He was a son of Sir Robert Taylor (1714–1788), the architect, and his wife Elizabeth, and was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, becoming a barrister at Lincoln's Inn in 1774.
[1] In Parliament Taylor showed himself anxious to curtail the delays in the Court of Chancery, and to improve the lighting and paving of the London streets; and he was largely instrumental in bringing about the abolition of the pillory.
At first a supporter of the younger Pitt, he soon veered round to the side of Fox and the Whigs, favoured parliamentary reform, and was a personal friend of the regent, afterwards King George IV.
He was on the committee which managed the Impeachment of Warren Hastings; was made a privy councillor in 1831; and died in London in July 1834.
The university did not receive the money, with which it built the Taylor Institution, until 1835, a year after Michael Angelo's own death.