Art of Poetry. With some Letters to Dr Lister and Others (1708), one of his most amusing works; The Art of Love; in imitation of Ovid . . . (1709); “Mully of Mountoun,” and a burlesque “Orpheus and Eurydice.” A volume of Miscellanies in Prose and Verse appeared in 1705; his Remains . . . were edited by J. Brown in 1732; and in 1776 John Nichols produced an excellent edition of his Original Works . . . with Historical Notes and Memoirs of the Author. Dr Johnson included him in his Lives of the Poets, and his works appear in subsequent collections.
King is not to be confused with another William King (1685–1763), author of a mock-heroic poem called The Toast (1736) satirizing the countess of Newburgh, and principal of St Mary Hall, Oxford.
KING [OF OCKHAM], PETER KING, 1st Baron (1669–1734),
lord chancellor of England, was born at Exeter in 1669. In his
youth he was interested in early church history, and published
anonymously in 1691 An Enquiry into the Constitution, Discipline,
Unity and Worship of the Primitive Church that flourished within
the first Three Hundred Years after Christ. This treatise engaged
the interest of his cousin, John Locke, the philosopher, by whose
advice his father sent him to the university of Leiden, where he
stayed for nearly three years. He entered the Middle Temple
in 1694 and was called to the bar in 1698. In 1700 he was
returned to parliament for Beer Alston in Devonshire; he was
appointed recorder of Glastonbury in 1705 and recorder of
London in 1708. He was chief justice of the common pleas
from 1714 to 1725, when he was appointed speaker of the
House of Lords and was raised to the peerage. In June of the
same year he was made lord chancellor, holding office until
compelled by a paralytic stroke to resign in 1733. He died at
Ockham, Surrey, on the 22nd of July 1734. Lord King as
chancellor failed to sustain the reputation which he had acquired
at the common law bar. Nevertheless he left his mark on English
law by establishing the principles that a will of immovable
property is governed by the lex loci rei sitae, and that where a
husband had a legal right to the personal estate of his wife, which
must be asserted by a suit in equity, the court would not help
him unless he made a provision out of the property for the wife,
if she required it. He was also the author of the Act (4 Geo. II.
c. 26) by virtue of which English superseded Latin as the language
of the courts. Lord King published in 1702 a History of
the Apostles’ Creed (Leipzig, 1706; Basel, 1750) which went
through several editions and was also translated into Latin.
His great-great-grandson, William (1805–1893), married in 1835 the only daughter of Lord Byron the poet, and was created earl of Lovelace in 1838. Another descendant, Peter John Locke King (1811–1885), who was member of parliament for East Surrey from 1847 to 1874, won some fame as an advocate of reform, being responsible for the passing of the Real Estate Charges Act of 1854, and for the repeal of a large number of obsolete laws.
KING (O. Eng. cyning, abbreviated into cyng, cing; cf. O.H.G.
chun- kuning, chun- kunig, M.H.G. künic, künec, künc, Mod.
Ger. König, O. Norse konungr, kongr, Swed. konung, kung), a
title, in its actual use generally implying sovereignty of the most
exalted rank. Any inclusive definition of the word “king” is,
however, impossible. It always implies sovereignty, but in no
special degree or sense; e.g. the sovereigns of the British Empire
and of Servia are both kings, and so too, at least in popular
parlance, are the chiefs of many barbarous peoples, e.g. the Zulus.
