TAYLOR, John, commonly known as the Water Poet, was born in Gloucestershire in 1580, and was apprenticed at an early age to a Thames waterman, whose avocation consisted in conveying the citizens of London from Windsor Bridge to Gravesend. Taylor says there were no fewer than 40,000 watermen in those days of peace, before the introduction of hackney coaches, or, as the Water Poet terms them, in true waterman politeness, "hyred hackney hell-carts." During a time of war the watermen were in constant request to man the fleet, so that Taylor himself, during his threescore years and ten, had made no fewer than sixteen voyages in the Queen's ships, and was with Essex at Cadiz and the Azores. He was a shrewd, fluent, passionate individual, who engaged in numerous "wagering adventures," sometimes to the no small danger of his life; such as rowing between London and Queensborough in a paper boat, with two stockfish for oars! This adventure he performed with one Roger Bird, a vintner, who seems to have been reduced to a deplorable plight when night came. As Taylor has it,
"The water four miles broad, no oars to row,
Night dark, and where we were we did not know;
And thus, twixt doubt and fear, hope and despair,
I fell to work, and Roger Bird to prayer.
And as the surges up and down did heave us,
He cried, most fervently, 'Good Lord receive us.'"
This four-mile voyage they accomplished in a day and a half: the bottom of their paper boat having given way, there was nothing to trust to for more than half-way but "eight large and well-blown bladders!" Now he embarks in "a very merry wherry-ferry voyage" from London to York; again he undertakes "a discovery by sea from London to Salisbury." Laying aside his oars for a time, he sets out on "The Pennyless Pilgrimage, or the Moneyless Perambulation of John Taylor, alias the King's Majesty's Water Poet; [narrating] how he travelled on foot from London to Edinburgh in Scotland, not carrying any money to or fro, neither begging, borrowing, or asking meat, drink, or lodging." Taylor complains bitterly of the scurvy manner in which many of those who engaged him in those insane frolics afterwards treated him in his "Scourge for Baseness, a Kicksey-Winsey, or a Lerry-cum Twang." During the state troubles which ensued, Taylor, who was too brave a man to turn with the tide, left London for Oxford. While here he issued his squibs against the Roundheads, and made himself "much esteemed for his facious company." Returning again to London after the surrender of Oxford, he kept a public-house in Phoenix Alley, near Long Acre, where, after the king's death, he set up a mourning crown for his sign. Compelled to remove this piece of loyal devotion, he elevated his own portrait in its stead. Here he died in 1656, and was buried in the churchyard of St Paul's, Covent Garden. In 1630 he made a collection of All the Works of John Taylor, the Water Poet, which are now exceedingly scarce.