Henry King Biography | Poet

Henry King (1591-1669), English bishop and poet, eldest son of John King, afterwards bishop of London, was baptized on the 16th of January 1591. With his younger brother John he proceeded from Westminster School to Christ Church, Oxford, where both matriculated on the 20th of January 1609. Henry King entered the church, and after receiving various ecclesiastical preferments he was made bishop of Chichester in 1642, receiving at the same time the rich living of Petworth, Sussex. On the 29th of December of that year Chichester surrendered to the Parliamentary army, and King was among the prisoners. After his release he found an asylum with his brother-in-law, Sir Richard Hobart of Langley, Buckinghamshire, and afterwards at Richkings near by, with Lady Salter, said to have been a sister of Dr Brian Duppa (1588-1662). King was a close friend of Duppa and personally acquainted with Charles I. In one of his poems dated 1649 he speaks of the Eikon Basilike as the king’s own work. Restored to his benefice at the Restoration, King died at Chichester on the 30th of September 1669. His works include Poems, Elegies, Paradoxes and Sonets (1657), The Psalmes of David from the New Translation of the Bible, turned into Meter (1651), and several sermons. He was one of the executors of John Donne, and prefixed an elegy to the 1663 edition of his friend’s poems.

King’s Poems and Psalms were edited, with a biographical sketch, by the Rev. J. Hannah (1843).