Peter King, 1st Baron King, (c. 1669 – 22 July 1734), commonly referred to as Lord King, was an English lawyer and politician, who became Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain. Life King was born in Exeter in 1669, and educated at Exeter Grammar School. In his youth he was interested in early church history, and published anonymously in 1691 An Enquiry into the Constitution, Discipline, Unity and Worship of the Primitive Church that flourished within the first Three Hundred Years after Christ. This treatise engaged the interest of his cousin, John Locke, the philosopher, by whose advice his father sent him to the Leiden University, where he stayed for nearly three years. He entered the Middle Temple in 1694 and was called to the bar in 1698. In 1700 he was returned to Parliament of England as the member for Bere Alston in Devon, holding the seat until 1715. He was appointed recorder of Glastonbury in 1705 and recorder of London in 1708. Made a Serjeant-at-Law, he was appointed Chief Justice of the Common Pleas from 1714 to 1725, when he was raised to the peerage as a Lord Justice and Speaker of the House of Lords. In June of the same year he was made Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, holding office until compelled by a paralytic stroke to resign in 1733. He was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society on 14 November 1728. He died at Ockham, Surrey, on 22 July 1734. Assessment Lord King as chancellor failed to sustain the reputation which he had acquired at the common law bar. Nevertheless, he left his mark on English law by establishing the principles that a will of immovable property is governed by the lex loci rei sitae, and that where a husband had a legal right to the personal estate of his wife, which must be asserted by a suit in equity, the court would not help him unless he made a provision out of the property for the wife, if she required it. He was also the author of the Act (4 Geo. II. c. 26) by virtue of which English superseded Latin as the language of the courts. Family King married Anne Seys in 1704. They had six children: two daughters and four sons. Each of their sons succeeded in turn as Lord King, Baron of Ockham. After his death in 1734, the