KING, Ralph (1619-c.66), of Londonderry and Dublin.

The son of a London vintner, Ralph King was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School, and at St John’s College Oxford, where he was a fellow from 1637.25Merchant Taylors’ Sch. Regs.; Al. Ox. Returning to London at the outbreak of the first civil war, in the autumn of 1643 King was appointed clerk of a new committee formed by the corporation of London to organize volunteers for the Irish wars, which sat at Merchant Taylors’ Hall.26SP16/539, ff. 68, 73. He continued to work for this committee at least until the spring of 1644, and as a result seems to have become involved in the affairs of Ulster, where the city companies had interests in the Londonderry plantation.27SP16/539, f. 73. By the autumn of 1646 King had moved to city of Londonderry, where he worked as keeper of the stores for the garrison, under its governor, Lord Folliot.28CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 510. In December 1646 he was awarded a salary of 4s a day, and in January 1647 he was promoted to be collector of the customs in the port.29CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 562, 587, 598. King seems to have owed his advancement to the influence of Parliament’s lord president of Connaught, Sir Charles Coote*, who had taken over the conduct of the war in western Ulster. His appointment as customs collector came during Coote’s assumption of the governorship of Londonderry while Folliot was absent in early 1647, and, before the end of 1648, he had been appointed treasurer of the garrison.30CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 587, 599; SP16/539/4, f. 201. The impression that King was a trusted client of the Coote interest is confirmed by his employment as Coote’s envoy to England in January 1649, when the lord president recommended him to the Irish treasurer-at-war, as ‘a person who hath given me good testimony of his real affections to the Parliament and in the management of the moneys which are raised of the country for maintenance of the army’.31SP16/539/4, f. 201.

King’s sojourn in London came at a time when Coote’s forces were under constant threat from the confederate and royalists forces, and Londonderry underwent a prolonged siege. As Coote’s envoy, King was well received by the council of state, and was interviewed by Oliver Cromwell* and other prominent MPs in April and May 1649.32CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 103, 118, 573. Over the next two years he advised the council on provisions for Ireland; defended Coote’s seizure of goods from merchantmen; and lobbied for fresh supplies of ammunition to be sent to the northern forces once the tide of the war had turned in Parliament’s favour.33CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 373, 459; 1650, p. 296. At the end of March 1651, with Parliament now in control of Ulster, King was given £100 to pay for his return journey to Ireland.34CSP Dom. 1651, p. 554. Resident in Londonderry from May 1651, King resumed his duties as treasurer, and was soon appointed to the local revenue commission, which, under Coote’s supervision, effectively governed the region in the mid-1650s.35Bodl. Firth c.5, f. 82; SP28/77, f. 406; CJ vii. 176b; SP63/281, unfol; Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 292. In April 1653 he was awarded a ‘convenient house’ in the town, and 500 acres of land in the surrounding countryside, in recognition of his services to the commonwealth.36Eg. 1762, f. 207v. By the summer of 1654 King had been elected mayor of Londonderry, and in the autumn he was appointed to the assessment commissions for cos. Londonderry, Tyrone and Donegal.37C219/44, unfol.; An Assessment for Ire.

King was elected for the combined borough of Londonderry and Coleraine in all three protectorate Parliaments. It is likely that he owed his election to his prominence in Londonderry, and his relationship with the Coote family was no doubt also an advantage, although their influence in northern Ulster declined as the decade went on. King was not an active MP: there is no evidence that he took up his seat in 1654, and in 1656 he was named to only two committees before being given leave to return to Ireland on 31 October.38CJ vii. 424b, 427a, 447b. The main reason for King’s withdrawal from the Commons in 1656 was his growing importance in the Irish administration, now dominated by Coote’s ally, Henry Cromwell*. In December 1655 King was appointed commissioner for leasing the commonwealth’s lands in Ireland, and in 1656 he was acting as commissioner for setting out forfeited lands in cos. Tyrone and Londonderry.39Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 552, 665; NLI, MS 758, f. 98. His colleagues on the leasing commission included Vincent Gookin* and Henry Markham*, both of whom also came under considerable pressure to leave Westminster and return to their duties in Ireland. A letter from Gookin to Henry Cromwell, dated 21 October 1656, set out the reasons why King had been chosen to return: unlike that of his colleagues, ‘Mr King’s interest in the north is very considerable’, and it was Ulster that most needed its land grants and leases investigated; also, in Gookin’s opinion, ‘the affairs of Parliament all go on here with so much unanimity that he may be spared without the least prejudice to affairs here’.40Henry Cromwell Corresp. 184-5. In the spring of 1657 King was firmly established in Dublin, where he handled the business of the leasing commission with the help of Alderman Hooke, and in July he received further instructions for the leasing of property in towns, working with Gookin and Markham.41Henry Cromwell Corresp. 212; Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 665.

