KING, Henry (1592-1669)

Noted more as a poet, close to John Donne (whose executor he was) than as a bishop, Henry King was a well-connected member of a clerical dynasty. Known for his preaching, he gained a clutch of significant preferments shortly after his ordination. Presumably at this time he was responsible for the upbringing of a nephew, the later Sir Robert Holte^‡. HP Commons, 1660-90, ii. 574. Thought to be a moderate, his appointment to the episcopate came as one of a number of preferments in October 1641 designed to conciliate puritan opinion. He was consecrated the day after Lords passed the bill excluding the bishops from Parliament. Some six months after the surrender of Chichester at the end of 1642, the Commons ordered King to be sequestrated. CJ, iii. 148. Compounding in the early 1650s, he later described how this ‘common gulf of sacrilege’ reduced him to the mere basics of ‘food and raiment’. CCC 2800; PROB 11/331. For the duration of the civil wars and the Interregnum he lived with sympathetic royalists, Sir Richard Hobart and Lady Salter (the latter the niece of Brian Duppa, King’s predecessor as bishop of Salisbury), wrote prolifically and conducted secret ordinations. Bosher, Restoration Settlement, 38; Duppa-Isham Corresp. 196. Involved in attempts to ensure the survival of the Church of England by conducting covert episcopal consecrations, he offered in 1655 to go to France to hold them there; but after the Restoration he justified the lack of achievement in a funeral sermon for Duppa that emphasized the dangers that had been involved. Bosher, 91-92; King, Sermon Preached at the Funeral of Bryan Lord Bishop of Winchester (1662).

King joined Duppa, Matthew Wren, bishop of Ely, and John Warner, bishop of Rochester in meeting the king at his entry into Whitehall on 29 May 1660. Bosher, 143-4. During the summer of 1660 King was busy conducting a large number of ordinations. The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited ed. S. Taylor and G. Tapsell, 207. In March 1661 he was named as one of the commissioners for the Savoy conference and at the coronation he preached at Whitehall, inferring Charles II’s popularity and virtue from his physical beauty. Tanner 282, f. 35; H. King, A Sermon Preached at Whitehall on 29 of May (1661), 15, 31–32. But although he delivered the occasional ‘great flattering sermon’ before the king (Samuel Pepys^‡’s disapproval was to do with his dislike of clergy meddling with ‘matters of state’) and was an admired preacher at Court, he was believed to have resented his failure to be translated to a better see, something often attributed to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon’s irritation at the bishops’ caution over the issue of consecrations during the Interregnum – although there was a rumour in Sussex in 1660, encouraged by King himself, that he might be translated to York, and the fact that this did not happen was said to be the result of poor timing and judgment in leaving for the country at the wrong moment. Suss. Arch. Colls. cxxv. 141; Ath. Ox. ii. 432; Pepys Diary, i. 195; Tanner 44, f. 80; Bosher, 125.

King took his seat in the Lords at the first opportunity, on 20 Nov. 1661, attending the House for 89 per cent of the remaining sitting days and being named to 37 committees. In April, King’s sermon at Duppa’s funeral in Westminster Abbey criticized the ‘preciser sort’ who disliked church ceremonies and the ‘tender and soft conscienced men … who strain at gnats and swallow camels’. King, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of … Bryan Lord Bishop of Winchester, (1662), 20–21. On 15 May he invoked privilege on behalf of his servant John Poole, who had been arrested and imprisoned in the Marshalsea. The arresting officer was taken into custody but, at King’s request, the House ordered his release on 17 May. Meanwhile, on 16 May 1662 King was named to the committee on the bill for draining the great level of the fens and he reported back to the House that afternoon with minor amendments; the bill was lost at the end of the session. On 19 May he was the only bishop to defend the privileges of the House by dissenting from the decision not to adhere to the amendments to the highways bill (which the Commons claimed to be a money bill).

