King was of a Scotch Presbyterian family, his father having settled in Ulster after his excommunication for refusal to sign the Covenant. He betrayed in his infant years an aversion to the mechanical lessons of his schoolmistress, and suffered much whipping as a consequence. The art of reading came upon him later quite as a surprise, as he suddenly found himself able to make sense of the combinations of letters which had baffled him under the tuition of an orthodox school _régime_. During his career in College he lived as a Spartan. “I scarce had twenty pounds,” he tells us in an unpublished autograph memoir preserved in Armagh Diocesan Library, “in all the six years I spent in College, save from the College (Scholarship). Yet herein do I acknowledge God’s providence that I was able to appear _nearly_ all that time decently drest and sufficiently fed.” Although without definite religious opinions, since as a child he had received no instruction, by study and conversation with men of weight and learning in the University he came to have that settled faith which drew him to the ministry of the Church, and remained with him all through life. Thus King’s debt to Trinity College was a large one; he owed to her not only the intellectual but the spiritual training which determined his life and character. When ordained Priest, he was appointed Chaplain to the Archbishop of Tuam. The change from the narrow fare of his life in College to that of the Palace, where a “dinner of sixteen dishes and a supper of twelve, with abundant variety of wines and other generous liquors,” were the usual diet, affected his health. “The issue was, that before I had begun to dream of ill effects,” he says quaintly, “I was taken with the gout.” Archbishop Parker, who had formed a high estimate of King’s powers, appointed him, soon after his own translation to Dublin, to the Chancellorship of St. Patrick’s, at that juncture of affairs when the Duke of York, heir-presumptive to the Crown, declared himself a Roman Catholic. In 1683 he was sent to Tunbridge Wells to try a course of the waters for his health, and fell into acquaintance with many political persons. Party spirit was then running very high, and considerable excitement prevailed over the revocation of the charters of certain cities. He felt it to be his duty to support the King, so that he might not be driven to seek support from the unprincipled politicians of the day. This support was, however, only conditional upon rational and legal action on the King’s part. When the crisis came in the next reign, and it was imperative that some side should be taken in the contest between James and the Prince of Orange, King came to the conclusion that in the illegal and unjustifiable action of James there was ample reason for the transference of his allegiance to the champion of the Protestant party.