Part 40

With the exception of occasional changes of residence in England, generally for the sake of his wife's health, one or two short holiday trips abroad, a tour in the West Indies, and another in America to visit his eldest son settled there as an engineer, his life was spent in the peaceful, if active, occupations of a clergyman who did his duty earnestly, and of a vigorous and prolific writer. But in spite of this apparently uneventful life, he was for many years one of the most prominent men of his time, and by his personality and his books he exercised considerable influence on the thought of his generation. Though not profoundly learned, he was a man of wide and various information, whose interests and sympathies embraced many branches of human knowledge. He was an enthusiastic student in particular of natural history and geology. Sprung on the father's side from an old English race of country squires, and on his mother's side from a good West Indian family who had been slaveholders for generations, he had a keen love of sport and a genuine sympathy with country-folk, but he had at the same time something of the scorn for lower races to be found in the members of a dominant race.

With the sympathetic organization which made him keenly sensible of the wants of the poor, he threw himself heartily into the movement known as Christian Socialism, of which Frederick Denison Maurice was the recognized leader, and for many years he was considered as an extreme radical in a profession the traditions of which were conservative. While in this phase he wrote his novels _Yeast_ and _Alton Locke_, in which, though he pointed out unsparingly the folly of extremes, he certainly sympathized not only with the poor, but with much that was done and said by the leaders in the Chartist movement. Yet even then he considered that the true leaders of the people were a peer and a dean, and there was no real inconsistency in the fact that at a later period he was among the most strenuous defenders of Governor Eyre in the measures adopted by him to put down the Jamaican disturbances. He looked rather to the extension of the co-operative principle and to sanitary reform for the amelioration of the condition of the people than to any radical political change. His politics might therefore have been described as Toryism tempered by sympathy, or as Radicalism tempered by hereditary scorn of subject races. He was bitterly opposed to what he considered to be the medievalism and narrowness of the Oxford Tractarian Movement. In _Macmillan's Magazine_ for January 1864 he asserted that truth for its own sake was not obligatory with the Roman Catholic clergy, quoting as his authority John Henry Newman (q.v.). In the ensuing controversy Kingsley was completely discomfited. He was a broad churchman, who held what would be called a liberal theology, but the Church, its organization, its creed, its dogma, had ever an increasing hold upon him. Although at one period he certainly shrank from reciting the Athanasian Creed in church, he was towards the close of his life found ready to join an association for the defence of this formulary. The more orthodox and conservative elements in his character gained the upper hand as time went on, but careful students of him and his writings will find a deep conservatism underlying the most radical utterances of his earlier years, while a passionate sympathy for the poor, the afflicted and the weak held possession of him till the last hour of his life.

Both as a writer and in his personal intercourse with men, Kingsley was a thoroughly stimulating teacher. As with his own teacher, Maurice, his influence on other men rather consisted in inducing them to think for themselves than in leading them to adopt his own views, never, perhaps, very definite. But his healthy and stimulating influence was largely due to the fact that he interpreted the thoughts which were stirring in the minds of many of his contemporaries.

As a preacher he was vivid, eager and earnest, equally plain-spoken and uncompromising when preaching to a fashionable congregation or to his own village poor. One of the very best of his writings is a sermon called _The Message of the Church to Working Men_; and the best of his published discourses are the _Twenty-five Village Sermons_ which he preached in the early years of his Eversley life.

As a novelist his chief power lay in his descriptive faculties. The descriptions of South American scenery in _Westward Ho!_, of the Egyptian desert in _Hypatia_, of the North Devon scenery in _Two Years Ago_, are among the most brilliant pieces of word-painting in English prose-writing; and the American scenery is even more vividly and more truthfully described when he had seen it only by the eye of his imagination than in his work _At Last_, which was written after he had visited the tropics. His sympathy for children taught him how to secure their interests. His version of the old Greek stories entitled _The Heroes_, and _Water-babies_ and _Madam How and Lady Why_, in which he deals with popular natural history, take high rank among books for children.

As a poet he wrote but little, but there are passages in _The Saint's Tragedy_ and many isolated lyrics, which are worthy of a place in all standard collections of English literature. _Andromeda_ is a very successful attempt at naturalizing the hexameter as a form of English verse, and reproduces with great skill the sonorous roll of the Greek original.

