f 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. 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