William Ames - Ministry in Holland

Ministry in Holland

He left Cambridge, and was offered a lecturer position at Colchester, but George Abbot, the Bishop of London, went against the wishes of the local corporation, and refused to grant institution and induction. Similar rebuffs awaited him elsewhere, and he travelled with Robert Parker to the Netherlands, helped by English merchants who wished him to controvert the supporters of the English church in Leiden. At Rotterdam, he debated with Grevinchovius (Nicholas Grevinckhoven, d. 1632), minister of the Arminian party, with reasoning from Philippians ii. 13, "It is God that worketh in us both to will and to do." This dispute made his name in the Netherlands.

Subsequently Ames entered into a controversy in print with Grevinchovius on universal redemption and election, and cognate problems. He brought together all he had maintained in his Coronis ad Collationem Hagiensem (A Finishing Touch to the Hague Conference)— his major book. At Leiden, Ames became intimate with Hugh Goodyear, pastor of the English church there. He was sent for to The Hague by Sir Horatio Vere, the English governor of Brill, who appointed him a minister in the army of the states-general, and of the English soldiers in their service. He married a daughter of Daniel Burgess, who was Vere's chaplain, and, on his father-in-law's return to England, succeeded to his place.

It was at this time he began his controversy with Simon Episcopius, who, in attacking the Coronis, railed against the author as having been "a disturber of the public peace in his native country, so that the English magistrates had banished him thence; and now, by his late printed Coronis, he was raising new disturbances in the peaceable Netherlands." Episcopius was rebutted by Goodyear, who became a defender of Ames against the Remonstrants, and later provided Nethenus with material for his biography of Ames.

The Coronis had been primarily prepared for the Synod of Dort, which sat from 13 November 1618 until 9 May 1619. At this synod the position of Ames was anomalous. The High Church party in England had induced Vere to dismiss him from the chaplaincy; but he was still held in reverence. It was arranged he should attend the synod, and he was retained by the Calvinist party at four florins a day to watch the proceedings. He was adviser to Johannes Bogerman, the synod's President.