In January 1658 he was named to another commission to settle disputes about the allocation of adventurers’ lands, and petitioned Henry Cromwell for an advance of his salary ‘towards the defraying my charges into England’.42Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 667; Lansdowne 823, f. 11. King was in London when Parliament reconvened later in the same month, and George Rawdon* hoped he would assist in passing legislation for payment of the arrears of officers who had served in Ireland before 1649, describing him as ‘a very near friend of mine and an honest gentleman’.43SP63/287, ff. 147v, 150. After the abrupt closure of this Parliament in February 1658 King returned to Ireland, where he seems to have taken on the role of prothonotary in the Dublin law-courts.44Kenny, King’s Inn, 154. He travelled back to Ulster in the spring of 1658, staying with the family of Arthur Hill* at Hillsborough in March, and renewing his acquaintance with Rawdon.45SP63/287, f. 168.

King attended the 1659 Parliament, but nothing is known of his activities in the Commons, although it seems to have been in England (possibly at Oxford) that he was awarded a doctorate in law, as he was thereafter known as ‘Dr King’.46Henry Cromwell Corresp. 516; NAI, Lodge’s MSS, 1.A.53.55, f. 132. His closeness to the Cromwells is not in doubt. In early May, he acted as courier to Henry Cromwell from Protector Richard Cromwell*, who commended King to his brother as one ‘who hath seen things and understood more by his general converse then myself’, and who could advise Henry on the feasibility of military resistance to the army’s coup.47Henry Cromwell Corresp. 516. When Henry Cromwell finally gave up the fight, King gravitated back to Sir Charles Coote. In August 1659 he was said to be advising Coote on whether to make contacts with the royalists in exile, and after Coote and other officers took control of Dublin in the following December, he was appointed as judge-advocate.48Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 70n, 144. As a result of this promotion, in January 1660 King was given the task of drawing up charges against the regicide, Sir Hardress Waller*, who had turned against the Coote and his allies.49HMC 8th Rep. 582; TCD, MS 844, ff. 191-5; NLI, MS 839, unfol. Although King did not serve in the General Convention in March (the Londonderry borough seat went instead to the city’s recorder, John Godbold), this left him free to act as an emissary between the General Convention and the English council of state in the weeks that followed.50CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 594; Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 178.

King survived the Restoration without incident, and was included in the general pardon granted to Coote and his allies in January 1661.51CSP Ire. 1660-2, p. 188. For much of the early 1660s, he was involved in the land settlement in Ireland, and he was appointed sub-commissioner for implementing the act of settlement in September 1661.52NAI, Lodge’s MSS, 1.A.53.55, f. 132. Yet, unlike many of his colleagues, King had little in the way of ill-gotten gains to protect. He complained volubly about his financial plight on various occasions in the late 1650s, and after 1660 his position seems to have been little better.53NLI, MS 758, f. 98; Lansd. 823, f. 11. In late 1662 he still awaited compensation for losses incurred in Londonderry during the 1640s, and although he was allocated repayment from the estates of the marquess of Antrim shortly afterwards, the suppression of attainder proceedings against that peer ruined his chances of compensation.54CSP Ire. 1660-2, p. 656; 1663-4, p. 339. He was more successful in gaining non-pecuniary honours, however: he was elected for Ratoath, co. Meath, for the Irish Parliament of 1661; appointed recorder of Londonderry at about the same time; and in 1665 admitted to the King’s Inn of Dublin on Charles II’s recommendation.55CJI i. 593; CSP Ire. 1663-4, p. 571. King was not to enjoy such marks of favour for long, however, as he had died by the end of 1666.56HMC Ormonde, o.s. i. 101.