the supreme council of the confederate catholics. In July 1648, when acting as the nuncio's confidential agent (Cardinal Moran, Spicilegium Ossoriense, i. 422), he was arrested by order of the council, and his guardianship of the convent conferred on Peter Walsh (Aphorismical Discovery, ed. Gilbert, i. 238). A few days later he wrote to Macmahon, bishop of Clogher, inviting Owen Roe O'Neill [q. v.] to seize Kilkenny and all the nuncio's enemies before Ormonde's arrival in Ireland. The letter was intercepted, and King fled to the continent. According to Bellings he had openly committed innumerable crimes, but the abortive plot to betray Kilkenny is alone mentioned. At Louvain he wrote a bitter diatribe against Rinuccini's opponents and the Anglo-Irish party generally; and this pamphlet, which professes to have been written from the Irish camp some months before, was carefully circulated by the wandering Franciscans in France, Spain, and Italy. Bellings dissects it sentence by sentence in the second part of the ‘Vindiciæ.’ Innocent X is believed to have blamed the nuncio much, but the Franciscan order generally sustained him, and in 1649 King was made guardian of St. Isidore's at Rome (Spicilegium Ossoriense, i. 326). The famous John Colgan [q. v.] recommended him as a proper person to be commissary over the Franciscan colleges on the continent, and he was for some years secretary to the procurator-general of the order. Bellings regrets (Vindiciæ, preface to part ii.) having had no opportunity of showing that punishment was deserved rather than promotion; but his antagonist John Ponce, himself a Franciscan, says King was worthy of even much greater honours. and defends him against a charge of publishing scurrilous verses. While at Rome King projected a book in ten volumes in honour of his order (‘nostri seraphici ordinis’), but only lived to publish a kind of syllabus, which was licensed for the ‘Index’ as ‘earnest of a great work.’ King, who was a professor of theology, was learned in Greek and Hebrew. He records his preference for an obvious and easy style, and wrote with vigour, but incorrectly, though he was a pupil of the famous latinist, Bonaventure Baron [q. v.] He died, it is believed at Rome, in 1665.
King's published writings, all in Latin, are: 1. Letter to the Bishop of Clogher, August 1648, printed in Bellings's ‘Vindiciæ,’ i. chap. 14, and in Cox's ‘Hibernia Anglicana.’ 2. ‘Epistola nobilis Hiberni ad amicum Belgam scripta ex castris catholicis ejusdem regni, die 4 Maii, anno 1649,’ printed in ‘Vindiciæ,’ pt. ii., and in Gilbert's ‘Contemporary History,’ ii. 211. 3. ‘Idea Cosmographiæ Seraphicæ concepta et concinnata a Fr. Paulo King, Hiberno, … Romæ,’ 1654. 4. An Elegy on Cardinal Ximenes.
[Vindiciæ Catholicorum Hiberniæ, authore Philopatro Irenæo (Richard Bellings), Paris, 1650; John Ponce's Vindiciæ Eversæ, Paris, 1653; Gilbert's Contemporary Hist. of Affairs in Ireland; information kindly supplied by the Rev. F. L. Carey, late guardian of St. Isidore's.]
KING, PETER, first Lord King, Baron of Ockham in Surrey (1669–1734), lord chancellor, son of Jerome King, grocer and drysalter, of Exeter, by Anne, daughter of Peter Locke, uncle of the philosopher John Locke, was born in Exeter in 1669. He was educated in Exeter at the nonconformist academy kept by Joseph Hallett (1656–1722) [q. v.] and bred to his father's business, but showed a studious disposition, and spent all his pocket-money in buying books. He was trained as a presbyterian, and interested himself in the early history of the Christian church. In 1691 he published anonymously ‘An Enquiry into the Constitution, Discipline, Unity and Worship of the Primitive Church that flourished within the first three hundred years after Christ. Faithfully collected out of the extant Writings of those Ages,’ London, 12mo. Locke was interested by the treatise, and persuaded King's father to send him to the university of Leyden, where he spent about three years. He was entered as a student at the Middle Temple on 23 Oct. 1694, and was called to the bar on 8 June 1698 by the recommendation of Chief-justice Treby [q. v.] He rapidly made his way both on circuit and at Westminster, and on 10 Jan. 1700–1 was returned to parliament in the whig interest for the close borough of Beeralston, Devonshire. The election gave the whigs an immense majority, and King, by Locke's advice, sacrificed the spring circuit to remain in town and watch the course of events. He made his maiden speech in the house in February 1702, and was, according to a congratulatory letter from Locke, well received. His first reported speech, however, was delivered in the debate on the Aylesbury election case in 1704, when he ably vindicated the rights of the electors. In 1705 he was appointed recorder of Glastonbury, and on 27 July 1708 recorder of London. He was knighted at Windsor on the ensuing 12 Sept., after conveying to the queen the congratulations of the city upon the battle of Oudenarde. At this time he was regarded as one of the mainstays of the whig party. In 1710 he was one of the managers of the impeachment of Sacheverell, and aggravated the doctor's
