Family and Education

2nd s. of Clement Taylor, paper-maker, of Wrotham, Kent by Sarah, da. of William Quelch, paper-maker, of Dartford, Kent.  unm.

Offices Held

Biography

Clement Taylor, like his father, three of his brothers, and the Quelchs, was a paper-maker with mills near Maidstone, in business on a large scale, enterprising and prosperous. He also owned some land in Kent. Contemporary correspondence suggests that he was of an independent turn of mind; and at Maidstone he was the candidate of the independent party, returned both in 1780 and 1784 after a contest.

He voted regularly against North's Administration, and his only reported speech, 20 Feb. 1782, was on the censure motion against the Admiralty:1 he said ‘that such in his opinion had been the mismanagement of the navy that all our calamities had originated in that source and were solely to be ascribed to that evil’. He voted for Shelburne's peace preliminaries, 18 Feb. 1783, for parliamentarty reform, 7 May 1783 and 18 Apr. 1785, and for Fox's East India bill, 27 Nov. 1783; and opposed Pitt till he left Parliament.

He went bankrupt in 1797, and died in Ireland in April 1804.2

Ref Volumes: 1754-1790

Author: Sir Lewis Namier

Notes

• 1. Debrett, vi. 259.
• 2. Gent. Mag. 1804, p. 977.