Biography Henry King Bishop of Chichester

Poet Biography

An English bishop and poet, eldest son of John King , former bishop of London. He was baptized on the i6th of January 1591- With his younger brother John.

The brothers 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 areferments he was made bishop of Chichester in 1642, receiving at the same time the rich living of Petworth, Sussex.
He married Anne Berkeley in 1617 (died 1624, aged 24) when he was Archdeacon of Colchester.

On the 2oth of December of that year Chichester surrendered to the Parliamentary army, and King was among the prisoners. After release he found an asylum with his brother-in-law, Sir Richard Hobart of Langley, Buckinghamshire, and then 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 3oth 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.