The Parliament relented towards Ussher so far as to vote him a pension in his later years, which was, however, but irregularly paid. The death of his royal master was a great blow to Ussher, and he ever after kept the momentous day of execution as a fast. A few years before his death he published his Old Testament Chronology, whence is taken the Table commonly inserted in Bibles. The great Protector sent for him, treated him with marked courtesy, and was indeed almost persuaded by him to grant a certain toleration to the Episcopal worship, but finally refused any such boon to his “implacable enemies;” showing himself, as Ussher tersely described him, a man possessed of “intestina non viscera.” At his death the honours of a public funeral were ordered by Cromwell, who, with all his sternness against his foes, could not but reverence the moral grandeur of the man; and the service of his own church was read over the grave of the greatest churchman of his time, in the chapel of St. Erasmus.
While Dodwell, that prolific author, whose name is also connected with the Camden Professorship bestowed on him by the University of Oxford, was a Fellow of Trinity lecturing in logic, his most brilliant pupil, soon to become a friend, was William King. Among his contemporaries several names of note occur in the College records—Tate and Brady; Dillon, Earl of Roscommon; Leslie, Denham, Peter Browne, Robert Boyle, and Wilson, the author of Sacra Privata. But King has claims to more than passing notice. A churchman of whom Swift, a warm admirer, could write as follows, can have been no common man—“He spends his time in the practice of all the virtues that can become public or private life. So excellent a person may justly be reckoned among the greatest and most learned prelates of this age.”
The most Reverend Father in God
William King D.D.
King was of a Scotch Presbyterian family, his father having settled in Ulster after his excommunication for refusal to sign the Covenant. He betrayed in his infant years an aversion to the mechanical lessons of his schoolmistress, and suffered much whipping as a consequence. The art of reading came upon him later quite as a surprise, as he suddenly found himself able to make sense of the combinations of letters which had baffled him under the tuition of an orthodox school régime. During his career in College he lived as a Spartan. “I scarce had twenty pounds,” he tells us in an unpublished autograph memoir preserved in Armagh Diocesan Library, “in all the six years I spent in College, save from the College (Scholarship). Yet herein do I acknowledge God’s providence that I was able to appear nearly all that time decently drest and sufficiently fed.” Although without definite religious opinions, since as a child he had received no instruction, by study and conversation with men of weight and learning in the University he came to have that settled faith which drew him to the ministry of the Church, and remained with him all through life. Thus King’s debt to Trinity College was a large one; he owed to her not only the intellectual but the spiritual training which determined his life and character. When ordained Priest, he was appointed Chaplain to the Archbishop of Tuam. The change from the narrow fare of his life in College to that of the Palace, where a “dinner of sixteen dishes and a supper of twelve, with abundant variety of wines and other generous liquors,” were the usual diet, affected his health. “The issue was, that before I had begun to dream of ill effects,” he says quaintly, “I was taken with the gout.”
Archbishop Parker, who had formed a high estimate of King’s powers, appointed him, soon after his own translation to Dublin, to the Chancellorship of St. Patrick’s, at that juncture of affairs when the Duke of York, heir-presumptive to the Crown, declared himself a Roman Catholic. In 1683 he was sent to Tunbridge Wells to try a course of the waters for his health, and fell into acquaintance with many political persons. Party spirit was then running very high, and considerable excitement prevailed over the revocation of the charters of certain cities. He felt it to be his duty to support the King, so that he might not be driven to seek support from the unprincipled politicians of the day. This support was, however, only conditional upon rational and legal action on the King’s part. When the crisis came in the next reign, and it was imperative that some side should be taken in the contest between James and the Prince of Orange, King came to the conclusion that in the illegal and unjustifiable action of James there was ample reason for the transference of his allegiance to the champion of the Protestant party.
At this time, when the confusion and apprehensions of the clergy drove many of them to England for refuge, the affairs of the Church in Ireland were wholly managed by King and Bishop Dopping, an ex-Fellow of Trinity. Archbishop Marsh, indeed, left everything in the hands of King as his commissary, and the latter’s position became one of great responsibility and danger. With many others, he was thrown into prison in Dublin Castle, and, although released in a few months, was again in the following year imprisoned, until the victory of the Boyne set him at liberty. As Dean of St. Patrick’s he preached at a thanksgiving service for the victory in his Cathedral, at which the King was present; and when it was told his Majesty, in answer to enquiry, that the preacher’s name was William King, he remarked, smiling, that their names were both alike—King William and William King. On his appointment to the Bishopric of Derry, which followed close upon the Revolution, he showed his great administrative abilities in the government of the See, which had been terribly impoverished by the war. As he had been the first to declare in public speech to which king his allegiance was due, so was he the first author of a history of the time, State of the Protestants in Ireland, in which he vindicated the lawfulness of William’s interposition between James and his subjects; a book spoken of by Burnet as “a copious history of the government of Ireland during the reign, which is so well received, and so universally acknowledged to be as truly as it is fairly written, that I refer my readers to the account of these matters which is fully and faithfully given by that learned and zealous prelate.”
As Archbishop of Dublin, King proved himself statesman no less than prelate, as the history of the times clearly evidence. When in his seventy-fifth year, the See of Armagh became vacant. To Swift, who wrote warmly expressing his hope that King would be promoted to Armagh, he replied: “Having never asked anything, I cannot now begin to do so, when I have so near a prospect of leaving the station in which I am another way.” But there is little doubt that the appointment of Boulter, an Englishman, was not acceptable to him, for he received the Primate at his first visit, seated, with the words—in which the jest did not disguise their bitterness,—“My Lord, I am sure your Grace will forgive me, because you know I am too old to rise.” This practice of importing Englishmen to fill the greater Sees of Ireland prevailed until a few years ago, and can scarcely be described as other than gratuitously insulting to the clergy of that Church in this Country. King was eminently ecclesiastic and prelate, wise, strong, and masterful, possessed of many of the gifts which go to make up a great statesman. Not such a scholar as Ussher, he was more fitted by nature to play a part among living men, although, as his great work, De Origine Mali, proves, he was a subtle thinker no less than a far-sighted man of action.
(bust of Dr. Delaney)