A Political Biography of William King

Christopher Fauske

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138661202
• eBook ISBN: 9781317324188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

William King (1650–1729) was perhaps the dominant Irish intellect of the period from 1688 until his death in 1729. An Anglican (Church of Ireland) by conversion, King was a strident critic of John Toland and the clerical superior of Jonathan Swift.

1 DISRUPTION

William King’s partial memoir ‘Quædam vitæ meæ insignora’ offers an account of the young man’s struggles learning to read, or, rather, his ‘utter refusal to learn … notwithstanding’ his school mistress ‘urging me to learn with whippings, but in vain, so that through weariness she desisted’.¹ Recalling those years, King remembered ‘often I wept in solitude, and accounted that it was from an evil mind and hatred towards me that my parents compelled me to learn letters’, but he knew ‘I was not dull, as I could make some progress in subjects of which I understood the reasonableness, notwithstanding their difficulty’.² This emphasis on ‘reasonableness’ by the older King looking back indicates the importance he placed on this attribute above all others, and even allowing for the retrospective reordering of memory King’s recounting of his almost instantaneous learning to read underpins this perspective:

It happened on a certain Lord’s day, that I was walking about with a woman in the garden, and we entered the wood and sat down together; she was reading the Holy Scriptures, and whilst reading sleep stole over her, I took the book from her hands, and by enumerating the letters, according to my habit, I pronounced the words in its beginning, and immediately perceived it to contain some sense.³

Starting ‘in the beginning’, King found himself able to read and understand. A combination of revealed sense and mental acuity brought meaning to words and ideas, and this practice of returning to the beginning was a habit that would underpin King’s approach to determining appropriateness of actions and the rightness of ideas throughout his life. This way of thinking would be validated by his experiences at Trinity College, Dublin, to which he was admitted in 1667.⁴

King’s formal education thus far had taken him to the Church of Ireland school in Dungannon, possibly for want of any other educational establishment as most Presbyterian schools were closed to him as a consequence of his father’s refusal to subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant. Raised in a separatist Presbyterian home and educated at a Church of Ireland school, King thus entered Trinity with no secure religious foundation. Beginning his third year at Trinity he was assigned as tutor the aptly named John Christian, whom King would identify as the man responsible for ‘imbu[ing] me with a true sense of religion’.⁵ This is an important phrase as King uses it here, and as he would throughout his life, for King distinguishes ‘religion’ from Church of Ireland doctrine. True religion – learned and understood by examining its ‘reasonableness’ – provides the premise against which the various claims of specific doctrines can be tested. King would identify Church of Ireland doctrine as the most compatible with true religion, but the validity of that doctrine was not evident until tested against the a priori tenets of religion qua religion. That testing of religious principles led King to

discern clearly enough, that I must either altogether renounce religion, or that I must addict myself to its practice … for I saw plainly enough, that there is no middle course between these, as from the words of Christ as well as from the nature of the subject itself, the choice was whether I wished to be a servant of Christ, or of the world.⁶

As part of his determination at Trinity to ‘examine religion from its foundations’,⁷ King explored the considerations of Greek and Roman philosophers on the subject of natural religion, treatises on revealed religion, works from the first centuries of the Christian religion, the doctrinal separation of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and the appearance of sects within the reformed churches, at the end of which

By the grace of God co-operating I brought the subject to a happy conclusion, and established myself in such principles, and confirmed them by such arguments, that from that time to this day, thanks be to God, nothing in the matter of religion have I either changed, added to, or taken from … nor has any one by so much as a nail’s breadth disturbed me from the path which I then took, by writing or word.⁸

Sometime before the spring of 1670, King was confirmed in the Church of Ireland. In a manner that most of the adherents of the various Protestant sects in the English-speaking world would have understood, King described his embrace of his religious life in something approaching confessional tones:

I was drawn to the better part by the admonitions and exhortations of my tutor, and I trembled lest I should abjure the hope of eternal felicity. The Divine power and the assurance of His grace I was obtaining, and in this conflict I learned, by experience how insufficient my strength was without the aid of Divine grace.⁹

As far as King was concerned, divine grace had called him to give his life to the Church of Ireland.

To understand the church into which King was ordained deacon in October 1671 requires something of a propensity for minutiae and arcane points of historical happenstance, a propensity that King most certainly had. If the political constitutional questions of Irish–English relations were problematic, the question of the relationship between the Church of Ireland and the Church of England had its own set of entanglements. Ford notes that ‘the structure of the civil relationship between Ireland and England appears, at first sight, to provide an obvious parallel for the ecclesiastical relationship … unfortunately the analogy is not very helpful’.¹⁰ While complications on the civil side help explain why the analogy is not necessarily helpful, there is also the fact that the two churches had their own doctrinal differences. Legislative differences can be reconciled by law or by compromise; doctrinal difficulties are much harder to resolve.

