King's Men (Númenor)

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The King's Men were a Númenórean royalist faction in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional prehistory of the world Arda, during the Second Age of the Sun. They rebelled against the angelic Valar because of their desire for immortality. After Númenor was consequently destroyed, those King's Men who remained were known as Black Númenóreans, hostile to Gondor.

As their power and knowledge had grown throughout the course of that Age, all the Númenóreans had become increasingly preoccupied with the limits placed on their contentment—and eventually their power—by mortality, the purpose of which they began to question. This growing wish to escape death, known as 'the doom of Men', also made most of the Númenóreans envious of the immortal elves, or Eldar, who they had come to physically resemble as part of their reward from God (Ilúvatar) for having been their allies. The Eldar sought ever to remind the men of Númenor however, that death was a gift from God to all men, and to lose faith in Ilúvatar would be heretical.

Nevertheless, after S.A. 2221, when Tar-Ancalimon became King of Númenor;

...the people of Númenor became divided. On the one hand was the greater party, and they were called the King's Men, and they grew proud and were estranged from the Valar and the Eldar. ('Akallabêth' ~ The Silmarillion)

The 'King's Men' therefore became increasingly predisposed to the corruption of Sauron, who in Númenor's last years seduced the elderly King Ar-Pharazôn;

...back to the worship of the Dark, and of Melkor the Lord thereof, at first in secret, but ere long openly and in the face of his people. ('Akallabêth' ~ The Silmarillion)

Within Númenor, the majority immediately followed suit, and this worship quickly passed across the ocean to most of Númenor's colonies in Middle-earth;

..for in the days of the sojourn of Sauron in that land the hearts of well nigh all its people had been turned towards darkness. Therefore many of those who sailed east in that time and made fortresses and dwellings upon the coasts were already bent to his will... ('Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age' ~ The Silmarillion)

Their corruption led the King's Men to disaster as they followed Ar-Pharazôn in his suicidal invasion of Aman, in consequence of which Númenor, the mightiest realm of men that had ever been, was destroyed and swallowed up into the sea. Royalist survivors remaining in Middle-earth failed to learn from their example, continuing to serve Sauron and oppose those who rejected his evil as the Black Númenóreans.