The use of the title is, in fact, involved in considerable confusion,
largely the result of historic causes. Freeman, indeed, in his
Comparative Politics (p. 138) says: “There is a common idea of
kingship which is at once recognized however hard it may be to
define it. This is shown among other things by the fact that no
difficulty is ever felt as to translating the word king and the words
which answer to it in other languages.” This, however, is subject
to considerable modification. “King,” for instance, is used to
translate the Homeric ἄναξ equally with the Athenian βασιλεύς
or the Roman rex. Yet the Homeric “kings” were but tribal
chiefs; while the Athenian and Roman kings were kings in
something more than the modern sense, as supreme priests as
well as supreme rulers and lawgivers (see Archon; and Rome: History). In the English Bible, too, the title of king is given
indiscriminately to the great king of Persia and to potentates
who were little more than Oriental sheiks. A more practical
difficulty, moreover, presented itself in international intercourse,
before diplomatic conventions became, in the 19th century, more
or less stereotyped. Originally the title of king was superior to
that of emperor, and it was to avoid the assumption of the
superior title of rex that the chief magistrates of Rome adopted
the names of Caesar, imperator and princeps to signalize their
authority. But with the development of the Roman imperial
idea the title emperor came to mean more than had been involved
in that of rex; very early in the history of the Empire
there were subject kings; while with the Hellenizing of the East
Roman Empire its rulers assumed the style of βασιλεύς, no
longer to be translated “king” but “emperor.” From this
Roman conception of the supremacy of the emperor the medieval
Empire of the West inherited its traditions. With the barbarian
invasions the Teutonic idea of kingship had come into
touch with the Roman idea of empire and with the theocratic
conceptions which this had absorbed from the old Roman and
Oriental views of kingship. With these the Teutonic kingship
had in its origin but little in common.
Etymologically the Romance and Teutonic words for king have quite distinct origins. The Latin rex corresponds to the Sanskrit rajah, and meant originally steersman. The Teutonic king on the contrary corresponds to the Sanskrit ganaka, and “simply meant father, the father of a family, the king of his own kin, the father of a clan, the father of a people.”[1] The Teutonic kingship, in short, was national; the king was the supreme representative of the people, “hedged with divinity” in so far as he was the reputed descendant of the national gods, but with none of that absolute theocratic authority associated with the titles of rex or βασιλεύς. This, however, was modified by contact with Rome and Christianity. The early Teutonic conquerors had never lost their reverence for the Roman emperor, and were from time to time proud to acknowledge their inferiority by accepting titles, such as “patrician,” by which this was implied. But by the coronation of Charles, king of the Franks, as emperor of the West, the German kingship was absorbed into the Roman imperial idea, a process which exercised a profound effect on the evolution of the Teutonic kingship generally. In the symmetrical political theory of medieval Europe pope and emperor were sun and moon, kings but lesser satellites; though the theory only partially and occasionally corresponded with the facts. But the elevation of Charlemagne had had a profound effect in modifying the status of kingship in nations that never came under his sceptre nor under that of his successors. The shadowy claim of the emperors to universal dominion was in theory everywhere acknowledged; but independent kings hastened to assert their own dignity by surrounding themselves with the ceremonial forms of the Empire and occasionally, as in the case of the Saxon bretwaldas in England, by assuming the imperial style. The mere fact of this usurpation showed that the title of king was regarded as inferior to that of emperor; and so it continued, as a matter of sentiment at least, down to the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the cheapening of the imperial title by its multiplication in the 19th century. To the
- ↑ Max Müller, Lect. Sci. Lang., 2nd series, p. 255, “All people, save those who fancy that the name king has something to do with a Tartar khan or with a ‘canning’ . . . man, are agreed that the English cyning and the Sanskrit ganaka both come from the same root, from that widely spread root whence comes our own cyn or kin and the Greek γένος. The only question is whether there is any connexion between cyning and ganaka closer than that which is implied in their both coming from the same original root. That is to say, are we to suppose that cyning and ganaka are strictly the same word common to Sanskrit and Teutonic, or is it enough to think that cyning is an independent formation made after the Teutons had separated themselves from the common stock? . . . The difference between the two derivations is not very remote, as the cyn is the ruling idea in any case; but if we make the word immediately cognate with ganaka we bring in a notion about ‘the father of his people’ which has no place if we simply derive cyning from cyn.” See also O. Schrader, Reallexikon der Indogermanischen Altertumskunde (Strassburg, 1901) s.v. “König”: the chuning (King) is but the chunni (Kin) personified; cf. A.S. léod masc. = “prince”; léod fem. = “race,” i.e. Lat. gens.
