Gregory King

Gregory King (15 December 1648 – 29 August 1712) was an English genealogist, engraver and statistician.

Gregory King was born at Lichfield, England. His father was a surveyor and landscape gardener. Gregory was a very bright boy and his father used him as an assistant in his surveying work. At 14 Gregory became a clerk to William Dugdale the antiquary and herald, i.e. student of heraldry. King later (1667–69) worked for Lord Hatton, who was forming a collection of the arms of the nobility. When this project collapsed, he went to work for the dowager Lady Gerard at Sandon, Staffordshire as steward, auditor and secretary (1670–72). She was the widow of Charles Gerard, 4th Baron Gerard, and remarried in 1673.

In 1672 King moved to London to work as an engraver for the printer John Ogilby; he also did surveying work and engraved maps. In 1677 he was appointed Rouge Dragon Pursuivant of Arms in Ordinary in the College of Arms. He became Lancaster Herald of Arms in Ordinary in 1688 and held that post until his death in 1712. These positions in the ceremonial branch of the state were lucrative and on three occasions he was sent abroad to confer the Order of the Garter on foreign princes.

By 1695 King was started on a second official career in the business branch of the state. He was a commissioner in charge of a new tax on marriages, births and burials and later Secretary to the Commission of Public Accounts and Secretary to the Controllers of Army Accounts; in 1708 he was one of the three commissioners appointed to state the debts of the late King William.

"The first great economic statistician," as Richard Stone calls him, came a generation after John Graunt and William Petty and continued their work. Their work was mainly published, but King's was not: he was a confidential advisor to the government. Material from his manuscripts appeared in the writings of his friend Charles Davenant and—a century later—in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (Book I, Chapter VIII), and in An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Britain by George Chalmers.

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