received 34 electoral votes to 183 cast for Monroe. He was again returned to the Senate in 1813, and was re-elected in 1819 as the result of a struggle between the Van Buren and Clinton factions of the Democratic-Republican party. In the Missouri Compromise debates he supported the anti-slavery programme in the main, but for constitutional reasons voted against the second clause of the Tallmadge Amendment providing that all slaves born in the state after its admission into the Union should be free at the age of twenty-five years. He died at Jamaica, Long Island, on the 29th of April 1827.
The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, begun about 1850 by his son, Charles King, was completed by his grandson, Charles R. King, and published in six volumes (New York, 1894–1900).
Rufus King’s son, John Alsop King (1788–1867), was educated at Harrow and in Paris, served in the war of 1812 as a lieutenant of a cavalry company, and was a member of the New York Assembly in 1819–1821 and of the New York Senate in 1823. When his father was sent as minister to Great Britain in 1825 he accompanied him as secretary of the American legation, and when his father returned home on account of ill health he remained as chargé d’affaires until August 1826. He was a member of the New York Assembly again in 1832 and in 1840, was a Whig representative in Congress in 1849–1851, and in 1857–1859 was governor of New York State. He was a prominent member of the Republican party, and in 1861 was a delegate to the Peace Conference in Washington.
Another son, Charles King (1789–1867), was also educated abroad, was captain of a volunteer regiment in the early part of the war of 1812, and served in 1814 in the New York Assembly, and after working for some years as a journalist was president of Columbia College in 1849–1864.
A third son, James Gore King (1791–1853), was an assistant adjutant-general in the war of 1812, was a banker in Liverpool and afterwards in New York, and was president of the New York & Erie railroad until 1837, when by his visit to London he secured the loan to American bankers of £1,000,000 from the governors of the Bank of England. In 1849–1851 he was a representative in Congress from New Jersey.
Charles King’s son, Rufus King (1814–1876), graduated at the U.S. Military Academy in 1833, served for three years in the engineer corps, and, after resigning from the army, became assistant engineer of the New York & Erie railroad. He was adjutant-general of New York state in 1839–1843, and became a brigadier-general of volunteers in the Union army in 1861, commanded a division in Virginia in 1862–1863, and, being compelled by ill health to resign from the army, was U.S. minister to the Papal States in 1863–1867.
His son, Charles King (b. 1844), served in the artillery until 1870 and in the cavalry until 1879; he was appointed brigadier-general U.S. Volunteers in the Spanish War in 1898, and served in the Philippines. He wrote Famous and Decisive Battles (1884), Campaigning with Crook (1890), and many popular romances of military life.
KING, THOMAS (1730–1805), English actor and dramatist,
was born in London on the 20th of August 1730. Garrick saw
him when appearing as a strolling player in a booth at Windsor,
and engaged him for Drury Lane. He made his first appearance
there in 1748 as the Herald in King Lear. He played the part of
Allworth in the first presentation of Massinger’s New Way to Pay Old Debts (1748), and during the summer he played Romeo
and other leading parts in Bristol. For eight years he was the
leading comedy actor at the Smock Alley theatre in Dublin,
but in 1759 he returned to Drury Lane and took leading parts
until 1802. One of his earliest successes was as Lord Ogleby
in The Clandestine Marriage (1766), which was compared to
Garrick’s Hamlet and Kemble’s Coriolanus, but he reached the
climax of his reputation when he created the part of Sir Peter
Teazle at the first representation of The School for Scandal
(1777). He was the author of a number of farces, and part-owner
and manager of several theatres, but his fondness for
gambling brought him to poverty. He died on the 11th of
December 1805.
