ne of that time was concerning the rights of
popes over kings--a question which, having been intensified by
the Reformation, naturally came to a crisis after the Gunpowder
Plot. James I. then instituted an oath of allegiance as a test of
Catholic loyalty, and many Catholics took the oath without
scruple, including the Archpriest Blackwell. Cardinal Bellarmine
thereupon wrote a letter of rebuke to the latter, and Pope Paul
V. sent a brief forbidding Catholics either to take the oath or
to attend Protestant churches (October 1606). But it is
remarkable that, so little did the Catholics believe in the
authenticity of this brief, another--and an angry one--had to
come from Rome the following September, to confirm and enforce
it. King James very fairly took umbrage at the action and claims
of the Pope, and spent six days in making notes which he wished
the Bishop of Winchester to use in a reply to the Pope and the
Cardinal. But when the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of
Ely saw the King's notes, they thought them answer enough, and so
James's _Apology for the Oath of Allegiance_ came to light, but
without his name, the author, among other reasons, deeming it
beneath his dignity to contend in argument with a cardinal. As
the Cardinal responded, the King took a stronger measure, and
under his own name wrote, in a single week, his _Premonition to
all most Mighty Monarch_, wherein he exposed with great force the
danger to all states from the pretensions of the Papacy.
Thereupon, at Paul's invitation, Suarez penned that vast folio
(778 pp.), the _Defensio Catholicae Fidei contra Anglicanae Sectae
Errores_ (1613), as a counterblast to James's _Apology_.
Considering the subject, it was certainly written with singular
moderation; and James would have done better to have left the
book to the natural penalty of its immense bulk. As it was, he
ordered it to be burnt at London, and at Oxford and Cambridge;
forbade his subjects to read it, under severe penalties; and
wrote to Philip III. of Spain to complain of his Jesuit subject.
But Philip, of course, only expressed his sympathy with Suarez,
and exhorted James to return to the Faith. The Parlement of Paris
also consigned the book to the flames in 1614, as it had a few
years before Bellarmine's _Tractatus de Potestate summi
Pontificis in Temporalibus_, in which the same high pretensions
were claimed for the Pope as were claimed by Suarez.

The question at issue remains, of c