Jeremy Taylor - Royalist Prisoner

Royalist Prisoner

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 in 1649, 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 4 February 1645. In 1646 he is found in partnership with two other deprived clergymen, keeping a school at Newton Hall, in the parish of Llanfihangel-Aberbythych, Carmarthenshire. Here he became private chaplain to and benefited from the hospitality of Richard Vaughan, 2nd Earl of Carbery, whose 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 John Milton's Comus. Taylor's first wife had died early in 1651. He second wife was Joanna Bridges or Brydges, said to a natural daughter of Charles I. She owned a good estate, though probably impoverished by Parliamentarian exactions, at Mandinam, in Carmarthenshire. Several years following their marriage, they moved to Ireland. Two daughters were born to them.

From time to time Taylor appears in London in the company of his friend John Evelyn, in whose Diary and correspondence his name repeatedly occurs. He was imprisoned three times: in 1645 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, because of the indiscretion of his publisher, Richard Royston, who had decorated his Collection of Offices with a print representing Christ in the attitude of prayer.