Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 31.djvu/146

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and in 1674 was apprehended and tried before the privy council of Scotland for holding conventicles. Lord Cardross was heavily fined at the same time for permitting King to conduct worship in his family. King was admitted to bail in five thousand merks to appear when called upon. In the following year he was again seized at Cardross House during the night; but in the morning the country people assembled and took him out of the hands of the soldiers. This incident was made the occasion of a letter from King Charles II to the Scottish council, dated 12 June 1675, complaining of their supineness (Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. App. pt. vi. p. 159). King was now by letters of intercommuning, 6 Aug. 1675, declared an outlaw. On 2 June 1679 he was apprehended in the town of Hamilton by Graham of Claverhouse. The battle of Drumclog took place next day, and Claverhouse's prisoners were rescued. King, however, was recaptured by stratagem on the estate of Blair, in the parish of Dalry, Ayrshire, shortly after the defeat of the covenanters at Bothwell, and was conveyed to Edinburgh. One of his escort of dragoons, being asked whither they were bound, is said to have answered, ‘To carry King to hell.’ The same day the dragoon was killed by the accidental discharge of his carbine. King was brought before the council on 9 July 1679, along with a fellow-minister, John Kid. After several appearances and a futile petition by counsel on their behalf, they were condemned and executed at the cross of Edinburgh on 14 Aug. following, their heads and limbs being severed from their bodies and placed on the Nether Bow port. Proclamation was made immediately before the execution of an indulgence to the ‘outed’ ministers, and King and Kid were pressed by Robert Fleming the elder [q. v.], then a fellow-prisoner, to signify their approval of it, which they resolutely declined to do. King's last speech on the scaffold was printed. In it he makes mention of his wife and one child. The only sermon by him which is known to exist is included in the collection made by John Howie [q. v.] (Glasgow, 1779).

[Wodrow's History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, Burn's ed. 1831, ii. 270–286, iii. 69–136; Crookshank's History of the Church of Scotland, ii. 32–65; Patrick Walker's Biographia Presbyteriana, i. 247–94.]

H. P.

KING, JOHN (1696–1728), classical writer, eldest son of John King (1652–1732) [q. v.], was born at Adstone, Northamptonshire, on 5 Aug. 1696. He was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. 1718 and M.A. 1722, and being elected a fellow. Though he did not take a medical degree, he settled at Stamford as a physician, and soon acquired a great reputation. In 1727 he married Lucy, daughter of Thomas Morice, paymaster of the forces at Lisbon, and his intention then was to settle in London, under the direction of John Freind [q. v.], who married his wife's sister, but he was cut off by fever at Stamford, 12 Oct. 1728. He was buried at Pertenhall, Bedfordshire. His only son, John King, patron and rector of Pertenhall 1752–1800, and also fellow of King's College, Cambridge, died 6 Oct. 1812, aged 85.

King was author of: 1. ‘Epistola ad Johannem Freind, in qua D. W. Trilleri epistolam Medico-criticam super primo et tertio Epidemicorum ad examen revocavit,’ Cambridge, 1722; an attack on the remarks of Triller on the treatises of Hippocrates on epidemics. 2. ‘Euripidis Hecuba, Orestes et Phœnissæ,’ Cambridge, 1726; the original Greek, with a Latin translation; this had occupied him nearly five years, as he had collated ten manuscripts. Thomas Morell published for use at Eton in 1748 the same three plays, with the addition of ‘Alcestis,’ in which he gave nearly the whole of King's translation and notes. King was elected on 12 Aug. 1724 a member of the Gentlemen's Society at Spalding. In the ‘Rel. Galeanæ’ (Bibl. Topogr. Brit. iii. 80) is the statement of Roger Gale, under date 1742, that he ‘always took Dr. King's skill in medals to be more that of a trader than a scholar.’

[Nichols's Lit. Anecdotes, iii. 752, vi. 13, 93; Gent. Mag. October 1812, p. 405; Harwood's Alumni Eton. p. 294.]

W. P. C.

KING, JOHN (1652–1732), miscellaneous writer, born at St. Columb, Cornwall, 1 May 1652, matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, as a poor scholar on 7 July 1674, being described as aged twenty, and as the son of John King of Manaccan in Cornwall. He graduated B.A. 1678 and M.A. 1680, and in 1698, when his friend Sir William Dawes [q. v.], afterwards archbishop of York, was its master, took the degree of D.D. at Catharine Hall, Cambridge. When first in clerical orders he was curate of Bray, Berkshire, where he married Anne, youngest daughter of William Durham, whose wife was Lætitia, granddaughter of Sir Francis Knollys, treasurer of the household of Queen Elizabeth. He had no children by his first wife. On 3 June 1690 King married, as his second wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Joseph Aris of Adstone, Northamptonshire, and widow of the Rev. John Eston, through whom he acquired the