Henry King, Bishop of Chichester

The Rawlinson Verse Exercises

The autograph verse exercises are preserved among the Rawlinson Papers in the Bodleian Library: i.e. among papers collected by the Oxford antiquary Thomas Hearne (1678-1735) and afterwards acquired by Richard Rawlinson (1690-1755). These papers include manuscripts formerly owned by Dr John Fell (1625-86), Bishop of Oxford, whose father Samuel Fell (1584-1649), Dean of Christ Church, was a close friend of Henry King's uncle, Philip King (see Crum, pp. 237-8). The relevant items were described by Percy Simpson in ‘The Bodleian Manuscripts of Henry King’, Bodleian Quarterly Record, 5 (1929), 324-40 (and plate after p. 304). Simpson's account there was marred, however, by confusion over the hands of Henry King and his brother John. At the prompting of Margaret Crum, he amended his account in a later note, ‘John and Henry King: A Correction’, BLR, 4 (1952-3), 208-9. The same failure to distinguish between the somewhat similar hands of the two brothers had also affected Lawrence Mason's edition of King's English Poems (New Haven, 1914), where some poems by John King are erroneously attributed to Henry (see Crum, p. 249 et seq.).

In sum, it may be established that the following manuscripts are in the hand of John King (1595-1639):

(i) Several poems (some probably of John's own composition) in MSS Rawl. D. 317, ff. 147r-58r, 161r, 166r-7r, 171r, 173r-5r, and Rawl. D. 398, ff. 160r-7r, 172r-3v, 177r-v, 178r-9r, 188r-9r, 230r-2v.

(ii) Some theological notes in MS Rawl. D. 399, ff. 165r-7r, 188r-91v, 219r-38v.

(iii) Some partly autograph political and ecclesiastical documents in MS Rawl. D. 399, ff. 107r-v, 113r, 169r-170v, 179r, 187r, 240r.

The poem by John King in MS Rawl. D. 317, f. 161, is reproduced in facsimile by Simpson in Bodleian Quarterly Record, 5 (1929), after p. 304 (as, erroneously, in the hand of Henry King).

The manuscripts in the hand of Henry King comprise:

(i) MS Rawl. D. 317A, f. 73: ‘Pasquinata’ (beginning ‘Out of the North is come here to be seene’); an 18-line satire on Queen Christina of Sweden, unlikely to be of King's composition.

(ii) MS Rawl. D. 317B, f. 211v: a six-line verse, beginning ‘A Battaile amongst the Bees’, possibly of Henry King's own composition (see *KiH 1).

(iii) MS Rawl. D. 317B, f. 176*v: an eight verses on Cromwell's dissolution of the Long Parliament in 1653, possibly of Henry King's own composition (see *KiH 392).

(iv) MS Rawl. D. 397, f. 317r: a second autograph copy of ‘A Battaile amongst the Bees’ (see *KiH 2).

(v) MS Rawl. D. 398, f. 195r: a Latin epitaph on the death of King's father, John King, Bishop of London (1621), possibly of Henry King's own composition (see *KiH 803).

(vi) MS Rawl. D. 398, ff. 243r-4v: a sequence of Latin epigrams by Henry King addressed to his father and concerning an attack of fever (see *KiH 800).

The Rawlinson Papers also include a copy of Henry King's Elegy Occasioned by Sicknesse with autograph corrections by him (MS Rawl. D. 398, ff. 168r-9v: see *KiH 148) and a scribal copy of a Latin elegy by King on Dr John Spenser (MS Rawl. D. 912, f. 305r; see KiH 801), as well as a scribal copy of King's celebrated ‘Exequy’ to his wife (MS Rawl. D. 398, ff. 175r-6r: see KiH 332) which may also conceivably derive from his family papers. The same papers also contain (MS Rawl. D. 398, f. 196v) a copy of another (unrelated) poem which is endorsed ‘For M^r Manne’ — denoting a connection with King's amanuensis, Thomas Manne (see below).

