Edward King was born in Norfolk and educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge and Lincoln's Inn. Though he practised law, a private fortune enabled him to pursue a literary career for most of his life. He was an antiquarian, but his major obsessions were public policy and religion, and he wrote a large number of proposals and tracts on subjects ranging from naval education to the angelic ancestry of John the Baptist.

King & McCord was a Montreal merchant company involved in the fur trade, that was active in the 1770s.