‘Great Exemplar’ was overshadowed by the death of Lady Carbery, which launched Taylor in another new direction, the funeral sermon crafted along the conventional lines of such preaching, first on the Gospel text, and then giving reflections on the deceased – a tendency that could be followed in our own time. Around 1650 Taylor lost his wife Phoebe, a tragedy which merely added to his deprivations. Hemmed in as Taylor may have been by life’s difficulties, he kept his pen in his hand and wrote copiously, perhaps even as a kind of therapy from it all. In 1650 came what is probably his best-known book of all – ‘the Rule and Exercises of Holy Living’, which was followed in 1651 by ‘the Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying’. Both works were dedicated to Carbery, for it was Lady Carbery who apparently had encouraged him to write them. Both reflect the troubled times in which they were written – the ‘epistle dedicatory’ to the first work hits the nail on the head when near the start Taylor observes that ‘men are apt to prefer a prosperous error to an afflicted truth’. Both books were best-sellers and reached their seventeenth editions in 1695. Although written separately, and (understandably for their subject-matter) in different styles, they were often bound together. The first proper combined edition appeared in 1700.
In the period since, they have frequently been reprinted and sometimes adapted and abbreviated. Although not as popular in our time as they once were, they probably remain Taylor’s most lasting legacy to the Catholic Church. Both books take the reader on a journey which is interspersed with reflections and prayers, a medium in which Taylor excelled. In contrast to ‘Great Exemplar’, which starts with the life of Christ, Taylor now reaches more directly (and more accessibly) to the human soul. For example, ‘Holy Living’ begins with our use of time, and ends with teaching about the Eucharist and prayers in preparation for communion; there is even a prayer for the anniversary of one’s baptism. He seems to cover everything in a ‘holy life’, including the physical side of marriage. He was the first devotional writer to do so, without any of the Augustinian baggage in that regard that has hampered Western Christianity for so long. For Taylor, sex could be a good thing, and therefore was to be enjoyed. Perhaps this was another area where he upset the more conventional minds of his time.
The next few years saw the appearance of some smaller works. These included collections of his sermons (1651 and 1653), with the two issued together as ‘Eniautos’, for the whole year. Surprisingly for someone of his Prayer Book views, these were not arranged in a strictly liturgical way to correspond with the Church Year. Among them were two on marriage, which have a strongly lyrical as well as practical quality, as well as one condemning death-bed confession, a recurring theme in Taylor, already explored in ‘Great Exemplar’, which rings a somewhat sour note for modern Christians, as it may well have done then. These sermons were probably preached at Golden Grove, though opinions differ on whether they were delivered in exactly the same form as they were printed.
There are hints that at this stage he spent time on visits to London. John Evelyn notes in his diary that he travelled there to hear Taylor preach on 15 April 1654 at St Gregory’s Church, near St Paul’s Cathedral, a small building, one of the few places where Oliver Cromwell permitted the Prayer Book services to be used. What a contrast from twenty years earlier, when he preached as an aspiring twenty-two year-old in the Cathedral itself! In that year appeared ‘Real Presence’, a serious exposition of eucharistic theology, directed against Transubstantiation (named in the characteristically lengthy title), as well as some of the Reformed views of the sacrament. It goes without saying that one of the challenges facing Anglicans (often more accurately described nowadays as ‘Prayer Book Conformists’), particularly in the first part of the seventeenth century was along these lines. Transubstantiation was anathema for them and all the churches of the Reformation. Taylor was by no means alone in refuting it at the time. John Cosin (1594–1672), Restoration Bishop of Durham, was doing the same from the vantage-point of his self-imposed exile in Paris. We shall look at this question in more detail later. Taylor comes through this tricky exercise, backed up as it is with copious quotations from the patristic, mediaeval, Reformation and Counter-Reformation writers, with his stress on mystery and sacramentality – the devotional rather than the systematic writer.
Whatever people thought of ‘Real Presence’, Taylor’s next publication irritated the authorities sufficiently to have him imprisoned again, at Chepstow. ‘Golden Grove’ (1655) is a small book of prayers and devotions, with a preface openly bemoaning the barren character of the Church in his time, and going so far as to say that ‘the people have fallen under the harrows and saws of impertinent and ignorant preachers’. It reached its twentieth edition in 1700, which speaks for itself. On release from prison, Taylor went to Mandinam, not far from Golden Grove, where Joanna Bridges lived, whom he married around this time. There doesn’t seem to have been a formal break with Carbery, but Cromwell had just decreed that Royalists were not allowed to keep private chaplains.
The real bombshell of his career, however, came in a book also published in 1655 on which he had obviously been working for some time, ‘Unum Necessarium, or the Doctrine and Practice of Repentance’. Taylor wrote it as a general but probing devotional work, and most of it passed without comment. The one exception was chapter six, on original sin. He must have known that he was walking on theological egg-shells, since he had tested some of it out on Brian Duppa, Bishop of Salisbury (1588–1662). The book nonetheless unleashed a storm that made Taylor suspect in many peoples’ minds for the rest of his life. What he said about original sin conflicted with the traditional tough Augustinian approach that held sway, with some variation, throughout the Catholic and Protestant world. It elicited from Taylor a ‘Further Explication’ (1656), which became chapter seven in subsequent editions, as well as correspondence with interlocutors after that.
To put it at its briefest, Taylor believed that we do not inherit Adam’s guilt, but only the consequences of Adam’s fall, which leaves us naturally sinful, but left us with the choice of ‘holy living’. It was perhaps not the best time in the Church’s history to propound a less pessimistic view about human nature. But although this debate rumbled on, it is clearly an area where Taylor was too far from public religious opinion. He was not undermining the reality of sin, the need for repentance, or, for that matter, the pastoral strength of private confession. But he was enough of a scholar of the Reformation to know that Article IX of the Thirty-Nine was not hard-line Calvinism, but was couched in carefully nuanced language. Taylor’s approach would nowadays be called ‘ecclesial’, with sin and forgiveness placed in the sacramental context of baptism and Eucharist, something earlier Anglican divines such as Andrewes propounded. But the emphasis on free will that he taught and which may be regarded as a consequence of his emphasis on human freedom, left him stigmatized by his detractors with Semi-Pelagianism. The controversy emboldened him, and strained a number of friendships in consequence.
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Then, in 1657, Taylor published a ‘Discourse on Friendship’, which was a letter to Katharine Phillips, a prominent young playwright married to an aged Roundhead. On the face of it, all Taylor is doing is defining the nature of Christian friendship, with its pitfalls and possibilities, as well as drawing out the particular characteristics of the female gender in this regard. And that is how successive writers in the period since have interpreted it. But Katharine Phillips, known in her literary circle as ‘the matchless Orinda’, had a very strong relationship with another woman, Anne Owen, about which she wrote a poem that – certainly to modern eyes – could (some would say should) be interpreted in lesbian terms, as Reginald Askew has shown.[5] Taylor’s prose can be delightfully elusive at the best of times, but it is hard not to agree with such a fresh reading of Taylor’s line. Homosexuality had been part of the court life of King James I, so that it was not a subject that could be avoided altogether. Writers like the Puritan leader Richard Baxter (1615–91) condemn it. Taylor on the other hand takes what would nowadays be called a ‘pastoral’ approach. We shall return to this later. But it is yet another area where Taylor, if the more – encoded – specific interpretation is accepted, was ahead of his time, and could therefore