Like the state in which it was established, the Church of Ireland depended for its survival upon English military authority. That was clear prior to 1688. After the events of 1688–91, that perception was considered an indisputable fact into the later part of the nineteenth century when the church was disestablished. Those such as King who would serve the church with something more than self-interest or secular political goals in mind had daily to negotiate the tension inherent in the claims of a national church dependent upon the continuing goodwill of a neighbouring political entity. King had exemplars from recent history to whom he could look, most prominently James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh during the 1634 convocation called to align Church of Ireland canons with those of the Church of England. Ussher argued that while

We give the right hand of fellowship and all due honour [to the Church of England] yet we must not make resignation of our right to be disposed of by that excellent church … giving the Church of England such superintendence over us, that nothing should be made law here that were not first allowed there.¹¹

The Church of Ireland convocation turned out to be no more adept at avoiding constitutional confusion than were its lay counterparts, and the church adopted the English thirty-nine articles as the bedrock of its doctrine without rescinding the nineteen 1615 articles creating the Church of Ireland. The Irish church also took the step of reducing the Church of England’s number of canon law articles to 100, combining various English canons ‘without’ what Mant describes as ‘any obvious improvement, rather perhaps the contrary’.¹² Nonetheless, the Irish clerics had asserted their distinctiveness. Ussher would go on to assert that the Irish church had always been independent of Rome, a national church saved from internationalism by the Reformation.¹³

After the Williamite campaigns in Ireland had secured the country to the Protestant cause, the English authorities were perhaps better positioned to ensure the obedience of the Irish church than they were of the Irish laity by the simple expedient of asserting the sovereign’s claim as defender of the faith and head of the church, a claim the church could hardly oppose with too great a fervour, for not only was its political survival at stake if English favour were withdrawn but, too, one of the fundamental precepts of the faith was the notion of passive obedience. It was on these twin yet distinct notions of establishment and passive obedience that King was to build his first series of intellectual defences of his faith, defensive manoeuvres that were to prove a significant precursor to his bolder intellectual forays in the years after the kingdom of Ireland had been secured and his church’s place within it at least protected from further erosion. As a consequence of King’s delineation of the Church of Ireland’s identity and historic rights, it would turn out that one significant Church of Ireland faction would, in fact, be harder to mollify or control than just about any other Protestant grouping in Ireland.

King’s ordained ecclesiastical career began in the archdiocese of Tuam under the patronage of Archbishop John Parker, a man with his own experiences of uncertain times for the church, and who, in 1661, had been one of seven men created bishop in a flurry of activity designed to show that the church had survived the vicissitudes of the Cromwellian era.¹⁴ Parker had been imprisoned during the interregnum, as King would twice be during the Williamite campaigns. The younger man had impressed his patron during an examination for a fellowship at Trinity, a fellowship King had not received, and upon King earning his MA Parker both ordained him a priest and appointed him his chaplain, a position which brought with it the prebend of Kilmainmore; thus, from the start of his ecclesiastic career King combined the care of souls with involvement in cathedral administration and diocesan statecraft. Encouraged by the archbishop, King became something of an expert on canon law and scriptural authority, both of which topics were to allow him to demonstrate the combination of intellect and stubbornness that defined his professional life.

In 1678 Parker was translated to be Archbishop of Dublin and he took his chaplain with him, elevating him the next year to be chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and rector of St Werburgh’s, one of the wealthiest parish livings in Ireland. Crucially, both cathedral and parish were in Dublin and King’s patron and his keen mind soon meant the younger man was being noticed by members of the governing elite. A convert with no family to support his own progress, King would likely have been stranded in the lower echelons of the church had it not been for the initial patronage of Parker. But in Dublin King was able both to enjoy the support of Parker and to begin to establish his own authority. St Werburgh’s was the parish church of the senior executive administrators when they were in Dublin and in 1683 King’s career took the next step and he added to his positions that of chaplain to the lord deputy, Richard Butler, Earl of Arran, who was acting in the absence of his father, James Butler, Duke of Ormonde. Ormonde himself would retain King’s services and Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, lord deputy from 1685 to 1686, offered King a position in England. The cleric preferred to remain in Ireland.

