Edward King

"Lycidas" by John Milton

King, Edward (1611/12–1637), friend of John Milton, was born at Boyle Abbey, Boyle, in Connaught, Ireland. His date of birth is not known, but the fact that he was fourteen when he entered Cambridge in June 1626 and twenty-five when he died in August 1637 means that he must have been born in 1611 or 1612. Edward King was one of the nine children of Sir John King (d. 1637), a Yorkshireman who had served in Ireland in various administrative capacities since 1585, and his wife, Catherine, née Drury (d. 1617), whose father, Robert, was the nephew of Sir William Drury, lord deputy of Ireland. Edward's godfather was his uncle (and namesake) Edward King, bishop of Elphin. Of his brothers and sisters the most prominent were Robert King (who became a member of Cromwell's council of state), John (who became clerk of the hanaper), Mary (later Lady Charlemont), Margaret (later wife of Sir Gerald Lowther, chief justice of common pleas in Ireland), and Dorothy Durie (whose second husband was the protestant divine John Durie, a friend of Milton).

Edward was educated at Thomas Farnaby's school in Goldsmiths' Alley, Cripplegate, London; Farnaby was later to contribute a Latin poem to the memorial collection for King. On 9 June 1626 Edward and his brother Roger were admitted as lesser pensioners to Christ's College, Cambridge, and were assigned to William Chappell, who had recently rusticated Milton. Edward proceeded BA in 1630 and MA in 1633. Soon after his MA he would have taken holy orders.

King's final term as an undergraduate began on 7 April 1630 but teaching was soon discontinued because of plague. As the fellows and undergraduates were preparing to leave it became known that Andrew Sandelands intended to resign his fellowship. On 10 June, while most of the fellows were still absent, the vacant fellowship was filled by royal mandate; King Charles appointed King to replace Sandelands. The myth that Milton had hoped to secure the fellowship was first recorded in 1736 and has often been repeated. In fact Milton was not eligible for election, because the statutes of the college prohibited the election of more than one fellow from any county. As long as Michael Honywood (who came from London) remained in post, Milton remained ineligible for election. King was also ineligible, because he was deemed, despite his Irish birth, to be a Yorkshireman, on the grounds that the family seat was Feathercock Hall, near Northallerton, and the college already had a Yorkshireman in the fellowship (William Power). The royal mandate, however, stipulated that King should be appointed ‘notwithstanding any statute’. He was appointed to the fellowship as an act of royal patronage, which he enjoyed simply because his family was of the requisite social standing; Milton's was not. The disputes that arose out of King's appointment were not resolved until 1696, when it was decided that eligibility must depend on actual place of birth.

King held his fellowship for the remaining seven years of his life. During that period he took only thirteen undergraduates because he was not dependent on undergraduate fees for his income. Of these, four were pupils of Thomas Whitehead (at Repton), who had taught Edward's younger brothers; two were pupils of Thomas Lovering at the Perse School in Cambridge; one was the son of the antiquary Roger Dodsworth; one was Edward's nephew Toby Caulfeild (later third Baron Caulfeild of Charlemont), the son of his sister Mary. Of the thirteen, one died as an undergraduate and only six went on to take degrees. As a fellow King was obliged to take his turn at college duties. He was appointed praelector in 1633, and in the academic year 1633/4 the entries in the college admissions book are written in his small and elegant hand; in 1636 he was appointed ‘Graecus lector’. Fellows were obliged to preach in chapel in vacations as well as in term-time, and the master of Christ's, Thomas Bainbrigg, deducted up to 16s. from the quarterly stipends (£1) of fellows who failed to fulfil this obligation; in 1634 King was fined for this offence.