Anthony Wood reported that King was thought to be a favourer of Presbyterians, and certainly, after the passage of the Act of Uniformity he offered several ministers incentives to conform; Matthew Woodman, vicar of Slinfold in Sussex, was assured that, if he remained within the Church, he would have King’s ‘utmost interest’ for the deanery. Ath. Ox. iii. 841; Calamy Revised, 544; Suss. Arch. Colls., cxxv. 143. However, in a sermon delivered at Lewes in October 1662 during his visitation King reiterated his warnings about ‘unnecessary scruples’ and asserted the Anglican orthodoxy that ‘there can be no greater danger to a settled Church, than liberty to dispute and call in question the points and articles of an established religion’. King, A Sermon Preached at Lewes (1663), 36–37. King complained in 1666 of Lewes as a place ‘full of fanatics and disaffected people’ (the same, he suggested, could be said of much of the rest of Sussex), and told Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury, of his refusal to institute Francis Challoner to the church of St Johns there. Suss. Arch. Colls., cxxv. 146.

The 1663 session saw King’s attendance fall to just below 25 per cent. His absence was concentrated in the first months of the session and was presumably caused by illness as he was excused attendance as sick on 23 Feb. 1663. He had already registered his proxy to John Warner on 14 Feb.; this was vacated on 5 Mar. when King attended the House for the debate of the king’s powers in ecclesiastical affairs. He was present again on 12 Mar. when the debate was resumed. Presumably it was a struggle for him to do so for he was then absent until 1 July, when he resumed regular attendance until the end of the session later that month. He attended all but six days of the short 1664 session, during which he held Warner’s proxy.

King’s attendance for the 1664–5 rose to 70 per cent. On 9 Feb. 1664 he again invoked privilege, this time to protect himself from the ‘very scandalous words’ of Thomas Chadwell, who was reported to have said, ‘Where is the pitiful bishop of Chichester? He hath no more right to sit in the House of Peers than I.’ Chadwell was ordered into custody and was committed to the Gatehouse prison on 11 February. On 16 Feb., having made a submission at the bar and receiving a reprimand from the House, he was released at the ‘special instance’ of the bishop on payment of his fees.

King did not attend the brief Oxford session in the autumn of 1665 or any of the 1666–7 session, registering his proxy with Seth Ward, then bishop of Exeter, for the former and with George Morley, bishop of Winchester, for the latter. He reappeared in the House on 10 Oct. 1667, the first day of the long and troubled 1667–9 session, and attended for 77 per cent of sitting days. How he voted on 20 Nov. concerning the attempt to commit Clarendon on a general charge of treason is unknown but he did not join the chancellor’s enemies by signing the protest that day. On 7 Dec. King was one of only three bishops named to the committee to consider the bill to banish Clarendon, although 18 prelates were listed as being in attendance. It may be significant that his fellow bishops on the committee, John Cosin, bishop of Durham, and William Lucy, bishop of St Davids, had both objected to the decision not to commit Clarendon, suggesting that King, still nurturing a grievance over his lack of promotion, might also be counted among the chancellor’s opponents.

King made his final appearance in the House on 1 Mar. 1669, a few days after preaching at court. He died on 30 Sept. 1669, weeks after a triennial visitation. He was was buried in Chichester cathedral. Suss. Arch. Colls., cxxv. 152; Lansd. 986, ff. 75–76. Written during the Interregnum, his lyrical will bemoaned his lack of disposable property, owing to the civil wars. Guy Carleton, a future bishop of Chichester, however, later claimed that King had benefitted from his bishopric to the sum of over £23,000. Tanner 148, f. 1. In a letter to Sheldon written in April 1666, King bemoaned the poverty of his diocese, stating that his annual diocesan revenues amounted to £1,000 although additional sources of income that netted him £10,000 a year. Suss. Arch. Colls., cxxv. 147. At his death he was able to bequeath an estate of more than £4,000 to his extended family.