Dominis, MARCO ANTONIO DE

Dominis, MARCO ANTONIO DE, an ecclesiastic whose career was both singular and chequered. He was born in 1566 in the Dalmatian island of Arbe, and was carefully educated by the Jesuits. From Bishop of Segni he had become Archbishop of Spalatro, when getting involved in the great quarrel between the papacy and the Republic of Venice, he found it expedient to resign his see. His reasons he gave in his Consilium Profectionis (1616). In 1616 he came to England, where he was hospitably received, and next year was by James I. appointed Dean of Windsor and Master of the Savoy. Here in 1617 he published the first part of his De Republica Ecclesiastica, a work in which he endeavoured to show that the pope had no supremacy over other bishops, but was only primus inter pares. In 1619 he published without authority Sarpi's famous History of the Council of Trent. His enemy Paul V. died in 1620, and was succeeded by Gregory XV., a relative and fellow-countryman of De Dominis, who moreover began to find himself unpopular from his avarice, his pretentiousness, and his corpulence, and from interest, much more than conscience, began to intrigue with Rome for a return to the bosom of the church. These negotiations had to be carefully kept secret from the king, but at length in the January of 1622 De Dominis wrote to James expressing his intention to leave England. The king was indignant, and when the negotiations of the ecclesiastics whom he sent to reason with him failed, De Dominis was commanded to leave the kingdom within twenty days. While waiting at Brussels for the pope's permission to go to Rome, he published his Consilium Reditus, in which he frankly gave the lie to every statement in his former tract, and denounced the Church of England as a wretched schism. His tract was replied to by Crakenthorpe in his Defensio Ecclesiae Anglicanæ. De Dominis now went on to Rome, but was at once seized by the Inquisition, and flung into prison, where he soon died in 1624. Being subsequently condemned as a heretic, his body was exhumed and burned. While yet a professor of Mathematics at Padua, De Dominis wrote his De Radiis Visus et Lucis in Vitris Perspectivis et Iradic (Venice, 1611). He was the first to point out that in the phenomenon of the rainbow the light undergoes in each rain-drop two refractions and an intermediate reflection.