Dublin had connections with London because of its political role. The coming and going of peers, landed gentry and governors meant it was never far behind the English city in artistic and philosophical trends, and King was soon a regular participant in the Dublin Philosophical Society’s meetings. He produced his first London-published work for the society, based on a talk he gave on 20 April 1685, ‘On the Bogs and Loughs in Ireland.’¹⁵ ‘On the Bogs’ offers various hints of the attitudes and independent streak for which King would become known. The Irish bogs were, he suggested, indicative of the ‘want of industry’ by the Irish and the wealth of the kingdom suffered because of the hardships they imposed on travellers and because they were ‘a great destruction to cattle’.¹⁶ King’s arguments, says Emery, produced a ‘reasoned paper, based on observation’,¹⁷ not a claim he was willing to make about much of the work produced at that time. Later (in 1708), King would publish ‘An account of the manner of manuring land with sea shells’, which Hoppen identifies as making a sustained contribution to Irish agriculture.¹⁸ King was also a member of the London-based Royal Society, though usually participating by correspondence rather than in person.

King’s interest in land management offered him an early place at the table among those who would pursue what would become known as ‘improvement’, and which would in turn separate those Protestants who preferred relatively short-term exploitation of the land for maximum rent from those such as King who advocated a longer-term, more sustainable approach to land management. King’s was a sensibility defined as a ‘patriotism’ focused not on national identity but on

economic improvement and the relations between [the] public and authority … characterized by its tendency toward heteronomy: the constitutional acceptance of local particularisms and of legal diversity between the state’s different regions.¹⁹

King would have bridled at the idea that Ireland was a ‘region’ of a British state, but he did grasp at least a few of the distinctions, geographic and political, of Ireland and later, as his efforts to protect the Church of Ireland and the Irish establishment from British encroachment deepened, he would at times suggest that Ireland had, indeed, become a region of Britain. ‘Ireland is a province’, he admitted to Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury,

and, generally speaking, it has been the fate of provinces to be under governors who had no interest or concern for their welfare … hence the wise man tells us, Eccl 5,8: ‘If thou seest oppression of the poor and violent perverting of judgement and Justice in a province marvell not at the matter,’ for this is generally the case of all provinces and particularly of Ireland.²⁰

This idea of patriotism was to some extent displaced in western Europe as the imperial surges of the later eighteenth and nineteenth century conflated in many people’s minds nationalism with patriotism. In the early twentieth century, G. K. Chesterton published a lovely short novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in which Adam Wayne exactly captures the spirit of patriotism rather than nationalism when he reflects that

I was born … in a spot of the earth which I loved because I had played boys’ games there, and fallen in love, and talked with my friends through nights that were nights of the gods. And I feel the riddle. These little gardens where we told our loves. These streets where we brought out our dead. Why should they be commonplace? Why should they be absurd?²¹

If all does not turn out well in Chesterton’s novel, that is because the patriotism of those like Wayne is co-opted or mis-identified by others who conflate an interest in the protection and improvement of one place with an interest in meddling in other place’s affairs. A more contemporary analogy yet is that of ‘Churchill and Hitler [who] were, in the most vital respects, opposites. Churchill was … a patriot, imbued with a love of place and people, while Hitler was a nationalist, infuriated by a hatred of aliens and imaginary enemies’.²² The struggle between self-interest and broader engagement would remain a characteristic of native-Irish Protestant polity into the twenty-first century, but King was firmly in the ‘patriot’ camp even as the implications of that word were still to be defined.

King’s first publication had appeared the same year as his paper on the bogs of Ireland. It was A Sermon Preached at Christ Church Dublin … Before Michael Boyle, Lord Primate of Ireland and Lord Chancellor and Arthur Forbes, Earl of Granard, Lords Justices. The publication of such sermons was not exactly routine, but there were a not inconsiderable number of sermons preached before leading figures of government published in London and Dublin and King’s first appearance in print went largely unnoticed. The sermon, however, was perhaps part of a campaign to re-establish King’s good graces in the eyes of the administration in Dublin after King had refused in January 1680 to present himself to the Dean of St Patrick’s, Dublin, John Worth, on the day the dean had selected for the visitation of the cathedral chapter, King having determined to his own satisfaction that nothing in cathedral statutes gave the dean the right to call such a visitation. Initially, five other prebendaries had joined King in his refusal, but they quickly capitulated when the matter was first adjudicated by the cathedral chapter. King, however, appealed and the archbishops’ court ruled in his favour, only in 1683 for that ruling to be overturned by the court of delegates, who in their judgement made it clear they were not impressed by the chancellor’s conduct.

This was to be the first of a series of long disputes, some intellectual, many legal, which would shape the rest of King’s life. Indeed, by the time his sermon was published King was on the cusp of an even lengthier argument.

In February 1685 James II became king of England, Scotland and Ireland. Unlike his brother Charles, whom many suspected of having converted secretly, James was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Editorial Note
• Introduction
• 1 Disruption
• 2 Settlement
• 3 Progress
• 4 Success
• 5 Frustration
• 6 Legacy
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index