KING, WILLIAM (1650–1729), Anglican divine, the son of
James King, an Aberdeen man who migrated to Antrim, was
born in May 1650. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin,
and after being presented to the parish of St Werburgh, Dublin,
in 1679, became dean of St Patrick’s in 1689, bishop of Derry in
1691, and archbishop of Dublin in 1702. In 1718 he founded
the divinity lectureship in Trinity College, Dublin, which bears
his name. He died in May 1729. King was the author of The State of the Protestants in Ireland under King James’s Government
(1691), but is best known by his De Origine Mali (1702; Eng.
trans., 1731), an essay deemed worthy of a reply by Bayle and
Leibnitz. King was a strong supporter of the Revolution, and
his voluminous correspondence is a valuable help to our knowledge
of the Ireland of his day.
See A Great Archbishop of Dublin, William King, D.D., edited by Sir C. S. King, Bart. (1908).
KING, WILLIAM (1663–1712), English poet and miscellaneous
writer, son of Ezekiel King, was born in 1663. From his father
he inherited a small estate and he was connected with the Hyde
family. He was educated at Westminster School under Dr
Busby, and at Christ Church, Oxford (B.A. 1685; D.C.L. 1692).
His first literary enterprise was a defence of Wycliffe, written
in conjunction with Sir Edward Hannes (d. 1710) and entitled
Reflections upon Mons. Varillas’s History of Heresy . . . (1688).
He became known as a humorous writer on the Tory and High
Church side. He took part in the controversy aroused by the
conversion of the once stubborn non-juror William Sherlock, one
of his contributions being an entertaining ballad, “The Battle
Royal,” in which the disputants are Sherlock and South. In
1694 he gained the favour of Princess Anne by a defence of her
husband’s country entitled Animadversions on the Pretended Account of Denmark, in answer to a depreciatory pamphlet by
Robert (afterwards Viscount) Molesworth. For this service he
was made secretary to the princess. He supported Charles
Boyle in his controversy with Richard Bentley over the genuineness
of the Epistles of Phalaris, by a letter (printed in Dr Bentley’s Dissertations . . . (1698), more commonly known as
Boyle against Bentley), in which he gave an account of the circumstances
of Bentley’s interview with the bookseller Bennet.
Bentley attacked Dr King in his Dissertation in answer (1699) to
this book, and King replied with a second letter to his friend
Boyle. He further satirized Bentley in ten Dialogues of the Dead relating to . . . the Epistles of Phalaris (1699). In 1700 he published
The Transactioneer, with some of his Philosophical Fancies, in two Dialogues, ridiculing the credulity of Hans Sloane, who was
then the secretary of the Royal Society. This was followed up
later with some burlesque Useful Transactions in Philosophy
(1709). By an able defence of his friend, James Annesley,
5th earl of Anglesey, in a suit brought against him by his wife
before the House of Lords in 1701, he gained a legal reputation
which he did nothing further to advance. He was sent to Ireland
in 1701 to be judge of the high court of admiralty, and later
became sole commissioner of the prizes, keeper of the records in
the Bermingham Tower of Dublin Castle, and vicar-general to the
primate. About 1708 he returned to London. He served the
Tory cause by writing for The Examiner before it was taken up
by Swift. He wrote four pamphlets in support of Sacheverell,
in the most considerable of which, “A Vindication of the Rev.
Dr Henry Sacheverell . . . in a Dialogue between a Tory and a
Whig” (1711), he had the assistance of Charles Lambe of Christ
Church and of Sacheverell himself. In December 1711 Swift
obtained for King the office of gazetteer, worth from £200 to
£250. King was now very poor, but he had no taste for work,
and he resigned his office on the 1st of July 1712. He died on
the 25th of December in the same year.
The other works of William King include: A Journey to London, in the year 1698. After the Ingenious Method of that made by Dr Martin Lister to Paris, in the same Year . . . (1699), which was considered by the author to be his best work; Adversaria, or Occasional Remarks on Men and Manners, a selection from his critical note-book, which shows wide and varied reading; Rufinus, or An Historical Essay on the Favourite Ministry (1712), a satire on the duke of Marlborough. His chief poems are: The Art of Cookery: in imitation of Horace’s