Letters

Original letters by Henry King are rare. A few — chiefly dating from his later years — are recorded in entries below (KiH 804-815). These may be supplemented by three further letters which are known only from early printed sources, namely:

Documents

King's letters may also be supplemented by a few recorded documents signed by him, ranging from his subscription as a seventeen-year-old student at Oxford to official papers as a bishop in the Restoration period (see KiH 816-827). Some later signatures (chiefly as Bishop of Chichester: ‘Hen: Chichester’), which are not given separate entries below, are to be found on official documents in the National Archives, Kew. They include certificates issued by him between 1635 and 1661, in SP 16/290/57; 29/4/106; 29/7/91.I; 29/12/21.I; 29/12/43.I; 29/12/56.II; and 29/34/49.II. King's will also survives, but in a registered copy (KiH 828).

King's Books

Other examples of King's hand are found in a few of the printed books that survive from his library. Following the capture of Chichester by the Parliamentary troops of Sir William Waller on 28 December 1642 — at which time the Cathedral Library itself was somewhat despoiled — King was deprived of many of his goods and rents by a Parliamentary Committee. After April 1643, according to the account in his later petition to the King (KiH 824), ‘his whole Library at Chichester’ was seized by the regicide William Cawley. In his will of 1653 King later bequeathed what he called ‘a small remainder of a large library taken from me at Chichester’ to his son, John, ‘excepting only such English bookes which may be fit for my sonne Henryes use’. (John King the Younger in turn bequeathed in 1671 his Latin and some other books ‘to the use of Schollers in this Diocese of Chichester hopeing this example will move others to do the same’). To other relatives and friends, Henry King bequeathed: to John Millington ‘fower volumes fairely bound, being a description of the world in French, written by Pierre Avity’; to Sir Richard Hubert ‘Camdens Brittannia with mapps, K. James his works, and history of the Irish warres, all three in folio’; to his sister Anne ‘my great french Bible with prints, which once belonged to my honored Friend Doctor Donne’; to his brother Philip (who predeceased Henry) ‘that parcel of books which once belonged to my deceased brother M^r William King, which I redeemed in Oxford’; to Francis Tryon (who also predeceased Henry King) ‘the workes of Mr. Samuell Purchas in folio, and Stowes Chronicle, and the History of the Church of Scotland by Io. Spotswood’; and to Walter Jones ‘the workes of Barradius in three Vol. in folio, and the last concordance in Latine by Stephanus’.

The precise extent of the despoliation of both King's episcopal library and his private library is unclear, although at least some books appear to have been ‘redeemed’. Neither is it known what happened to any of the books specifically mentioned in King's will. However, it seems likely that a number of books which would have been owned or used by King are still preserved in the Cathedral Library at Chichester. Almost all the 974 books listed in the Cathedral's ‘Old Catalogue of books before 1735’ (which is itself a copy of a much earlier catalogue) date from before King's death and, following yet later dispersal, some 255 of these books are still retained. In addition, fourteen early books from Chichester Cathedral which were recorded in the ‘Old Catalogue’ have been acquired by the University of London Library. Sales records exist for a further fourteen books from the Cathedral which were sold at Sotheby's on 24-5 November 1947 (lots 5, 18, 19, 27, 35-7, 43, 52, 54-5) and on 25 October 1949 (lots 323, 326).

Of these various books, which were almost certainly associated with King, at least twenty-four volumes (or sets of volumes) still at Chichester bear inscriptions or annotations in his own hand. Though not given separate entries below, these books include a presentation exemplum of Sir Henry Spelman's Archaeologus (London, 1626), a book given to King by his father's erstwhile chaplain Henry Mason; George Buchanan's De iure regni apud Scotos (London, 1583), with quotations from William Barclay copied in by King; editions of St Gregory and St Augustine; and three books inscribed by King in his earlier Christ Church days. One of the volumes sold at Sotheby's (25 October 1949, lot 323) — St Ambrose, Opera (Paris, 1549) — is also recorded as bearing King's signature (with the date 1617). For discussions of this subject, see Francis W. Steer, Chichester Cathedral Library, The Chichester Papers No. 44 (Chichester, 1964); Mary Hobbs, ‘Henry King, John Donne and the Refounding of Chichester Cathedral Library’, The Book Collector, 33 (Summer 1984), 189-205 (with a facsimile of one inscribed book); and also Mark Purcell, ‘Master Petypher's Virgil’, The Book Collector, 50/4 (Winter 2001), 471-92).

