William King (16 March 1685 – 30 December 1763) was an English academic and writer, Principal of St Mary Hall, Oxford from 1719, He was known for strongly held Jacobite views, and as a satirist and poet.

[2] King devoted his life to scholarship and literature, interested himself in politics, and was long recognised the head of the Jacobite party at Oxford.

[4] For a time King acted as secretary to the Duke of Ormonde and the Earl of Arran, when they were Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and he was elected principal of St Mary Hall in 1719.

[6] During the same year King met Nathaniel Hooke at Dr. George Cheyne's house at Bath, Somerset, and acted as his amanuensis while he was translating Andrew Michael Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus.

[2] Early in 1746 William Lauder, later exposed as a literary forger, travelled south from Scotland, and King welcomed him in Oxford, approving of his politics.

The group of scholars who subsequently demonstrated Lauder's bad faith included Roger Watkins, vice-principal of St Mary Hall.

He with others (Robert Thyer and Thomas Newton, as well as John Bowle who already was a public critic of Lauder) therefore proceeded carefully to gather evidence.

His heart, having been enclosed in a silver urn, was deposited by his own directions in the chapel of St Mary Hall, where there is a monument to his memory, with a Latin epitaph written by himself.

[9] The audience included key supporters of the Hanoverian heir Frederick, Prince of Wales, who found also some signs of the Tory ground shifting.

[10] Be that as it may, Jacobite propagandists lapped up King's themes, the invocation of Astraea in Virgil's terms of return, and the slogan "Redeat Magnus Ille Genius Britanniae" was adopted for use on the medallion marking the 1752 English covert visit of the Pretender.

[2] King thought himself badly treated in the course of his Irish lawsuit, and attacked his enemies in a mock-heroic poem, in two books, called The Toast (alleged to have been originally composed in Latin by a Laplander, "Frederick Scheffer", and translated into English, with notes and observations, by "Peregrine O'Donald, Esq.")

Swift praised it, and The Toast was completed in four books, inscribed to him, and printed in London (1736), with a frontispiece by Hubert-François Gravelot (engraver Bernard Baron);[16] it was reissued in 1747.

It may have been identical with Antonietti ducis Corseorum epistola ad Corseos de rege eligendo included in King's collected writings.

[2] In 1739 King issued an anonymous political satire entitled Miltoni Epistola ad Pollionem (i.e. to Lord Polwarth), 1738, London, dedicated to Alexander Pope, of which a second edition appeared in 1740.

Soon after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, King described Prince William, Duke of Cumberland as a man "qui timet omnia præter Deum" ("who fears everything except God").

[2] King published a volume of fanciful anonymous essays called The Dreamer, London, 1754, which was assailed in the Whig papers as tainted with Jacobitism.

[20] He retaliated against authors of libels which had appeared in the Evening Advertiser, attacked a tract called A Defence of the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College, and spoke severely of a canon of Windsor named Richard Blacow.

King wrote also: an inscription for the collection of statues presented to the university in 1756 by the Countess Dowager of Pomfret; an Elogium in 1758 on Chevalier John Taylor the oculist, of which he printed copies for his friends; and an epitaph on Beau Nash.

[2] Assisted by the contributions of old members of St Mary Hall, King rebuilt the east side of the quadrangle, and added a new room to the principal's lodgings.