Author: TAYLOR, Thomas William
Biography:
TAYLOR, Thomas William (1782-1854: ancestry.co.uk)
The Bodleian library attributes The Lay of Corneelis, about the Aug. 1811 battle to capture Fort Cornelis from the French in Java, to Thomas William Taylor, an officer in the British army. He is not known to have written any other verse but the contents of the poem make the attribution plausible. He was the eldest of five children of Pierce Joseph Taylor of Ogwell, Devon, and his wife Charlotte Cooke, daughter of the dean of Ely and provost of King’s College, Cambridge. Taylor was born on 13 July 1782 and baptised on 14 Aug. at Denham, Buckinghamshire. (The Taylors had two family seats, at West Ogwell and Denham.) He was educated at Eton and admitted to St. John’s, Cambridge, on 30 June 1800 and to the Inner Temple on 11 Feb. 1802. He did not take a degree but instead entered the army as a cornet in the 6th Dragoon Guards on 14 July 1804. Taylor moved steadily through the ranks, served in India and Java, and served at Waterloo when he was captain of the 10th Hussars. At the time of the capture of Java he was quarter-master general. He was promoted to major in the 10th Dragoons on 21 Sept. 1815. On 14 Jan. 1810 in Madras he married Anne Harvey Petrie whose uncle William Petrie was the acting governor of Madras; they had four sons and five daughters. In 1826 he served as superintendent of the cavalry riding school in St. John’s Wood, London, and from 1837 to his death in 1854 he was lieutenant governor of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He died on 8 Jan. 1854 of edema of the lungs and was buried at Denbury, Devon, on 17 Jan. His will left an encumbered estate to his eldest son, Pierce Taylor, and a life insurance policy to his wife together with a snuff box that Taylor had received from the Duke of Orleans. In Feb. 1854 Anne Taylor applied to the army for a widow’s pension; she died in 1858. (ancestry.co.uk 6 June 2025; CCEd; Burke; Eton school registers) SR