In person Charles Kingsley was tall and spare, sinewy rather than powerful, and of a restless excitable temperament. His complexion was swarthy, his hair dark, and his eye bright and piercing. His temper was hot, kept under rigid control; his disposition tender, gentle and loving, with flashing scorn and indignation against all that was ignoble and impure; he was a good husband, father and friend. One of his daughters, Mary St Leger Kingsley (Mrs Harrison), has become well known as a novelist under the pseudonym of "Lucas Malet."

Kingsley's life was written by his widow in 1877, entitled _Charles Kingsley, his Letters and Memories of his Life_, and presents a very touching and beautiful picture of her husband, but perhaps hardly does justice to his humour, his wit, his overflowing vitality and boyish fun.

The following is a list of Kingsley's writings:--_Saint's Tragedy_, a drama (1848); _Alton Locke_, a novel (1849); _Yeast_, a novel (1849); _Twenty-five Village Sermons_ (1849); _Phaeton, or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers_ (1852); _Sermons on National Subjects_ (1st series, 1852); _Hypatia_, a novel (1853); _Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore_ (1855); _Sermons on National Subjects_ (2nd series, 1854); _Alexandria and her Schools_ (1854); _Westward Ho!_ a novel (1855); _Sermons for the Times_ (1855); _The Heroes_, Greek fairy tales (1856); _Two Years Ago_, a novel (1857); _Andromeda and other Poems_ (1858); _The Good News of God_, sermons (1859); _Miscellanies_ (1859); _Limits of Exact Science applied to History_ (Inaugural Lectures, 1860); _Town and Country Sermons_ (1861); _Sermons on the Pentateuch_ (1863); _Water-babies_ (1863); _The Roman and the Teuton_ (1864); _David and other Sermons_ (1866); _Hereward the Wake_, a novel (1866); _The Ancient Regime_ (Lectures at the Royal Institution, 1867); _Water of Life and other Sermons_ (1867); _The Hermits_ (1869); _Madam How and Lady Why_ (1869); _At last_ (1871); _Town Geology_ (1872); _Discipline and other Sermons_ (1872); _Prose Idylls_ (1873); _Plays and Puritans_ (1873); _Health and Education_ (1874); _Westminster Sermons_ (1874); _Lectures delivered in America_ (1875). He was a large contributor to periodical literature; many of his essays are included in _Prose Idylls_ and other works in the above list. But no collection has been made of some of his more characteristic writings in the _Christian Socialist_ and _Politics for the People_, many of them signed by the pseudonym he then assumed, "Parson Lot."

KINGSLEY, HENRY (1830-1876), English novelist, younger brother of Charles Kingsley, was born at Barnack, Northamptonshire, on the 2nd of January 1830. In 1853 he left Oxford, where he was an undergraduate at Worcester College, for the Australian goldfields. This venture, however, was not a success, and after five years he returned to England. He achieved considerable popularity with his _Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn_ (1859), a novel of Australian life. This was the first of a series of novels of which _Ravenshoe_ (1861) and _The Hillyars and The Burtons_ (1865) are the best known. These stories are characterized by much vigour, abundance of incident, and healthy sentiment. He edited for eighteen months the _Edinburgh Daily Review_, for which he had acted as war correspondent during the Franco-German War. He died at Cuckfield, Sussex, on the 24th of May 1876.

