Lije and Works of Henry King. 237 



missing dates of these births, as well as of those of the marriage and 

 of Anne Berkeley's death. The one fixed date is that of the birth 

 of little Anne King, for Bishop John King's funeral certificate^ 

 states that she was five weeks old when that license was issued, 

 and therefore must have been born in the last week of February, 

 1621. Following out Goffe's suggestion, now, we may infer that 

 the son John who lived to grow up must have been born in January, 

 1620, say, or at the end of 1619 (for the funeral certificate gives his 

 age as, roughly, a year and a half, in early April, 1621); the first- 

 born son John, who died in infancy, would have been born, then, 

 about the end of 1618 ; and the marriage would have taken place 

 early in 1618, or towards the end of 1617. Starting with Anne's 

 birth, again, in late February, 1621, we may suppose that the fourth 

 child, Henry, was born in March or April, 1622 ;2 that the fifth child, 

 also a son — perhaps the second who died before the mother, — was 

 born in May or June, 1623 ; and that the sixth and last, also a son — 

 perhaps one of the "two Children dying of one Disease" after their 

 mother's death, — was born in July or August, 1624. It seems 

 fairly reasonable, next, to assign Anne Berkeley's death to the last 

 half of 1624; for she died of a "Feaver,"^ and was buried in St. 

 Paul's,* and neither of these statements could well have been made 

 if she had died in London in 1625, for that would practically mean 

 dying of the plague.^ Moreover, in 1625, Henry King was in Oxford, 

 taking his D.D. and avoiding the plague," — and incidentally, in all 

 probability, bearing the news of his wife's recent death to Goffe's 

 sympathetic ears ; and finally, she could not have died in this plague • 

 interval, or surely her husband would have made some reference to 

 his loss when he resumed his interrupted series of sermons on the 

 Lord's Prayer in London,' or in his "Act Sunday" Sermon at Ox- 

 ford, in July, 1625.8 



1 Hannah, xci, xcii. 



2 He died Feb. 21, 1669, in the 46th year of his age ; i. e., he was not quite 

 47. — Hannah, xciii. 



3 As her husband's beautiful elegy shows. * Hannah, xv. 



^ "In 1625 is the third great London plague with 35,417 deaths— though 

 the year 1624 was remarkably exempt, and 1626 nearly so." Encyc. Brit., 

 Xlth ed., xxi, 695. 



fi Cf. Bibliog., p. 278, N. I, inf. 



' Ibid., notice the unconcerned, impersonal tone of his resumption : 

 "though the Contagion which lately dispersed us, hath diminished many 

 of those hearers," etc.— "Exposition on the Lords Prayer," 1628, p. 243. 



8 Bibliog., p. 275. 



