George Bancroft, History of the Colonization of the United States, Vol. 1, 17th edition.

[294] With the whole force of English diplo-

Chap. VIII.} 1603.

macy, he suggested the propriety of burning an Arminian professor of Holland, whose heresies he refuted in a harmless tract. Once he indulged his vanity in a public discussion, and, when the argument was over, procured himself the gratification of burning his opponent at the stake. His mind had been early imbued with the doctrines of Calvinism; but he loved arbitrary power better than the tenets of Knox; and as the Arminians in England favored royalty, King James became an Arminian. He always loved flattery and ease; and had no fixed principles of conduct or belief.

Such was the king of England, at a period when the limits of royal authority were not as yet clearly defined. Such was the man to whose decision the Puritans must refer their claims. He had called the church of Scotland the sincerest kirk of the world; he had censured the service of England as ‘an evil said mass.’ Would he retain for Puritans the favor which he had promised?

The English hierarchy had feared, in the new monarch, the approach of a ‘Scottish mist;’ but the borders of Scotland were hardly passed, before James began to identify the interests of the English church with those of his prerogative. ‘No bishop, no king,’ was a maxim often in his mouth. Whitgift was aware that the Puritans were too numerous to be borne down; ‘I have not been greatly quiet in mind,’ said the disappointed archbishop, ‘the vipers are so many.’ But James was not as yet fully conscious of their strength. While he was in his progress to London, more than seven hundred of them presented the ‘millenary petition’ for a redress of ecclesiastical