KINGSLEY, MARY HENRIETTA (1862-1900), English traveller, ethnologist and author, daughter of George Henry Kingsley (1827-1892), was born in Islington, London, on the 13th of October 1862. Her father, though less widely known than his brothers, Charles and Henry (see above), was a man of versatile abilities, with a passion for travelling which he managed to indulge in combination with his practice as a doctor. He wrote one popular book of travel, _South Sea Bubbles, by the Earl and the Doctor_ (1872), in collaboration with the 13th earl of Pembroke. Mary Kingsley's reading in history, poetry and philosophy was wide if desultory, but she was most attracted to natural history. Her family moved to Cambridge in 1886, where she studied the science of sociology. The loss of both parents in 1892 left her free to pursue her own course, and she resolved to study native religion and law in West Africa with a view to completing a book which her father had left unfinished. With her study of "raw fetish" she combined that of a scientific collector of fresh-water fishes. She started for the West Coast in August 1893; and at Kabinda, at Old Calabar, Fernando Po and on the Lower Congo she pursued her investigations, returning to England in June 1894. She gained sufficient knowledge of the native customs to contribute an introduction to Mr R. E. Dennett's _Notes on the Folk Lore of the Fjort_ (1898). Miss Kingsley made careful preparations for a second visit to the same coast; and in December 1894, provided by the British Museum authorities with a collector's equipment, she proceeded via Old Calabar to French Congo, and ascended the Ogowé River. From this point her journey, in part across country hitherto untrodden by Europeans, was a long series of adventures and hairbreadth escapes, at one time from the dangers of land and water, at another from the cannibal Fang. Returning to the coast Miss Kingsley went to Corisco and to the German colony of Cameroon, where she made the ascent of the Great Cameroon (13,760 ft.) from a direction until then unattempted. She returned to England in October 1895. The story of her adventures and her investigations in fetish is vividly told in her _Travels in West Africa_ (1897). The book aroused wide interest, and she lectured to scientific gatherings on the fauna, flora and folk-lore of West Africa, and to commercial audiences on the trade of that region and its possible developments, always with a protest against the lack of detailed knowledge characteristic of modern dealings with new fields of trade. In both cases she spoke with authority, for she had brought back a considerable number of new specimens of fishes and plants, and had herself traded in rubber and oil in the districts through which she passed. But her chief concern was for the development of the negro on African, not European, lines and for the government of the British possessions on the West Coast by methods which left the native "a free unsmashed man--not a whitewashed slave or an enemy." With undaunted energy Miss Kingsley made preparations for a third journey to the West Coast, but the Anglo-Boer War changed her plans, and she decided to go first to South Africa to nurse fever cases. She died of enteric fever at Simon's Town, where she was engaged in tending Boer prisoners, on the 3rd of June 1900. Miss Kingsley's works, besides her _Travels_, include _West African Studies, The Story of West Africa_, a memoir of her father prefixed to his _Notes on Sport and Travel_ (1899), and many contributions to the study of West African law and folk-lore. To continue the investigation of the subjects Miss Kingsley had made her own "The African Society" was founded in 1901.

Valuable biographical information from the pen of Mr George A. Macmillan is prefixed to a second edition (1901) of the _Studies_.

KING'S LYNN (LYNN or LYNN REGIS), a market town, seaport and municipal and parliamentary borough of Norfolk, England, on the estuary of the Great Ouse near its outflow into the Wash. Pop. (1901), 20,288. It is 97 m. N. by E. from London by the Great Eastern railway, and is also served by the Midland and Great Northern joint line. On the land side the town was formerly defended by a fosse, and there are still considerable remains of the old wall, including the handsome South Gate of the 15th century. Several by-channels of the river, passing through the town, are known as fleets, recalling the similar _flethe_ of Hamburg. The Public Walks forms a pleasant promenade parallel to the wall, and in the centre of it stands a picturesque octagonal Chapel of the Red Mount, exhibiting ornate Perpendicular work, and once frequented by pilgrims. The church of St Margaret, formerly the priory church, is a fine building with two towers at the west end, one of which was formerly surmounted by a spire, blown down in 1741. Norman or transitional work appears in the base of both towers, of which the southern also shows Early English and Decorated work, while the northern is chiefly Perpendicular. There is a fine Perpendicular east window of circular form. The church possesses two of the finest monumental brasses in existence, dated respectively 1349 and 1364. St Nicholas chapel, at the north end of the town, is also of rich Perpendicular workmanship, with a tower of earlier date. All Saints' church in South Lynn is a beautiful Decorated cruciform structure. Of a Franciscan friary there remains the Perpendicular Grey Friars' Steeple, and the doorway remains of a priests' college founded in 1502. At the grammar school, founded in the reign of Henry VIII., but occupying modern buildings, Eugene Aram was usher. Among the other public buildings are the guildhall, with Renaissance front, the corn exchange, the picturesque custom-house of the 17th century, the athenaeum (including a museum, hall and other departments), the Stanley Library and the municipal buildings. The fisheries of the town are important, including extensive mussel-fisheries under the jurisdiction of the corporation, and there are also breweries, corn-mills, iron and brass foundries, agricultural implement manufactories, ship-building yards, rope and sail works. Lynn Harbour has an area of 30 acres and an average depth at low tide of 10 ft. There is also good anchorage in the roads leading from the Wash to the docks. There are two docks of 6¾ and 10 acres area respectively. A considerable traffic is carried on by barges on the Ouse. The municipal and parliamentary boroughs of Lynn are co-extensive; the parliamentary borough returns one member. The town is governed by a mayor, 6 aldermen and 18 councillors. Area, 3061 acres.

