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TAYL017, ROWLAND, LL.D. 



TAYLOR, THOMAS. 



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stone-mason, who was more prosperous than prudent, for he affected 

 a style of living very unusual at that period among persons engaged iu 

 business : ho kept his carriage, and also his country-house iu Essex. 

 Towards his son, on the contrary, he appears to have been far from 

 liberal, aa he bestowed on him only a common school education, and 

 then placed him under Sir Henry Cheere, a sculptor, whose chief 

 work of note is the statue of Col. Codrington, in the library of All 

 Souls, Oxford. On quitting Cheere, he was furnished by his father 

 with j ust sufficient money to proceed to Rome, where he was obliged 

 to live with the utmost frugality. His studies in Italy were however 

 of no long continuance, for he was soon summoned home by the intel- 

 ligence of his father being dangerously ill ; upon which he hurried 

 back to England with as much expedition as the state of the Continent 

 would then permit, and was obliged to disguise himself as a Franciscan 

 friar. On reaching home, he found that his father was dead, and that 

 he had left nothing. Thus thrown entirely upon his own resources 

 and ability, all that remained for him was to set up business as a 

 statuary, and he first brought himself into notice by Cornwall's monu- 

 ment. His principal other works iu sculpture are Guest's monument, 

 near the north door of Westminster Abbey, the figure of Britannia at 

 the Bauk of England, and the bas-relief in the pediment of the 

 Mansion-house, London. After this he abandoned sculpture for archi- 

 tecture, and one of his earliest productions in his new profession was 

 the mansion erected by him for Mr.Gower, near the South Sea House. 

 In 1756-58 he was employed in the alterations of old London Bridge 

 in conjunction with Dance, and thenceforth upon a number of build- 

 ings both public and private ; but very few among them display much 

 architectural taste, and least of all any of that richness in decoration 

 and detail which might have been expected from one who had been 

 brought up and had practised as a sculptor. The wings added by him 

 to the Bank of England (afterwards swept away by his successor 

 Soane) were at the time termed ' magnificent,' but then it could only 

 be by comparison with the older building by Sampson, to which they 

 were attached. This design itself was only borrowed from one of 

 Bramante's, and was upon so small a scale as to look insignificant in 

 such a situation. The ' Stone Buildings' at Lincoln's Inn are such a 

 mere architectural blank, that the columns, instead of diminishing the 

 poverty of its character, serve only to render it the more apparent. 

 There is however some architectural character displayed in that which 

 is called the ' Six Clerks' Office,' situated between the other building 

 and Chancery Lane. The villa which he built for Sir Charles Asgill 

 at Richmond is at least unexceptionable in taste, though it does not 

 deserve the admiration it has obtained. Among his other works, 

 Lord Grimstone's seat at Gorhambury is one of the best. If not 

 great, he was eminently successful, in his profession, and obtained 

 several lucrative appointments and surveyorships to the Admiralty, 

 Foundling Hospital, Greenwich Hospital, and the Bank of England, 

 for which he was well qualified, being a man of most business-like 

 habits, and of most extraordinary diligence and assiduity. He was 

 rarely in bed after four in the morning ; was most abstemious in his 

 diet, and drank no wine. Whether in consequence of taking warning 

 from his father's example or not, he seems in almost all respects to 

 have been the very reverse of him in his mode of living ; and it is 

 scarcely surprising that his economy, together with the appointments 

 which he held, should have enabled him to realise a fortune of 

 180,000^., though, as he himself used to say, he began the world with 

 hardly eighteen pence. He died at his own house in Spring Gardens, 

 September 27, 1788, and was buried in St. Martin's church. He gave 

 the whole of his property to his only son, Michael Angelo Taylor, M.P., 

 with the exception of a sum to the University of Oxford, to accu- 

 mulate for a certain term of years and then to be applied to found an 

 institute for the study of modern languages. This bequest having 

 been incorporated with a similar one by Dr. Randolph for a picture 

 and statue gallery, a building was begun in 1841, under the name of 

 the ' Taylor and Randolph Institute,' from the designs of C. R. 

 Cockerell, professor of architecture at the Royal Academy [CoCKE- 

 BELL, C. R.] ; the buildings which form a handsome addition to the 

 architectural features of Oxford are generally known as the Taylor 

 Buildings. Taylor was knighted when sheriff of London in 1783. 



TAYLOR, ROWLAND, LL.D., was a clergyman eminent for his 

 learning and piety, who waa burnt at the stake in the reign of Queen 

 Mary. He is said by Bishop Heber to have been an ancestor of 

 Jeremy Taylor. He was chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer, by whom 

 he was appointed rector of Hadleigh, in Suffolk, where he went to 

 reside. 



Dr. Taylor was summoned, in the year 1553, to appear in London 

 before Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, who was then lord chancellor, 

 for resisting the performance of mass in his church at Hadleigh. He 

 was strongly persuaded to escape, but refused, and presented himself 

 before. Gardiner, by whom, after a long conference, in which he 

 defended his cause with unshrinking firmness, he waa committed to 

 the King's Bench prison. There he remained till the 22nd of January 

 1555, when he and other prisoners were cited before Gardiner, and the 

 bishops of London, Norwich, Salisbury, and Durham, who were joint 

 commissioners with the chancellor. The chief offence of which Dr. 

