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Summary

William King disappeared from history, so much so and so rapidly that after he was buried, at his request without a headstone, plans to provide for a memorial somehow got forgotten. King was an instinctive conservative but a hard-headed realist who knew there was no golden past to conserve. He was a committed servant of a national institution whose service was marked by stubbornness often sufficient to alienate his erstwhile allies.

King was born in May 1650 in Antrim, Ireland, the son of a devout separatist Presbyterian who had left Scotland out of objections to his church's views about an appropriate social-religious contract. King's father would later run into some minor trouble in his adopted home when he refused to assent to the Solemn League and Covenant, not out of any religious opposition to the doctrines expressed therein but because of a deeply held political objection to the secular imposition of religious orthodoxy. The senior King was representative of an understanding of the role of religion in society that had in the English-speaking world its most effective advocate in the person of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, who had fled from Massachusetts Bay colony after angering its distinctly non-separatist Puritan leadership. Williams combined a strict separatist Puritanism with an appreciation of the inherent complications of any sort of church-state compact.

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Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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