James's methods of achieving ends in themselves honourable and profitable were indeed of a kind which has made posterity unjust to his real merits. The circumstances in which he passed his youth developed in him a natural tendency to craft. He boasted indeed of his "king-craft" and probably believed that he owed it to his studies. But it was in reality the resource of the weak, the art of playing off one possible enemy against another by trickery, and so deceiving all. The marquis de Fontenay, the French ambassador, who saw him in the early part of his reign, speaks of him as cowed by the violence about him. It is certain that James was most unscrupulous in making promises which he never meant to keep, and the terror in which he passed his youth sufficiently explains his preference for guile. He would make promises to everybody, as when he wrote to the pope in 1584 more than hinting that he would be a good Roman Catholic if helped in his need. His very natural desire to escape from the poverty and insecurity of Scotland to the opulent English throne not only kept him busy in intrigues to placate the Roman Catholics or anybody else who could help or hinder him, but led him to behave basely in regard to the execution of his mother in 1587. He blustered to give himself an air of courage, but took good care to do nothing to offend Elizabeth. When the time came for fulfilling his promises and half-promises, he was not able, even if he had been willing, to keep his word to everybody. The methods which had helped him to success in Scotland did him harm in England, where his reign prepared the way for the great civil war. In his southern kingdom his failure was in fact complete. Although England accepted him as the alternative to civil war, and although he was received and surrounded with fulsome flattery, he did not win the respect of his English subjects. His undignified personal appearance was against him, and so were his garrulity, his Scottish accent, his slovenliness and his toleration of disorders in his court, but, above all, his favour for handsome male favourites, whom he loaded with gifts and caressed with demonstrations of affection which laid him open to vile suspicions. In ecclesiastical matters he offended many, who contrasted his severity and rudeness to the Puritan divines at the Hampton Court conference (1604) with his politeness to the Roman Catholics, whom he, however, worried by fits and starts. In a country where the authority of the state had been firmly established and the problem was how to keep it from degenerating into the mere instrument of a king's passions, his insistence on the doctrine of divine right aroused distrust and hostility. In itself, and in its origin, the doctrine was nothing more than a necessary assertion of the independence of the state in face of the "Hildebrandism" of Rome and Geneva alike. But when Englishmen were told that the king alone had