his wish to return to Rome. The king's anger was aroused when De Dominis announced his intention (16 January 1622), and Star-Chamber proceedings for illegal correspondence with Rome were threatened. Eventually he was allowed to depart, but his chests of hoarded money were seized by the king's men, and only restored in response to a piteous personal appeal to the king. Return to Rome Once out of England, his attacks upon the English Church were as violent as had been those on the Papacy, and in Sui Reditus ex Anglia Consilium (Paris, 1623) he recanted all he had written in his Consilium Profectionis (London, 1616), declaring that he had deliberately lied in all that he had said against Rome. After a stay of six months in Brussels he proceeded to Rome, where he lived on a pension assigned him by the Pope. On the death of Pope Gregory XV on 8 July 1623 the pension ceased, and irritation loosened his tongue. Coming into conflict with the Inquisition he was declared a relapsed heretic and was confined to the Castel Sant'Angelo. He there died a natural death in September 1624. Even his death did not end his trial. His case was continued after his death, and on 20 December 1624 judgment was pronounced over his corpse in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. His heresy was declared manifest, and by order of the Inquisition his body was taken from the coffin, dragged through the streets of Rome, and publicly burned in the Campo di Fiore together with his works, on 21 December 1624. By a strange irony, the publication of his Reditus consilium was subsequently forbidden in Venice because of its uncompromising advocacy of the supremacy of the Pope over the temporal powers. As a theologian and an ecclesiastic Dominis was thoroughly discredited; as a man of science he was more happy. Scientific work In 1611 he published, at Venice, a scientific work entitled: , in which, according to Isaac Newton, he was the first to develop the theory of the rainbow by drawing attention to the fact that in each raindrop the light undergoes two refractions and an intermediate reflection. His claim to that distinction is, however, disputed in favor of Descartes. In 1625 his work "Euripus, seu de fluxu et refluxu maris sententia" was published posthumously in Rome. It is an important source for the strange story of