Edward King (antiquarian)

A fortune bequeathed to him by his uncle, Mr. Brown, a wholesale linendraper of Exeter, gave him financial independence, but he regularly attended the Norfolk circuit for some years, and was appointed recorder of King's Lynn.

On the death of Jeremiah Milles in February 1784, King was elected his successor in the presidency of the Society of Antiquaries, though on the understanding that Lord De Ferrars would assume the office on the ensuing 23 April.

[2] King died on 16 April 1807, aged 72, and was buried in the churchyard at Beckenham, Kent, where was his country seat was "The Oakery", on Clay Hill.

In 1788 he published Morsels of Criticism, tending to illustrate some few passages in the Holy Scriptures, upon philosophical principles and an enlarged view of things.

Among other claims, King attempted to prove that John the Baptist was an angel from heaven, and the same who formerly appeared in the person of Elijah.

A notice of the book in Thomas James Mathias's Pursuits of Literature created some demand for it, and a second edition with a "supplemental part" was published in 1800 (3 vols.

Irritated by Gough's critique on this tract in the Gentleman's Magazine, he wrote an angry letter to the printer, John Nichols.

Jonas Hanway, in a report made to the society in July of that year, had proposed a marine school on land.