King, William

William King (1650–1729), bishop and parliamentarian, was born on 1 May 1650 in Antrim town into a Scots Presbyterian family. Educated at Dungannon Royal School, he became an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, where, rejecting his Presbyterian upbringing, he embraced with enthusiasm Church of Ireland Anglicanism. Within five years of his ordination in 1674 he was chancellor of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, of which he became dean in 1688. The most senior clergyman left in Dublin in 1689, he was rightly suspected of Williamite sympathies by the Jacobite authorities and imprisoned on two occasions. With Williamite victory assured, King set himself to write The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the Late King James's Government (1691), which, whatever its author's intentions, became a hugely influential account of Protestant suffering under James II, running into several editions. Appointed bishop of Derry (1691), he became in effect the leader of the reform party in the established church, seeking to restore church finances and buildings, and he remained the leading advocate of church rights after his promotion to the archbishopric of Dublin in 1703. Inevitably, he came into conflict with Presbyterians and continued to be a strong opponent of legal toleration for Dissent. Though his attitude to Catholicism was implacably hostile, he did not support the draconian penal laws.

In 1697 he was embroiled in a legal dispute involving the diocese of Derry and the Irish Society of London-derry. When the latter appealed to the English House of Lords over the heads of the Irish parliament, King became a staunch defender of the Irish parliament's jurisdiction. Over succeeding decades he championed "patriot" issues, including opposition to both a bank of Ireland in 1721 and Thomas Woods's patent to mint halfpence in 1722. Despite his trenchant criticisms of government policy, he was appointed a lord justice of Ireland during the absence of the viceroy on three occasions in George I's reign, though he was twice passed over (1713 and 1724) for promotion to the see of Armagh in favor of English clerics, whose appointment he deplored for both personal and "patriot" reasons.

William King, who never married, died on 8 May 1729. Had he never had a public career, he would be best remembered for his tract on the problem of evil in the world, De Origine Mali (1702), which the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz took sufficiently seriously to write a refutation.

SEE ALSO Church of Ireland: Since 1690

Bibliography

King, C. S. A Great Archbishop of Dublin: William King, D.D., 1650–1729. Autobiography and Selected Correspondence. 1906.

O'Regan, Philip. Archbishop William King of Dublin (1650–1729) and the Constitution in Church and State. 2000.

James McGuire