tacks William Bowyer the younger [q. v.], who had said something against King's latinity (Nichols, Lit. Anecd. ii. 223–5). King further translated all the abusive names which Burton had bestowed on him, and the complimentary phrases applied by Burton to himself, and printing the whole catalogue on a large sheet of coarse paper, gave it to a scavenger to be cried about the streets of Oxford, Windsor, and Eton (Anecdotes, pp. 153–7).
King was presented to the Pretender in September 1750. The Pretender was then paying a stealthy visit to England, and drank tea one evening at the doctor's lodgings at Oxford. They subsequently corresponded, but as the intimacy advanced King came to dislike the Pretender (ib. pp. 196–214).
King took part in the memorable contested election for Oxfordshire in 1754, and was in consequence vigorously libelled. He was accused of having defrauded subscribers for books never published to the extent of 1,500l., was taunted with having offered himself to sale both in England and Ireland, and was accused of inspiring the Jacobite ‘London Evening Post.’ During the same year he published without his name a volume of fanciful essays called ‘The Dreamer,’ 8vo, London, 1754, which was assailed in the whig papers as tainted with Jacobitism. In February 1755 King had the pleasing duty of taking to Johnson his diploma of M.A., and found in him a warm admirer of both his scholarship and politics (Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, i. 279). During the same year he replied to his assailants in a vigorously written pamphlet entitled ‘Doctor King's Apology; or, Vindication of himself from the several matters charged on him by the Society of Informers,’ 4to, Oxford, 1755 (2nd and 3rd editions the same year). He retaliated warmly on the authors of various libels which had appeared in the ‘Evening Advertiser,’ attacked a pestilent tract called ‘A Defence of the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College,’ and spoke severely of a canon of Windsor named Richard Blacow. Blacow thereupon printed a ‘Letter to William King, LL.D.,’ 8vo, 1755, in which he sought to make King responsible for a Jacobite demonstration by some undergraduates in February 1747.
On the Earl of Arran's death the Jacobite Earl of Westmoreland was elected chancellor. At his installation on 7 July 1759 King made a speech, at which Johnson ‘clapped his hands till they were sore’ (Boswell, i. 348). A collective edition of his writings was published as ‘Opera Guilielmi King,’ 4to, London, 1760 (cf. Notes and Queries, 5th ser. ix. 14). King publicly severed his connection with the Jacobite party in 1761, when he accompanied a deputation from the university to present the king with an address of congratulation on his marriage. He was personally introduced to the king by Lord Shelburne. His desertion did not escape censure (Anecdotes, pp. 189–196).
At the Encænia of 1763 King, amid great applause, delivered an oration with all his wonted animation and grace. Churchill, who was present, condescended to approve of his style, but afterwards sneered at his ‘piebald Latin’ in the ‘Candidate’ (Nichols, Lit. Anecd. viii. 236).
King died on 30 Dec. 1763, and was buried on 5 Jan. following at Ealing, Middlesex (Lysons, ii. 236), where he had resided for many years on an estate called Newby, near the church. He was also lessee of the rectory of Ealing (Faulkner, Hist. of Brentford, &c., 1845, pp. 177, 248). His heart, having been enclosed in a silver urn, was deposited by his own directions in the chapel of St. Mary Hall, where there is a monument to his memory, with a Latin epitaph written by himself (Wood, Colleges and Halls, ed. Gutch, p. 675). His son, Charles King, born about 1711, was M.A. of St. Mary Hall, and in holy orders (Foster, Alumni Oxon. 1715–1886, ii. 794). His daughter Dorothy married William Melmoth the younger (1710–1799) [q. v.] (Nichols, Lit. Anecd. iii. 41).
Assisted by the contributions of old members of St. Mary Hall, King rebuilt the east side of the quadrangle, and added a new room to the principal's lodgings (Wood, Colleges, &c., p. 674).
King wrote also an inscription for the collection of statues presented to the university in 1756 by the Countess Dowager of Pomfret (Wood, Antiquities of Oxford, ed. Gutch, vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 811); an ‘Elogium’ in 1758 on Chevalier John Taylor the oculist, of which he printed a few copies to oblige his friends (Anecdotes, p. 136), and an epitaph on Beau Nash (ib. p. 248). His posthumous ‘Political and Literary Anecdotes of his own Times,’ 8vo, London, 1818 (2nd edit. 1819), mostly written in his seventy-sixth year to beguile the languor of a sick-room, and edited for the benefit of two of his lady relatives by Philip Bury Duncan [q. v.] (Gent. Mag. 3rd ser. xvi. 125), show him to have been a man of sense, acuteness, and cultivation. Throughout his life he was a water-drinker (Anecdotes, p. 11).
There is a striking likeness of King in the orator's rostrum in Worlidge's picture
