the pack of Puritans were who overruled the lower house.”