King's bequest to his sister Anne noted above is a reminder that in 1631 King was co-executor of John Donne's will and probably obtained some portion of Donne's library according to the ‘Scedule’ mentioned in the will. Thus there is always a remote possibility that volumes directly associated with King may once have belonged to Donne. Conversely, some of the two hundred or so widely dispersed books that can be identified as having once been Donne's may have subsequently belonged to King as well. A list of further volumes thought to be owned by Donne and preserved at Chichester Cathedral is given in Mary Hobbs's articles ‘More Books from the Library of John Donne’, The Book Collector, 29 (Winter 1980), 590-2, and ‘“To a Most Dear Friend” — Donne's Bellarmine’, Review of English Studies, NS 32 (1981), 435-8), although it must be recorded that, in his subsequent inspection of these particular books, the Donne Scholar I. A. Shapiro was very sceptical about this supposed provenance.

In his letter to Izaak Walton noted above, King mentions, furthermore, that three days before his death Donne delivered into King's hands ‘those excellent Sermons of his now made publick…prepared…for the Press; together with…all his Sermon-Notes, and his other Papers, containing an Extract of near Fifteen hundred Authors’. The last items are also mentioned in the will of John Donne the Younger (1662), as ‘all those Papers which are of Authors Analysed by my Father; many of which he [King] hath already received with his Common-Place Book’. The fate of these papers and commonplace book is not certain except that they were evidently retained neither by King nor by Walton (they were ‘lost both to me and your self’, wrote King). They may have been returned to John Donne the Younger (1604-62/3), being by implication contained in the ‘cabinet’ of his father's papers which he subsequently bequeathed to ‘Mr. Walton's son’ (see Crum, p. 14, and Hannah, pp. xxx, lxx). In the same letter to Walton, King discusses the fate of Richard Hooker's papers, which had once been in the possession of his father, John King, Bishop of London. One item he mentions — a letter about Hooker by George Cranmer and Sir Edwin Sandys, which King sent on to Walton — can be identified among manuscripts at Christ Church, Oxford (MS 295: see HkR 11).

As for the bulk of King's own papers, it is clear from his letter to Edward Bysshe (*KiH 808) that they suffered the same fate as his library: ‘through the barbarous vsage of a wretched Committee at Chichester, I was not only depriu'd of Those amongst seuerall collections of higher moment, but denyed my owne Priuate Papers, w^ch had bene the moniments of my course in Study through all my Life’.

The Manuscripts of King's Verse

Apart from the exercises among the Rawlinson papers, none of King's poems survives in his own hand. However, it appears that during the 1630s, while Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, and before he became Dean of Rochester (1639), King allowed fair copies to be made of his collected verse for use within a limited coterie centred at Christ Church.

The principal, identifiable figure responsible for such copies was Thomas Manne (1581/2-1641), who was Chaplain of Christ Church from 1605 to 1635 and whose signature appears several times in the Disbursements Books there. Manne was the chief scribe responsible for the ‘Hannah MS’ (Bodleian MS Eng. poet. e. 30), which bears autograph corrections by King himself. Manne also compiled a miscellany of his own (British Library Add. MS 58215), chiefly of verse by Christ Church poets, in which he incorporated 24 poems by King. This manuscript too was handled by King himsel, who has added in his own hand the ascriptions of three poems to Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset. In addition, Manne's hand can be recognized in an independent copy of King's ‘Exequy’ to his wife (KiH 336), and (adopting a variant style) in an independent copy of An Essay on Death and a Prison (KiH 318).