 Taylor was now accused was his marriage ; but he defended the right 

 of priests to marry with so much learning, that no sentence of divorce 

 was pronounced, though he was deprived of his benefice. At the end 



of January the prisoners were again brought before the oommissionera, 

 by whom they were sentenced to death. Dr. Taylor waa committed 

 to the Poultry Compter, where, on the 4th of February, he was visited 

 by Bonner, bishop of London, who went there for the purpose of 

 making him put on the dress of a Roman Catholic priest. Dr. Taylor 

 resisted with his usual courage, and tie dress was put upon him by 

 forco : he treated the whole proceeding with the utmost contempt, as 

 a piece of mummery, and Bonner would have struck him with his 

 crozier if he had not been restrained by his chaplain. On the following 

 day the procession set forth which was to conduct him to the place of 

 execution* In the course of the journey much persuasion waa used by 

 the sheriff and others to induce him to recant, but without making 

 the smallest impression upon him. The procession passed through 

 Hadleigh, where he was consoled and cheered by the blessings and 

 prayers of his parishioners. The execution took place on the 8th of 

 February, 1555, on Aldham Common, near Hadleigh. A stone, with 

 the following inscription, perhaps still remains to mark the spot : 

 ' 1 555. Dr. Tayler in defending that was gode at this plas left his 

 blode.' 



Bishop Heber, in his 'Life of Bishop Jeremy Taylor,' says, " There 

 is nothing indeed more beautiful in the whole beautiful Book of 

 Martyrs than the account which Fox has given of Rowland Taylor, 

 whether in the discharge of his duty as a parish priest or in the more 

 arduous moments when he was called upon to bear hia cross in the 

 cause of religion. His warmth of heart, his simplicity of manners, 

 the total absence of the false stimulants of enthusiasm or pride, and 

 the abundant overflow of better and holier feelings, are delineated, no 

 less than his courage in death and the buoyant cheerfulness with 

 which he encounteied it, with a spirit only inferior to the eloquence 

 and dignity of the ' Phscdon.' " 



TAYLOR, SILAS, otherwise called Domville, or D'Omville, by 

 Antony Wood, was the sou of Sylvanus Taylor, one of the commis- 

 sioners during the civil wars for ejecting those of the clergy called 

 * scandalous and insufficient ministers.' Silas Taylor was born at 

 Haiiey near Much-Weulock, in Shropshire, July 16, 1624, and after 

 being educated at Shrewsbury and Westminster schools, became a 

 commoner of New Inn Hall at Oxford in 1641. He was taken thence 

 by his father to join the parliamentary army, in which he had a 

 captain's commission. After the war he was appointed by the interest 

 of his father sequestrator of the royalists in Herefordshire, in discharge 

 of which office he conducted himself with so much moderation as to 

 conciliate the king's party. Part of the bishop's palace at Hereford fell 

 to his share in the general spoliation, and he acquired considerable 

 wealth, all of which he was compelled to restore at the Restoration. 



On that event he was treated by the royalists with great lenity, and 

 appointed commissary of ammunition, &c. at Dunkirk, and about 

 1665 made keeper of the king's stores and storehouses for shipping at 

 Harwich. He died November 4, 1678, and was buried at Harwich. 

 Taylor was much interested in the antiquities of his country, and was 

 enabled in the confusion of the civil wars to ransack the libraries of 

 Hereford and Worcester cathedrals, and in the course of these re- 

 searches is said to have discovered the original charter in which King 

 Edgar asserts his claim to the sovereignty of the seas, which is 

 printed in Selden's ' Mare Clausum,' lib. ii. He left materials for a 

 history of Herefordshire, which afterwards came into the hands of Sir 

 Ed. Harley of Brampton Brian in that county. To this collection belong 

 Nos. 4046, 4174, 6726, 6766, 6856,and6S68 of the Harleian manuscript 1 ?, 

 containing part of a general history with notes and special topogra- 

 phical information under the several parishes, extracts from ' Domes- 

 day,' Leland, &c. From these papers Mr. William Brome, a sub- 

 sequent collector for the same county, is said to have borrowed largely. 

 (Gough, ' Catalogue of Topographical Works, Herefordshire.') In 

 the Sloane manuscripts is a paper of Taylor's on the making of cider. 

 (Ayscough's 'Catalogue, Taylor.') 



His published works are, ' The History of Gavelkind with some 

 observations and remarks upon many special occurrences of British and 

 English history. To this is added a short history of William the 

 Conqueror, written in Latin by an anonymous author in the time of 

 Henry I.,' London, 4to, 1663. A History of Harwich was published 

 from his papers by Samuel Dale, in 1730, and another edition, or the 

 same with another title-page, London, 1732. 



Wood (' Athen. Oxon.') states, that Taylor wrote many pamphlets 

 before the Restoration, but without his name ; that he was a good 

 classical scholar and mathematician, and possessed of much general 

 information ; that he was an excellent musician, and that he composed 

 several anthems, and edited ' Court Ayres,' &c., 8vo, 1655, printed by 

 John Playford. 



TAYLOR, THOMAS, was born in London on the 15th of May 

 1758 : his parents were respectable hi their calling, but not wealthy. 

 At a very early age he was sent to St. Paul's School, and after remain- 

 ing there about three years he was placed under the care of a relation 

 who held a situation in the dockyard at Sheerness, with whom he 

 resided several years. During this time he applied himself assiduously 

 to the study of mathematics, and also obtained some knowledge of 

 chemistry : he next became a pupil to the Rev. Mr. Worthington, a 

 dissenting minister who possessed considerable classical acquirements, 

 ultimately intending to complete his studies at Aberdeen with a view 

 to the ministry. But a premature marriage and pecuniary difficulties 