As Lynn (Lun, Lenne, Bishop's Lynn) owes its origin to the trade which its early settlers carried by the Ouse and its tributaries its history dates from the period of settled occupation by the Saxons. It belonged to the bishops of Thetford before the Conquest and remained with the see when it was translated to Norwich. Herbert de Losinga (c. 1054-1119) granted its jurisdiction to the cathedral of Norwich but this right was resumed by a later bishop, John de Gray, who in 1204 had obtained from John a charter establishing Lynn as a free borough. A fuller grant in 1206 gave the burgesses a gild merchant, the husting court to be held once a week only, and general liberties according to the customs of Oxford, saving the rights of the bishop and the earl of Arundel, whose ancestor William D'Albini had received from William II. the moiety of the tolbooth. Among numerous later charters one of 1268 confirmed the privilege granted to the burgesses by the bishop of choosing a mayor; another of 1416 re-established his election by the aldermen alone. Henry VIII. granted Lynn two charters, the first (1524) incorporating it under mayor and aldermen; the second (1537) changing its name to King's Lynn and transferring to the corporation all the rights hitherto enjoyed by the bishop. Edward VI. added the possessions of the gild of the Trinity, or gild merchant, and St George's gild, while Queen Mary annexed South Lynn. Admiralty rights were granted by James I. Lynn, which had declared for the Crown in 1643, surrendered its privileges to Charles II. in 1684, but recovered its charter on the eve of the Revolution. A fair held on the festival of St Margaret (July 20) was included in the grant to the monks of Norwich about 1100. Three charters of John granting the bishop fairs on the feasts of St Nicholas, St Ursula and St Margaret are extant, and another of Edward I., changing the last to the feast of St Peter ad Vincula (Aug. 1). A local act was passed in 1558-1559 for keeping a mart or fair once a year. In the eighteenth century besides the pleasure fair, still held in February, there was another in October, now abolished. A royal charter of 1524 established the cattle, corn and general provisions market, still held every Tuesday and Saturday. Lynn has ranked high among English seaports from early times.

See E. M. Beloe, _Our Borough_ (1899); H. Harrod, _Report on Deeds, &c._;, of King's Lynn (1874); _Victoria County History: Norfolk_.

KING'S MOUNTAIN, a mountainous ridge in Gaston county, North Carolina and York county, South Carolina, U.S.A. It is an outlier of the Blue Ridge running parallel with it, i.e. N.E. and S.W., but in contrast with the other mountains of the Blue Ridge, King's Mountain has a crest marked with sharp and irregular notches. Its highest point and great escarpment are in North Carolina. About 1½ m. S. of the line between the two states, where the ridge is about 60 ft. above the surrounding country and very narrow at the top, the battle of King's Mountain was fought on the 7th of October 1780 between a force of about 100 Provincial Rangers and about 1000 Loyalist militia under Major Patrick Ferguson (1744-1780), and an American force of about 900 backwoodsmen under Colonels William Campbell (1745-1781), Benjamin Cleveland (1738-1806), Isaac Shelby, John Sevier and James Williams (1740-1780), in which the Americans were victorious. The British loss is stated as 119 killed (including the commander), 123 wounded, and 664 prisoners; the American loss was 28 killed (including Colonel Williams) and 62 wounded. The victory largely contributed to the success of General Nathanael Greene's campaign against Lord Cornwallis. There has been some dispute as to the exact site of the engagement, but the weight of evidence is in favour of the position mentioned above, on the South Carolina side of the line. A monument erected in 1815 was replaced in 1880 by a much larger one, and a monument for which Congress appropriated $30,000 in 1906, was completed in 1909.