Sir John King died in Lichfield on 4 January 1637 and was buried at Boyle Abbey on 30 March. King decided to travel to Ireland that summer with a view to seeing his relatives (his brother Robert, his sisters Mary and Margaret, and his uncle Bishop King) and his former tutor William Chappell, who was provost of Trinity College, Dublin; he may also have intended to visit his father's grave in Roscommon. Piracy and the threat of storms made travelling across the Irish Sea a perilous undertaking so King drew up a will (dated 30 July, with a codicil dated two days later) before he left for Chester, where his ship sailed on the spring tide of 10 August. The ship struck a rock off the coast of Anglesey and quickly sank. King was drowned, and his body was carried out to sea and never recovered.

King's friends and colleagues commemorated him in a small volume of poetry which was published in Cambridge in 1638. This slim quarto, of which some thirty-three copies survive (including Izaak Walton's) consists of two parts: the first part, which is entitled Justa Edovardo King naufrago, contains twenty poems in Latin and three in Greek; the second part, entitled Obsequies to the Memory of Mr Edward King, contains thirteen poems in English, of which the last is Milton's ‘Lycidas’. A draft of this poem survives in Milton's poetical notebook, now in Trinity College, Cambridge, and at least two copies of the printed volume (one in the British Library and one in Cambridge University Library) contain corrections to the text of ‘Lycidas’ in a hand that seems to be Milton's. The contributors to the memorial volume included Edward's brother Henry King (who is often confused with his namesake, the bishop of Chichester), Joseph Beaumont, John Cleveland, Michael Honywood, Henry More, Thomas Farnaby, and Ralph Widdrington. In addition to the thirty-six poems published in Justa there are at least four surviving unpublished memorial poems, including two by Clement Paman.

Commemorative poetry accommodates a measure of exaggeration in the praise of the deceased but the repeated and extravagant praise of King's knowledge of Greek and Latin suggests that his learning was exceptional, even by the high standards of that learned age. John Pullen of Magdalene College, for example, describes King (in Latin) as the great glory of Cambridge's men of letters, and Henry More eulogizes him (in Greek) as the light of the lamp of Athens. Such assertions help to explain why the erudite young Milton would describe King as ‘a learned friend’ in the headnote to ‘Lycidas’.

King was the author of ten published Latin poems, seven of which were written to mark the birth of royal children; of the other three, one celebrates the recovery of King Charles from smallpox in the winter of 1632 and another gives thanks for Charles's safe return from his coronation in Scotland in 1633. King's only poem to be free of the constraints of royal encomium was written to welcome the publication of Peter Hausted's comedy Odium senile. These ten occasional poems may not achieve the greatness of Milton's best Latin poetry but they are none the less wholly competent and they display a marked independence of expression as well as a firm grasp of the classical tradition. The fact that the poems are largely devoted to the praise of royalty does not point to a partisan political position because King's life ended just as England was beginning to divide into rival supporters of king and parliament; nevertheless the supportive reference to the royal fleet in a poem published in 1637, the year in which John Hampden was tried for refusing to pay ship-money, could not have been politically neutral. Similarly the assertion in a poem written in 1636 that ‘sancta maiestas Cathedræ / Dat placidam Italiæ quietem’ (‘the holy sovereignty of the church grants Italy its calm serenity’) may have been appropriate in a poem addressed to a Catholic queen but it is indicative of an unusual degree of tolerance for Roman Catholicism.

Apart from the poems written by King and the poems written in his memory the only other documents that give any hint of his personality and circumstances are his will and the probate inventory of his rooms in Christ's College. In his will he left his books (which were valued at £90) to his colleague John Alsop and his sizar John Potts, and he requested Alsop to burn his papers without reading them or allowing them to be read by anyone else. The inventory is unremarkable, save that £512 (out of a total valuation of nearly £642) consists of ‘debts owing unto him by bonds in his book’; these debts, which are described as ‘sperate et desperate’ (‘hopeful and hopeless’), imply that King enjoyed considerable wealth during his brief life. Milton does not name King in ‘Lycidas’ but the fact that he is remembered in one of the greatest poems in the English language confers on him a degree of immortality that he would not have enjoyed had he not been the learned friend of Milton.

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