mber 1616, wrote at Venice his _Consilium profectionis_, and then
went by way of Switzerland, Heidelberg and Rotterdam to England, where
he arrived in December. He was welcomed by the king and the Anglican
clergy with great respect, was received into the Church of England in St
Paul's cathedral, and was appointed master of the Savoy (1618) and dean
of Windsor (1619); he subsequently presented himself to the living of
West Ilsley, Berkshire. Contemporary writers give no pleasant account of
him, describing him as fat, irascible, pretentious and very avaricious;
but his ability was undoubted, and in the theological controversies of
the time he soon took a foremost place. His published attacks on the
papacy succeeded each other in rapid succession: the _Papatus Romanus_,
issued anonymously (London, 1617; Frankfort, 1618), the _Scogli del
naufragio Christiano_, written in Switzerland (London, (?) 1618), of
which English, French and German translations also appeared, and a
_Sermon preached in Italian, &c._, before the king. But his principal
work was the _De republica ecclesiastica_, of which the first
part--after revision by Anglican theologians--was published under royal
patronage in London (1617), in which he set forth with a great display
of erudition his theory of the church. In the main it is an elaborate
treatise on the historic organization of the church, its principal note
being its insistence on the divine prerogatives of the Catholic
episcopate as against the encroachments of the papal monarchy. In 1619
Dominis published in London, with a dedication to James I., Paolo
Sarpi's _Historia del Concilio Tridentino_, the MS. of which he had
brought with him from Venice. It is characteristic of the man that he
refused to hand over to Sarpi a penny of the money present given to him
by the king as a reward for this work.

Three years later the ex-archbishop was back again in Rome, doing
penance for his heresies in St Peter's with a cord round his neck. The
reasons for this sudden revolution in his opinions, which caused grave
scandal in England, have been much debated; it is probably no libel on
his memory, however, to say that they were connected with the hopes
raised by the elevation of his kinsman, Alessandro Ludovisi, to the
papal throne as Gregory XV. (1621). It is said that he was enticed back
to Rome by the promise of pardon and rich preferment. If so, he was
doomed to bitter disappointment. He had barely time to publ