Henrietta; but it may have been strengthened by his known connexion with Laud, as well as by his ascetic habits. More serious consequences followed his attachment to the Royalist cause. The author of The Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy or Episcopacy Asserted against the Aerians and Acephali New and Old (1642), could scarcely hope to retain his parish, which was not, however, sequestrated until 1644. Taylor probably accompanied the king to Oxford. In 1643 he was presented to the rectory of Overstone, Northamptonshire, by Charles I. There he would be in close connexion with his friend and patron Spencer Compton, 2nd earl of Northampton.
During the next fifteen years Taylor's movements are not easily traced. He seems to have been in London during the last weeks of Charles I., from whom he is said to have received his watch and some jewels which had ornamented the ebony case in which he kept his Bible. He had been taken prisoner with other Royalists while besieging Cardigan castle on the 4th of February 1645. In 1646 he is found in partnership with two other deprived clergymen, keeping a school at Newton Hall, in the parish of Llanvihangel-Aberbythych, Carmarthenshire. Here he became private chaplain to Richard Vaughan, 2nd earl of Carbery (1600-1686), whose hospitable mansion, Golden Grove, is immortalized in the title of Taylor's still popular manual of devotion, and whose first wife was a constant friend of Taylor. The second Lady Carbery was the original of the “Lady” in Milton's Comus. Mrs Taylor had died early in 1651. He second wife was Joanna Bridges, said on very doubtful authority to have been a natural daughter of Charles I. She owned a good estate, though probably impoverished by Parliamentarian exactions, at Mandinam, in Carmarthenshire.
From time to time Jeremy Taylor appears in London in the company of his friend Evelyn, in whose diary and correspondence his name repeatedly occurs. He was three times imprisoned: in 1654-5 for an injudicious preface to his Golden Grove; again in Chepstow castle, from May to October 1655, on what charge does not appear; and a third time in the Tower in 1657-8, on account of the indiscretion of his publisher, Richard Royston, who had adorned his “Collection of Offices ” with a print representing Christ in the attitude of prayer.
Much of his best work was produced at Golden Grove. In 1646 appeared his famous plea for toleration, Θεολογία Ἐκλεκτικὴ, A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying. In 1649 he published the complete edition of his Apology for authorized and set forms of Liturgy against the Pretence of the Spirit, as well as his Great Exemplar . . . a History of . . . Jesus Christ, a book which was inspired, its author tells us, by his earlier intercourse with the earl of Northampton. Then followed in rapid succession the Twenty-seven Sermons (1651), “for the summer half-year,” and the Twenty-five (1653), “for the winter half-year,” The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650), The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651), a controversial treatise on The Real Presence . . . (1654), the Golden Grove; or a Manuall of daily prayers and letanies . . . (1655), and the Unum Necessarium (1655), which by its Pelagianism gave great offence.[1] The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living provided a manual of Christian practice, which has retained its place with devout readers. The scope of the work is described on the title-page. It deals with “the means and instruments of obtaining every virtue, and the remedies against every vice, and considerations serving to the resisting all temptations, together with prayers containing the whole Duty of a Christian.” Holy Dying was perhaps even more popular. A very charming piece of work of a lighter kind was inspired by a question from his friend, Mrs Katherine Phillips (the “matchless Orinda”), asking “How far is a dear and perfect friendship authorized by the principles of Christianity?” In answer to this he dedicated to the “most ingenious and excellent Mrs Katherine Phillips” his Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship (1657), His Ductor Dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience . . . (1660) was intended to be the standard manual of casuistry and ethics for the Christian people.
He probably left Wales in 1657, and his immediate connexion with Golden Grove seems to have ceased two years earlier. In 1658, through the kind offices of his friend John Evelyn, Taylor was offered a lectureship in Lisburn, Ireland, by Edward Conway, second Viscount Conway. At first he declined a post in which the duty was to be shared with a Presbyterian, or, as he expressed it, “where a Presbyterian and myself shall be like Castor and Pollux, the one up and the other down,” and to which also a very meagre salary was attached. He was, however, induced to take it, and found in his patron's mansion at Portmore, on Lough Neagh, a congenial retreat.
At the Restoration, instead of being recalled to England, as he probably expected and certainly desired, he was appointed to the see of Down and Connor, to which was shortly added the small adjacent diocese of Dromore. He was also made a member of the Irish privy council and vice-chancellor of the university of Dublin. None of these honours were sinecures. Of the university he writes, “I found all things in a perfect disorder . . . . a heap of men and boys, but no body of a college, no one member, either fellow or scholar, having any legal title to his place, but thrust in by tyranny or chance.” Accordingly he set himself vigorously to the task of framing and enforcing regulations for the admission and conduct of members of the university, and also of establishing lectureships. His episcopal labours were still more arduous. There were, at the date of the Restoration, about seventy Presbyterian ministers in the north of Ireland, and most of these were from the west of Scotland, and were imbued with the dislike of Episcopacy which distinguished the Covenanting party. No wonder that Taylor, writing to the duke of Ormonde shortly after his consecration, should have said, “I perceive myself thrown into a place of torment.” His letters perhaps somewhat exaggerate the danger in which he lived, but there is no doubt that his authority was resisted and his overtures rejected. His writings also were ransacked for matter of accusation against him, “a committee of Scotch spiders being appointed to see if they can gather or make poison out of them.” Here, then, was Taylor's opportunity for exemplifying the wise toleration he had in other days inculcated, but the new bishop had nothing to offer the Presbyterian clergy but the bare alternative — sub- mission to episcopal ordination and jurisdiction or deprivation. Consequently, in his first visitation, he declared thirty-six churches vacant; and of these forcible possesssion was taken by his orders. At the same time many of the gentry were won by his undoubted sincerity and devotedness as well as by his eloquence. With the Roman Catholic element of the population he was less successful. Ignorant of the English language, and firmly attached to their ancestral forms of worship, they were yet compelled to attend a service they considered profane, conducted in a language they could not understand. As Heber says, “No part of the administration of Ireland by the English crown has been more extraordinary and more unfortunate than the system pursued for the introduction of the Reformed religion.” At the instance of the Irish bishops Taylor undertook his last great work, the Dissuasive from Popery (in two parts, 1664 and 1667), but, as he himself seemed partly conscious, he might have more effectually gained his end by adopting the methods of Ussher and Bedell, and inducing his clergy to acquire the Irish tongue.
The troubles of his episcopate no doubt shortened his life. Nor were domestic sorrows wanting in these later years. In 1661 he buried, at Lisburn, Edward, the only surviving son of his second marriage. His eldest son, an officer in the army, was killed in a duel; and his second son, Charles, intended for the church, left Trinity College and became companion and secretary to the duke of Buckingham, at whose house he died. The day after his son's funeral Taylor caught fever from a patient whom he visited, and, after a ten days' illness, he died at Lisburn on the 13th of August 1667, in the fifty-fifth year of
- ↑ See an angry letter by Brian Duppa, bishop of Salisbury, on the subject (Eden i. xlii.).
