King, Paul (David) (c.1610–1655), Franciscan friar, was born in Co. Kilkenny, the son of Cornelius King, secretary to the Baron of Upper Ossory. During his youth, he was captured by Moorish pirates, but was released thanks to the efforts of the Franciscan friar Luke Wadding (qv), head of St Isidore's College in Rome. King joined the Franciscan order and studied at St Isidore's; he was a talented scholar and became proficient in Greek and Latin. In 1641 he travelled to Brindisi in southern Italy to teach moral theology, and in July 1644 appears at Aracoeli friary, the Franciscan headquarters in Rome, acting as secretary to the procurator general of the order. By December 1646 he had returned to Ireland, where he resided at the friary in Kilkenny; he became lecturer in theology there in September 1647 and guardian of the friary by February 1648.
As the Catholic Confederation of Ireland became increasingly polarised, King emerged as one of the leading partisans for GianBattista Rinuccini (qv), papal nuncio to Ireland, who strongly opposed the efforts of the supreme council of the confederation to forge an alliance with the royalist forces in Ireland. In March 1648 Rinuccini sent King to the commander of the Ulster army of the confederation, Owen Roe O'Neill (qv), to advise him against following the supreme council's orders to attack the Scottish forces in Ulster; instead Rinuccini urged O'Neill to advance on the protestant forces in Munster. The nuncio feared that the supreme council intended to sign a truce with the Munster protestants as a precursor to a formal alliance with the protestant royalists. These fears were borne out in May 1648 and Rinuccini responded by excommunicating any catholics who adhered to or supported the truce.
This desperate act provoked a civil war within the confederation. At the confederate capital in Kilkenny, King inveighed both in word and in print against the supreme council and in particular against the cleric John Callaghan (qv), a leading controversialist on the council's behalf. In late July 1648 he instigated a plot whereby he and his accomplices would set fire to a house in Kilkenny as a distraction while they secured the city gates, thereby enabling the Ulster army to seize Kilkenny for the nuncio. However, his letters were intercepted and he was imprisoned at Kilkenny on 1 August and eventually removed as guardian of the friary there. Around December 1648 or January 1649, he appears to have been allowed to escape, and on 13 February 1649 he was sent to Rome by the head of the Franciscans in Ireland to protest at the appointment of Raymond Carron (qv), a supreme council supporter, as visitor apostolic to the Franciscan order in Ireland.
On his way to Rome he wrote and published at Louvain a letter entitled Epistola nobilis Hiberni criticising the nuncio's opponents; this later prompted a withering response from Callaghan. At Rome King lobbied tirelessly against Carron, who was eventually replaced as visitor on 1 January 1650, and against Rinuccini's enemies generally. During this period, he was somewhat critical of the stance adopted by his former mentor, Luke Wadding, regarding events in Ireland. On 1 January 1650 he became guardian of St Isidore's College in Rome, a post he held for two years. He had ambitions to succeed Wadding as annalist of the Franciscan order, which would necessitate completing the monumental ten-volume history of the friars commenced by Wadding. He published an outline of this project, Idea cosmographiae seraphicae, in 1654. Thereafter he continued to reside at St Isidore's and, in 1654, was engaged in efforts further to discredit Wadding in order to gain control of the college. He died, probably at Rome, in 1655.