Second in importance to Manne is a scribe who, it is clear, consciously modelled his script on Manne's and can thus, to use Margaret Crum's term, be known as Manne's ‘imitator’. He was responsible for part of the ‘Hannah MS’ (Bodleian, MS Eng. poet. e. 30); for all of the ‘Malone MS’ (Bodleian, MS Malone 22) and ‘Houghton MS’ (British Library, Add. MS 62134) and for most of the ‘Stoughton MS’ (owned by Rosemary Williams). It is not possible to identify this scribe. It has been tentatively suggested by Mary Hobbs that Richard Smith of Warwickshire who, on 14 July 1620, at the age of 22, was admitted to Christ Church and was ‘serviens’ to Thomas Manne, may have acted as his amanuensis. This date is, however, considerably earlier than the period in which the extant manuscripts were evidently transcribed. The hand of Manne's ‘imitator’ can, indeed, be found as late as the end of 1647 when he transcribed ‘His Ma^ties Answere to the Bills, & Propositions presented to Him at Carisbrook Castle in the Isle of Wight’ (Bodleian, MS Jones 56, f. 146r-v).

A third, anonymous scribe, writing slightly later in the 1640s, can be recognized as wholly responsible for the ‘Phillipps MS’ (Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 8471) and for additions to the ‘Stoughton MS’; while a fourth, unidentified scribe was responsible for the ‘Wrest Park MS’ (Bodleian, MS Eng. poet. e. 127).

From the nature of these collections, the occurrence of common hands, and even their physical appearance (their neat, calligraphic layout and similar morocco bindings on several of them), it is evident that these manuscripts were the product of a coterie and were intended for limited circulation.

That manuscripts from this group, or transcripts thereof, did fall into other hands in due course, however, is clear from other evidence. In their apologetic preface to the author in their allegedly unauthorized edition of King's Poems (1657) (reprinted in Hannah, pp. 1-2), the publishers Richard Marriot and Henry Herringman claim (ingenuously or otherwise) to have prevented ‘the present attempts of others’ to injure King's reputation ‘by their false copies of these Poems’. They themselves, they claim, are publishing at the instigation of King's ‘friends’, who have (it is implied) at ‘sundry times’ unsuccessfully endeavoured to persuade King to publish and who, ‘lest the ill publishing might disfigure these things’, have furnished Marriot and Herringman ‘with some papers which they thought Authentick’. Again, the identity of these ‘friends’ must remain conjectural. A possibility that has been tentatively advanced is that Izaak Walton, who was allegedly a friend to King, as also to Richard Marriot, was responsible, but there is no clear evidence of his collusion.

Notable groups of poems by King are also found in certain manuscript miscellanies. Both the quality of their texts and the fact that they are, for the most part, signed with the distinctive ‘HK’ monogram of King found in the principal manuscript collections, indicate a close interrelationship between these sources. On 3 February 1636/7 it was possible for James Howell to comment on ‘those choice Manuscripts’ which an Inns of Court correspondent had sent him, ‘among which I find divers rare pieces; but that which afforded me most entertainment in those Miscellanies, was Dr. Henry King's Poems’ (Familiar Letters, cited in Hannah, p. xxxiv, and in Crum, p. 17). By this time, however, a number of King's earlier poems had followed familiar routes of transmission — through miscellanies initially produced in Christ Church circles and thence to other university and Inns of Court circles — for copies of poems by King, often in relatively early versions, are found in numerous other miscellanies recorded in the entries below. Certain occasional pieces — such as King's elegy on Gustavus Adolphus (KiH 223-243) — clearly enjoyed initial circulation by means of individual and separate copies

Principal Manuscript Collections of King's Verse

The principal manuscripts of poems by King recorded in the entries below may be listed briefly as follows, with the delta numbers originally supplied in IELM (plus the addition here of [KiH Δ 13]):

