Author: Taylor, Robert
Biography:
TAYLOR, Robert (1784-1844: ODNB)
He was born on 18 Aug. 1784 and baptised at All Saints, Edmonton, Middlesex, on 21 Aug., the son of a prosperous ironmonger, John Taylor, and his wife Elizabeth Jasper. After the death of his father in 1791, an uncle was appointed his guardian. He was sent to a good boarding school in Edmonton and then in 1801 apprenticed to a surgeon in Birmingham. He completed his training in London and was licensed to practice as a MRSC in 1807. In 1809, however, having decided that his real calling was the Church, he went up to St. John’s, Cambridge (matric. 1809, BA 1813) and took orders. He held several curacies 1813-18 but a course of reading deist authors such as Gibbon, Paine, and Voltaire led him to resign his charges. Though he soon made a public recantation, he never again managed to hold a responsible position in the established church. In Dublin and then in London he did some teaching, wrote articles for the periodical press attacking the church, and gave lectures. In 1824 he founded a Society of Universal Benevolence and then a Christian Evidence Society. When he began preaching with a “liturgy” of his own composition, drawing large numbers of followers, he was charged with blasphemy and imprisoned for a year. The radical publisher Richard Carlile (1790-1843) supported him by raising money for him, employing him as a writer, and in 1829 joining him for a debating tour—debates for which they found no takers. In 1830 he hired the Rotunda in Blackfriars Road, London, for services that attracted large audiences and a second conviction for blasphemy, with a prison term of two years. Both Swing (1831), which opposes an Archbishop of Cant and a rebel “Robert the Devil, or the Genius of Reason,” and a collection of “sermons” entitled The Devil’s Pulpit(1831-2) belong to this period. After his release from prison he married Harriet Robinson (1776-1866) at St. Giles-in-the-Fields on 17 Jan. 1834. He was then successfully sued for breach of promise by the former housekeeper of the Rotunda, so he and his wife fled to France, where he resumed his practice as a surgeon and died at Tours on 5 June 1844. (ODNB 5 Aug. 2024; ancestry.com 5 Aug. 2024; findmypast.com 5 Aug. 2024; ACAD; Morning Advertiser 7 Oct. 1844) HJ