THE CHARACTER AND CONDUCT OF JAMES I. 273 



should have secretly entered into a political union with the pope ; 

 for though there was religious intolerance on hoth sides, yet that 

 was not allowed to present a fatal obstacle to a good understanding 

 between them, when they found their interests, in so many impor- 

 tant respects, to be the same. 



The following statement, however, of Burnett, has exposed him 

 to a storm of invective from his reviewer: — "A letter* was also 

 written to the pope, by him, giving assurance of this, which, when 

 it came to be published, by Bellarmine, upon the prosecution of the 

 recusants, after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, Balmerinock 

 did affirm that he, out of zeal to the king's service, got his hand to 

 it, having put it into a bundle of papers that were signed in course, 

 without the king's knowing any thing of it. Yet when that dis- 

 covery drew no other severity but the turning him out of office, and 

 the passing a sentence condemning him to die for it, which was pre- 

 sently pardoned (and he was, after a short confinement, restored to 

 his liberty), all men believed that the pretended confession of the 

 secretary was only collusion to lay the jealousy of the king's fa- 

 vouring popery, which still hung on him, notwithstanding his writ- 

 ing on the Revelations,t and his affecting to enter, on all occasions, 

 into controversy, asserting in his book that the pope was antichrist.ij: 

 An evil concupiscence of theological controversy will ultimately in- 

 volve the peace and respectability of the individual who indulges in 

 it. If James, in one of his polemical treatises, had not said what 



• History of his own Time, vol. i., p. 14. Oxford Edition. 



+ In reference to this composition, Boderie the French Ambassador says, 

 that it was " le plus fou, s'il m'est loisible d'ainsi parler, et le plus pernicieux 

 que se soil jamais fait sur tel suject." — t. iv. p. 302. Scaliger remarks, that 

 Calvin was wise, because he did not write upon the Revelation. " Calvinus 

 sapuit, quia non scripsit in Apocalypsin." But it was the spirit of James to 

 deem himself wiser than all the world besides, and therefore he so often 

 made himself the laughing-stock of Europe. " La presumption seule," says 

 Boderie, " qu'il h. de syavoir plus en the'ologie que tons les docteurs du 

 monde, en est I'unique cause." Ibid iv. p. 319. A young Prince, for James 

 had not then attained his twentieth year, writing a Latin commentary on the 

 Apocalypse, was an undertaking so preposterously strange and even ludi- 

 crous, that we might almost anticipate the reply of his illustrious tutor 

 Buchanan when reproached for making his Sovereign a pedant—" that it was 

 the best he could make of him." 



X In his eager desire to purify the theology of Rome, lest his own should 

 be brought under a suspicion of orthodoxy, he thought it proper to sof- 

 ten down his interpretation by saying, that the Pope was Antichrist only 

 while he clothed himself with temporal authority in other states, besides his 