Editing King's Poems

With the survival of so many contemporary collections, as well as the 1657 Poems, the task of an editor of King's poems is reasonably circumscribed. Not, however, that the texts in the main manuscripts are identical in every detail, or even that their contents are similar (as is evident from the different number of poems each contains). Margaret Crum has argued that King's ‘original’ manuscript of his poems (now lost) was the common copy-text for KiH Δ 1, KiH Δ 3 and KiH Δ 5 above (those principal manuscripts known to her), but that King was in the habit of periodically making corrections to his manuscript, with the result that each transcript represents the original at a different stage of correction. She also suggests, plausibly, that King's ‘original’ manuscript consisted of unbound papers: hence the different arrangement of the poems in each transcript. Crum was not, before 1965, aware of KiH Δ 2, KiH Δ 4 and KiH Δ 6, which might be expected to throw further light on the history of the texts, perhaps in support of her theory of copy-text. In this connection, a major contribution was made in 1973 by the completion of Mary Hobbs's unpublished thesis on the ‘Stoughton MS’ (see KiH Δ 6), which should be used by future scholars in conjunction with Crum's edition. Besides offering an extensive study of the ‘Stoughton MS’ itself and of its textual significance, Hobbs offers innumerable original insights into other related manuscripts and into the transmission of texts in miscellanies of the period; she demonstrates ‘the evidently important position of Henry King as a disseminator, not only of his own poems but those of others’; she establishes far-reaching connections between King and contemporary musical circles and songbooks (further elaborated in her article ‘John Wilson's Literary Sources’, Lute Society Journal, 17 (1975), 6-16); and she also argues, in demonstration of the importance of fine detail in the main manuscripts, that King's peculiar use of capitalization, regarded by Crum as ‘apparently rather capricious’, is actually a deliberate system of notation for reading aloud.

With regard to her editing practice, Crum edits, ‘wherever possible, from copies by King's second scribe’ (i.e. Manne's ‘imitator’) [viz. from KiH Δ 1, ff. 64r-86r, and KiH Δ 3], because, she believes, he shows the clearest signs of being the most conscientiously accurate copyist. Otherwise she prints from the ‘best available text’, usually the 1657 Poems or the second, slightly expanded, edition of 1664. Those other manuscript texts cited in her ‘Notes’ are signalled in the entries below by the phrase ‘This MS collated in Crum’, although the collations she gives are usually very selective. Those other ‘miscellaneous’ manuscript texts which she simply lists without further comment (on pp. 60-2) are signalled as being ‘recorded’ by her.

The Verse Canon

The canon of King's English verse accepted for present purposes is also based on Crum (to which may be added the lengthy edition of King's version of the Psalms, published in 1651) and includes those verses which may be of King's composition among the Rawlinson Papers (noted above). It excludes those spurious poems sometimes ascribed to King, listed in Crum (pp. 251-2), as well as poems by other members of King's family, notably his brothers John, William and Philip, and his sister Anne, which are to be found in various sources (see Crum, pp. 249-51, and Mary Hobbs's thesis noted above).

Like many of his Oxford contemporaries, King also wrote occasional Latin verse. These verses have never been collected, but entries are given below to a few Latin compositions attributable to King and found in manuscripts (KiH 800-803). For the record, those other Latin verses by ‘Henricus King ex Aede Christi’ which appeared only in printed sources (i.e. Oxford academic miscellanies) may be listed here briefly (chronologically according to publication) as follows:

Miscellaneous

A printed exemplum of King's Poems (London, 1664), with ‘the autograph of Anne Howe (the Poet's Sister, see p. 83)’ was sold at Sotheby's, 1 March 1971 (Sir John Simeon sale, fifth day), lot 1132, to Molini. In his annotated exemplum of his own A Roll of Honor (London, 1908) in the British Library (1655/4, opposite p. 129), W. Carew Hazlitt also mentions ‘Ann King Sister of Bishop Henry King. Her name occurs in a few books of a religious character’.

For King's sermons and prose works, none of which is known to survive in manuscript, see Keynes, pp. 51-81, and Mary Hobbs's edition of them (Scolar Press, 1992).

Peter Beal