King was appointed Archbishop of Dublin in February 1703. It was a significant achievement for a man who had caused almost as much strife as he had developed admiration in others, and his elevation was recognition of both his tremendous force of personality and of his unstinting efforts on behalf of his church, both practical and theoretical. King's magna opera were still to come when he was enthroned in Dublin, an act he managed to make controversial by demanding that it happen twice – against custom – once in St Patrick's and once at the Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity (Christ Church, Dublin) as part of his effort to demonstrate his primacy over all the clerics of his archdiocese. The Dean of Christ Church, Welbore Ellis, Bishop of Kildare, and the cathedral's archdeacon were not impressed. Edward Southwell, who had succeeded his father as Secretary of State for Ireland – and who, for the most part, would work well with King – noted that while King had an ‘admirable disposition to push a thing to the utmost’ when ‘in the right’, he also had the ‘misfortune to have the same zeal … if he happens to be in the wrong’.

Strife aside, King was now politically and geographically at the centre of parliamentary and governmental affairs, but his new position also conferred an additional importance to a work he had just recently seen through the press.