He was the son of Johannes (Jan) Vos, a
Protestant from the
Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the
Electorate of the Palatinate and briefly became pastor in the village near
Heidelberg where Gerardus (the
Latinized form of
Gerrit) was born, before friction with the strict
Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him to settle the following year at the
University of Leiden as student of
theology, and finally became pastor at Dordrecht, where he died in 1585. Here in Dordrecht the son received his education, until in 1595 he entered the University of Leiden, where he became the lifelong friend of
Hugo Grotius, and studied classics,
Hebrew, church history and theology. In 1600 he was made rector of the
Latin school in
Dordrecht, and devoted himself to
philology and historical theology. From 1614 to 1619 he was director of the theological college at
Leiden University. In the meantime, he was gaining a great reputation as a scholar, not only in the Netherlands, but also in
France and
England. But in spite of the moderation of his views and his abstention from controversy, he came under suspicion of heresy, and escaped expulsion from his office only by resignation (1619). The year before he had published his
Historia Pelagiana, a history of the
Pelagian controversies; at the time it was considered by some to favour the views of the
Arminians or
Remonstrants. In 1622, he was appointed professor of
rhetoric and chronology, and subsequently of
Greek, in the university. He had many contacts in England; he declined invitations from Cambridge, but accepted from
Archbishop Laud a prebend in
Canterbury Cathedral without residence, and went to England to be installed in 1629, when he was made LL.D. at Oxford. He was on intimate terms with
Thomas Farnaby, and Farnaby's "Latin Grammar" is based to a certain extent upon that which Vossius wrote for the Elzevir press in 1629. Among his other English correspondents were
Brian Duppa,
Dudley Carleton,
Lord Herbert of Cherbury,
George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, the prelates
James Ussher and
Richard Sterne, and
Christopher Wren. He got permission from Charles I to return to the Low Countries. In 1632 he left Leiden to take the post of professor of history in the newly founded
Athenaeum Illustre at
Amsterdam, which he held until his death. ==Family==