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de gens doctes qui tous les jours s'assemblent devant le dit Roi, pou revoir et corriger les traductions qui en ont été faites."[1] Their method evidently was the same as that employed by the contemporary translators of the Bible. In 1612, the King gave a new turn to the discussion by the publication of A Declaration concerning the Proceedings with the States Generall, of the United Provinces of the Low Countreys, in the cause of D. Conradus Vorstius, an attack on the Dutch professor for his Arminian disbelief in the limited essence and complete foreknowledge of God. The main question was again taken up, however, in A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings, and the Independance of their Crownes, against an Oration of the Most Illustrious Card. of Perron, pronounced in the Chamber of the third Estate, Jan. 75, 1615. In the next year, all of these prose pieces, with six of the King's addresses in Parliament, were gathered together in chronological order in a single folio volume.
The almost complete oblivion of these tracts, in modern times, obscures somewhat their importance in the age when they were written. They were the defense of the established monarchical form of government, on the one hand against the Puritans who in Scotland and later in England sought to set up a religious commonwealth like that of Calvin at Geneva, and on the other hand against the pretensions of the Pope to temporal power. Like Hooker in the reign of Elizabeth, James bent his energies to meet these attacks; and however extreme his position, it was fundamentally in accord with what has remained the traditional English attitude. The theory of the divine right of kings was now first fully formulated; fantastic as it may seem to-day, it was the result merely of an effort to find for monarchy the same sanction as that asserted by its opponents, and the only one they were disposed to accept. Needless to say, if James could have conducted his government as skilfully as his arguments, such defense might not have been necessary.
In the partial list, already given, of writers whom re-
- ↑ Ambassades, Vol. IV, p. 323 (May 14, 1609).
