Henry wrote to Jeannin that he knew very well "what that was capable of, but that he should not be kept awake by anything he could do." As a king he spent his reign--so much of it as could be spared from gourmandizing, drunkenness, dalliance with handsome minions of his own sex, and theological pursuits--in rescuing the Crown from dependence on Parliament; in straining to the utmost the royal prerogative; in substituting proclamations for statutes; in doing everything in his power, in short, to smooth the path for his successor to the scaffold.

As father of a family he consecrated many years of his life to the wondrous delusion of the Spanish marriages.
The Gunpowder Plot seemed to have inspired him with an insane desire for that alliance, and few things in history are more amazing than the persistency with which he pursued the scheme, until the pursuit became not only ridiculous, but impossible.
With such a man, frivolous, pedantic, conceited, and licentious, the earnest statesmen of Holland were forced into close alliance.

It is pathetic to see men like Barneveld and Hugo Grotius obliged, on great occasions of state, to use the language of respect and affection to one by whom they were hated, and whom they thoroughly despised.
But turning away from France, it was in vain for them to look for kings or men either among friends or foes.

In Germany religious dissensions were gradually ripening into open war, and it would be difficult to imagine a more hopelessly incompetent ruler than the man who was nominally chief of the Holy Roman Realm.

Yet the distracted Rudolph was quite as much an emperor as the chaos over which he was supposed to preside was an empire.