not satisfactorily fulfil both his parliamentary and other duties. On 25 March 1820 Taylor was appointed military secretary at the Horse Guards. On 23 April 1823 he was made colonel of the 85th foot, in 1824 a knight grand cross of the royal Guelphic order, and on 27 May 1825 was promoted to be lieutenant-general. On the death of the Duke of York in January 1827, he was appointed military secretary to the new commander-in-chief, the Duke of Wellington; but on the duke resigning the command-in-chief in July 1827, Taylor was nominated by Lord Palmerston, then secretary at war, to be a deputy secretary at war in the military branch of the war office; the king had already made him his first and principal aide-de-camp on 1 May 1827.
On 19 March 1828 Taylor was appointed master surveyor and surveyor-general of the ordnance of the United Kingdom. On 25 Aug. of the same year he became adjutant-general of the forces, an appointment which he held until the accession of William IV, to whom he became private secretary, and continued in the office during the whole of his reign. On 16 April 1834 the king conferred upon him the grand cross of the order of the Bath. On the death of William IV in 1837 Taylor retired into private life, but was continued by the young queen in the appointment of first and principal aide-de-camp to the sovereign. He had already received from George III a pension of 1,000l. a year on the civil list, with remainder to his widow. In the autumn of 1837 he went with his family to Cannes. In the spring of 1838 he went on to Italy, and he died at Rome on 20 March 1839. His body was embalmed for conveyance to England, but was buried in the protestant cemetery at Rome. In the middle of April his remains were exhumed and sent to England, and on 13 June were deposited in a vault of the chapel of St. Katherine’s Hospital, Regent’s Park, to the mastership of which he had been appointed in 1818.
Taylor married, in 1819, Charlotte Albina, daughter of Edward Disbrowe of Walton Hall, Derbyshire, M.P. for Windsor, vice-chamberlain to Queen Charlotte, and grand-daughter of the third Earl of Buckinghamshire. By her he left two daughters, who, with their mother, survived him.
Taylor, who was a confidential friend of the Duke of York, and who was nominated one of the duke’s executors, wrote the ‘Memoirs of the last Illness and Decease of H.R.H. the Duke of York,’ London, 1827, 8vo (three editions). In 1838, in a pamphlet (‘Remarks,’ &c.) he defended his patrons George III and George IV from some strictures in an article in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ No. 135.
A portrait by W. J. Newton was engraved by W. Ward.
[War Office Records; Despatches; Annual Register, 1839; Gent Mag. 1839; United Service Journal, 1839 (contains a very complete memoir); Naval and Military Mag. vols. i–iii. 1827–1828; The Royal Military Calendar, 1820; Correspondence of Earl Grey, 1867; Nichols’s Lit. Illustr. vi. 755; Edinb. Rev. October 1838; Evans’s Cat. of Engraved Portraits, vol. ii.; Carmichael Smyth’s Chronological Epitome of the Wars in the Low Countries.]
TAYLOR, ISAAC (1730–1807), engraver, son of William (b. 1693) and Ann Taylor, was born on 13 Dec. 1730 in the parish of St. Michael in Bedwardine, in the city of Worcester. In the early part of his career he is said to have worked successively as a brassfounder, a silversmith, and a surveyor, owing this versatility to his father, who cast a chandelier for the Worcester town-hall in successful competition with a Birmingham firm, and who also engraved cards for tradesmen and silver plate for the county families. Several examples of William Taylor’s work as an engraver are in the British Museum print-room. About 1752 Isaac, thinking himself ill-used at home, made his way to London, walking by the side of a wagon. He found employment first at a silversmith’s, and then with Thomas Jefferys, the geographer, at the corner of St. Martin’s Lane. Under his guidance he executed a number of plates for the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’ He gradually concentrated his attention upon book illustration, among the first that he illustrated being Owen’s ‘Dictionary’ and Andrew Tooke’s ‘Pantheon.’ Soon after its incorporation, in January 1765, Taylor was admitted a fellow of the Society of Artists, and in 1774 he was appointed secretary as successor to John Hamilton, being the third to hold that post. At the time he joined the society Taylor was living at Holles Street, Clare Market. The advance that was being made about this time by English engravers was illustrated by his engraving for Boydell of ‘A Flemish Collation,’ after Van Harp, which was shown at the first exhibition at Spring Gardens, and by his elegant vignette prefixed to John Langhorne’s ‘Poetical Works’ (1766), the last being in direct and successful competition with what had hitherto been regarded as a monopoly of the ‘library engravers’ of France. Taylor designed and engraved the vignette to Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in 1770. He also designed and engraved
