Venerable Frances Margaret Taylor

Frances Margaret Taylor, religious name Mary Magdalen of the Sacred Heart (20 January 1832 – 9 June 1900) was an English religious sister and founder of the congregation of the Poor Servants of the Mother of God. Frances Taylor was born in Stoke Rochford, the youngest of ten children of Henry Taylor (1777–1842), Anglican Rector of a rural Lincolnshire parish, and his wife Louisa Maria Jones (1793–1869). Her paternal grandfather Richard Taylor (fl.1745–1829) had been rector of parishes in Wiltshire and Hampshire. On her mother's side, her family were merchants and shopkeepers in the City of London. Her father, a graduate of Lincoln College, Oxford, had been a curate at St Mary Abbots, Kensington, where in 1816 he married. His final appointment was to Stoke Rochford in 1824, where he was instituted by his patron, the vicar of Kensington, Thomas Rennell, whose High Church sympathies he shared. Following Henry's death, the family returned to London in reduced circumstances, but Louisa rejected a suggestion that Frances be sent to a clergy orphan school. The family shortly moved to Brompton, London, where Frances and her elder sisters encountered the Tractarian spirit and teaching at Holy Trinity Brompton Church. A few years later, the family moved to St John's Wood, and later to the vicinity of Regent's Park, possibly to be nearer to Christ Church, Albany Street, then one of London's leading Tractarian churches. The Holy Cross sisters of Park Village were nearby, the first congregation to be established in the Church of England since the Protestant Reformation. Frances developed a desire to serve the poor and vulnerable of London. In 1849 she made an abortive application to become a member of St John's House, based in Fitzroy Square, a nursing school which also functioned as an Anglican religious community. In 1848 her sisters Emma and Charlotte had joined an Anglican sisterhood, the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Trinity founded by Priscilla Lydia Sellon.