The Devil's Chaplain
Amidst public unrest in July 1830 when the French king was deposed by middle class republicans and given refuge in England by the Tory government, Carlile gave Taylor a platform in the Blackfriars Rotunda, a ramshackle building on the south bank of the River Thames where republican atheists now gathered. Several times a week Taylor dressed in "canonicals", staged infidel melodramas, preaching bombastic sermons to artisans. Two Sunday sermons on "The Devil" caused particular outrage when he pronounced "God and the Devil... to be but one and the self-same being... Hell and Hell-fire... are, in the original, nothing more than names and titles of the Supreme God." He was then dubbed "The Devil's Chaplain", and thousands of copies of his ceremonies were circulated in a seditious publication, The Devil's Pulpit. As the Tory government collapsed in November, Taylor preached against the establishment while a revolutionary tricolour flew from the roof of The Rotunda.
At the start of April 1831 Taylor was again indicted for blasphemy over two Easter sermons in the last days of The Rotunda. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol whence he sent protesting letters to The Times, but his pleas were snubbed by the Home Secretary. In a letter to W.Watts he described his physical decline and fear that "the Christians have determined to kill me.... I never expect to leave this Bastile but Heels foremost. Your greatly obliged Murdered Friend, Robert Taylor." Despite these fears, he lived on till 1844.
Read more about this topic: Robert Taylor (Radical)
Famous quotes containing the words devil and/or chaplain:
“Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality,—that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidate,—who is invariably the devil,—and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity,—who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Though I had not come a-hunting, and felt some compunctions about accompanying the hunters, I wished to see a moose near at hand, and was not sorry to learn how the Indian managed to kill one. I went as reporter or chaplain to the hunters,—and the chaplain has been known to carry a gun himself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)