King, Sir Lucas White (1856–1925), Indian civil servant and Oriental scholar, was born 28 September 1856 in Madras, India, first among three sons and three daughters who survived infancy, of Henry King, a Drogheda-born member of the Indian Medical Service, and his wife Sophie Eccleston of New York, daughter of an Irish immigrant linen-importer.
In 1864 Lucas was taken to Ireland and left in Tulla rectory, Co. Clare, with his great-aunt Sophia and her husband, the Rev. Robert Humphreys, later dean of Killaloe. He attended Ennis College from 1870, where he shone academically and became head of school. In 1873 he won an exhibition to TCD, where his father had been a scholar, and although he won prizes and high honours along the way in classics, logic, Persian, Arabic, and Hindustani, he was more industrious than brilliant and graduated in 1877 with an LLB and a second-class BA. Having just failed in 1876 in his first attempt at the Indian Civil Service examination, he was successful in 1878 and – having borrowed £100 for his fees and equipment – he was sent to the Punjab.
King's posts included assistant and deputy commissioner, political agent, and judge, and among the places in which he served were Mysore (on special duty with the Maharaja), Waziristan, Kohat, and Peshawar. He saw battle, was mentioned in dispatches, and his medals and honours included Companion of the Order of the Star of India and the Coronation (Durbar) medal awarded by Lord Curzon in 1902; he would end his career as commissioner of Rawalpindi. A model colonial officer, widely acknowledged as brave, just, conscientious, and politically astute, he earned qualifications and won prizes in Urdu, Arabic, Baluchi, Persian, Pashto, and Russian, and indulged with passion and dedication a range of interests that included archaeology, antiquities, anthropology, linguistics, numismatics, geography, history, flora, fauna, folklore, and big-game hunting. In 1896 his scholarly work won him a doctorate from TCD.
In the spring of 1890 King was in Dublin at the end of a convalescence that had followed an illness acquired after nine months studying in Moscow, when his uncle Richard Ashe King (qv) introduced him to 23-year-old Geraldine Adelaide Harmsworth, eldest daughter of Alfred and Geraldine (qv) Harmsworth, who was away from her London home visiting her Maffett relatives. After five meetings and a passionate correspondence they became engaged, and accompanied by a magnificent trousseau financed by her brother Alfred (qv), Geraldine arrived in Karachi on 11 February 1892 and married King the following day. Clever, idle, self-indulgent Geraldine took instantly to life as a memsahib, and as King rose through the ranks, in the interstices of giving birth to four daughters and three sons, his wife climbed socially, assisted by presents from the newly acquired fortunes of some of her brothers; on a visit home in 1896 she was presented at court. In India, King was highly valued professionally by the viceroy, Lord Curzon, while his wife became an intimate of the vicereine, who was godmother in 1902 to their youngest boy, Alfred Curzon. King drove with Curzon and the maharajah of Patiala to the ceremony where he was awarded the Companion of the Star of India, ‘in a state carriage of solid silver through lines of elephants covered with red and gold embroideries and carrying howdahs of silver and gold’ (Verity, 210).
Though Geraldine was heartbroken at leaving India, many years of trekking across vast tracts of inhospitable and often dangerous territory had taken their toll on King, who was desperate to go home. He sent the family to England in March 1903 and joined them permanently in 1905, when he settled in Dublin, took up at TCD the chair of Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, and lectured also in Indian history; most of his students were candidates for the Indian Civil Service. A £300 academic salary, a £1,000 annual pension, the £2,000 annual allowance given his wife by her elder brother, and the sale of his collection of 6,000 coins, made it possible for the family to live in Roebuck Hall, a large Georgian house in Clonskeagh, Dublin, with eleven acres, ten staff, and four carriages; ‘they lived in an English upper class society transplanted into Ireland, with a background of deliciously funny irrational subservient characters’ (Stokes, 53). His robust, confident, strong-minded wife – a true matriarch in the style of her mother – had never been able to give her emotionally needy, sentimental husband the reassurance he constantly craved and they now led almost separate lives: King was a JP, enjoyed shooting (in Ireland and Scotland), liked academic and literary company, and collected ancient Irish stone and bronze weapons and first editions of Irish authors. Geraldine was a snob; it was to please her that her brother, Lord Rothermere, helped secure a knighthood for King in 1919.
Not that King was without his own social insecurity: as the Harmsworths climbed to the top of society, King expended a great deal of time investigating his own family tree. In 1913 his uncle Richard Ashe King wrote: ‘My dear Lu / As you are always on the vain look-out for respectable ancestors I think it right to let you know I came across yesterday afternoon as near an approach to one as you are ever likely to get . . .’. He ended with the story of the chorus girl who claimed to the peer she married that she was of noble birth: ‘After a month's diligent search the expert reported that he could get no farther back than her grandfather who played the hind-leg of an elephant in a pantomime at Norwich in the year 1872’ (King collection, box 2, folio 9); the affectionate teasing reflected well on both Kings. There was much tragedy; Luke, King's eldest son, was killed in 1915 at Ypres, Alfred Curzon drowned in the Leinster in the Irish Sea in 1918; and in 1921 their second daughter, Sheila, died in childbirth. King lived for his scholarship; his publications include an edition of the memoirs of the Mugal emperor Bãbur and a translation of odes by the thirteenth century Persian poet Sa'di.
King died, with The Times Literary Supplement in his hand, on 23 August 1925 in Aboyne, Scotland, where he and his wife had gone to live after he retired in 1922. His surviving son, Cecil (qv), who would achieve fame and notoriety in press and political circles and was notoriously denigratory of his relatives, wrote of him as an ‘irascible old gentleman’ who seemed to have neither imagination nor enterprise (King, 16). His daughter Enid, who adored him, reflected the more common view when she wrote of his ‘simplicity and affection’ and ability to draw out ‘the very best in anyone he was with’ (Stokes, 127). King was, indeed, a quintessential Victorian hero: despite the anguish of separation from his parents and later, for long periods, from his wife and children, physically, mentally and morally he used his talents to the full in the service of his country and in understanding and explaining those cultures on which he lavished a lifetime of dedicated study. There is a 1916 photograph of King, and others in the King collection in Boston.