See L. C. Draper, _King's Mountain and its Heroes_ (Cincinnati, 1881); and Edward McCrady, _South Carolina in the Revolution 1775-1780_ (New York, 1901).

KINGSTON, ELIZABETH, DUCHESS OF (1720-1788), sometimes called countess of Bristol, was the daughter of Colonel Thomas Chudleigh (d. 1726), and was appointed maid of honour to Augusta, princess of Wales, in 1743, probably through the good offices of her friend, William Pulteney, earl of Bath. Being a very beautiful woman Miss Chudleigh did not lack admirers, among whom were James, 6th duke of Hamilton, and Augustus John Hervey, afterwards 3rd earl of Bristol. Hamilton, however, left England, and on the 4th of August 1744 she was privately married to Hervey at Lainston, near Winchester. Both husband and wife being poor, their union was kept secret to enable Elizabeth to retain her post at court, while Hervey, who was a naval officer, rejoined his ship, returning to England towards the close of 1746. The marriage was a very unhappy one, and the pair soon ceased to live together; but when it appeared probable that Hervey would succeed his brother as earl of Bristol, his wife took steps to obtain proof of her marriage. This did not, however, prevent her from becoming the mistress of Evelyn Pierrepont, 2nd duke of Kingston, and she was not only a very prominent figure in London society, but in 1765 in Berlin she was honoured by the attentions of Frederick the Great. By this time Hervey wished for a divorce from his wife; but Elizabeth, although equally anxious to be free, was unwilling to face the publicity attendant upon this step. However she began a suit of jactitation against Hervey. This case was doubtless collusive, and after Elizabeth had sworn she was unmarried, the court in February 1769 pronounced her a spinster. Within a month she married Kingston, who died four years later, leaving her all his property on condition that she remained a widow. Visiting Rome the duchess was received with honour by Clement XIV.; after which she hurried back to England to defend herself from a charge of bigamy, which had been preferred against her by Kingston's nephew, Evelyn Meadows (d. 1826). The house of Lords in 1776 found her guilty, and retaining her fortune she hurriedly left England to avoid further proceedings on the part of the Meadows family, who had a reversionary interest in the Kingston estates. She lived for a time in Calais, and then repaired to St Petersburg, near which city she bought an estate which she named "Chudleigh." Afterwards she resided in Paris, Rome, and elsewhere, and died in Paris on the 26th of August 1788. The duchess was a coarse and licentious woman, and was ridiculed as Kitty Crocodile by the comedian Samuel Foote in a play _A Trip to Calais_, which, however, he was not allowed to produce. She is said to have been the original of Thackeray's characters, Beatrice and Baroness Bernstein.

There is an account of the duchess in J. H. Jesse's _Memoirs of the Court of England 1688-1760_, vol. iv. (1901).

KINGSTON, WILLIAM HENRY GILES (1814-1880), English novelist, son of Lucy Henry Kingston, was born in London on the 28th of February 1814. Much of his youth was spent at Oporto, where his father was a merchant, but when he entered the business, he made his headquarters in London. He early wrote newspaper articles on Portuguese subjects. These were translated into Portuguese, and the author received a Portuguese order of knighthood and a pension for his services in the conclusion of the commercial treaty of 1842. In 1844 his first book, _The Circassian Chief_, appeared, and in 1845 _The Prime Minister, a Story of the Days of the Great Marquis of Pombal_. The _Lusitanian Sketches_ describe Kingston's travels in Portugal. In 1851 _Peter the Whaler_, his first book for boys, came out. These books proved so popular that Kingston retired from business, and devoted himself to the production of tales of adventure for boys. Within thirty years he wrote upwards of one hundred and thirty such books. He had a practical knowledge of seamanship, and his stories of the sea, full of thrilling adventures and hairbreadth escapes, exactly hit the taste of his boy readers. Characteristic specimens of his work are _The Three Midshipmen_; _The Three Lieutenants_; _The Three Commanders_; and _The Three Admirals_. He also wrote popular accounts of famous travellers by land and sea, and translated some of the stories of Jules Verne.