Peter King, 1st Baron King

Life

He was born in Exeter in 1669, and educated at Exeter Grammar School.

In his youth he was interested in early church history, and published anonymously in 1691 An Enquiry into the Constitution, Discipline, Unity and Worship of the Primitive Church that flourished within the first Three Hundred Years after Christ. This treatise engaged the interest of his cousin, John Locke, the philosopher, by whose advice his father sent him to the university of Leiden, where he stayed for nearly three years. He entered the Middle Temple in 1694 and was called to the bar in 1698.

In 1700 he was returned to parliament for Bere Alston in Devon; he was appointed recorder of Glastonbury in 1705 and recorder of London in 1708. He was chief justice of the common pleas from 1714 to 1725, when he was appointed speaker of the House of Lords and was raised to the peerage. In June of the same year he was made lord chancellor, holding office until compelled by a paralytic stroke to resign in 1733. He was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society on 14 November 1728. He died at Ockham, Surrey, on 22 July 1734.

Assessment

Lord King as chancellor failed to sustain the reputation which he had acquired at the common law bar. Nevertheless, he left his mark on English law by establishing the principles that a will of immovable property is governed by the lex loci rei sitae, and that where a husband had a legal right to the personal estate of his wife, which must be asserted by a suit in equity, the court would not help him unless he made a provision out of the property for the wife, if she required it. He was also the author of the Act (4 Geo. II. c. 26) by virtue of which English superseded Latin as the language of the courts.

Family

King married Anne Seys in 1704. They had six children: two daughters and four sons. Each of their sons succeeded in turn as Lord King, Baron of Ockham.

In 1835 his great-great-grandson William King (1805-1893), married the only daughter of Lord Byron and was later created Earl of Lovelace. Another descendant Peter John Locke King was a member of parliament for Surrey from 1847-1849 and won some fame as an advocate of reform, being responsible for the passing of the Real Estate Charges Act 1854, and for the repeal of a large number of obsolete laws.

Works

Lord King published in 1702 a History of the Apostles' Creed (Leipzig, 1706; Basel, 1750) which went through several editions and was also translated into Latin. His earlier work "An inquiry into the constitution, discipline, unity, and worship of the primitive church: that flourished within the first three hundred years after Christ" was published 1691 and was quoted by John Wesley in many of his correspondences and is seen as influencing many of his view on the order of the Church.

Cases

Some notable cases on which he was involved: