Herbert Taylor (British Army officer)
British Army general (1775-1839)
Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Taylor (29 September 1775 – 20 March 1839) was a British Army officer who served as the first Private Secretary to the Sovereign of the United Kingdom, serving George III, George IV, and William IV.
Military career
Taylor was the son of the Rev. Edward Taylor of Bifrons, Patrixbourne, Kent and his wife Margaret Payler daughter of Thomas Turner Payler of Ileden, who died at Brussels in 1780. The diplomat Sir Brook Taylor was his younger brother. He joined the 2nd Dragoon Guards as a cornet in 1794. Later that year he was promoted to lieutenant and then the following year to captain. In 1795, he served as assistant secretary and aide de camp to the Duke of York, then commander-in-chief of the British Army. Taylor was later the Duke of York's assistant military secretary, an office he held until 1798. He was later a Major. In 1798, he was made Aide de Camp, Military Secretary and Private Secretary to the Marquess Cornwallis, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In the following year he returned to the Duke of York's service and remained there until 1805, although he was transferred to the 9th West India Regiment as a lieutenant-colonel in 1801.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5735731. VIAF identifies the subject as 49596192. The Library of Congress control number is nr93039243. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1775, 1839, 1780 and 1794.
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This entry incorporates text from “Herbert Taylor (British Army officer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.