Author: Cayley, Cornelius
Biography:
CAYLEY, Cornelius (1728-83: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 23 Apr. 1728 and baptised on 18 May at St. Mary Lowgate, Hull, Yorkshire, one of about ten children of Cornelius Cayley (1692-1779), attorney and recorder, and Elizabeth Smelt (1695-1750), who had married at York in 1723. He had intense religious experiences as a child but later felt public school and the diversions of London had led him to neglect religion. He left school at fourteen and was articled to his father but at nineteen he was given a post, on a comfortable stipend of £80 per annum, as clerk in the household of the Prince of Wales. In 1751 he removed to become Clerk to the Princess Dowager’s Treasury. In Sept. 1750 his younger brother, Leonard, died in London and his mother soon after, and he underwent another conversion experience. The following year he heard George Whitefield preach and embraced Methodism. He also became acquainted with James Harvey, author of Meditations among the Tombs (1746) and regularly attended the Tabernacle, Moorfields. He printed The Doctrine of Jesus Christ (1751) for private circulation but no copies appear to have survived. He married Sarah Dyer on 24 May 1756 at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, Westminster. There was probably no issue. In 1757 he resigned his position to devote himself full-time to his preaching and ministry. He settled in Norwich for about five years, where he published his spiritual autobiography, The Riches of God’s Free Grace (1757, 1758) and a short defence of Methodists in A Letter to the Rev. Mr. Potter(1758). He left Norwich in 1761 to preach further afield, and seems to have settled in Leeds. In the autumn of 1772 he travelled abroad and published his experiences in A Tour Thorough [sic] Holland, Flanders and Part of France (Leeds 1773). He also published a third enlarged edition (with a portrait) of his autobiography at Leeds in 1778. He translated three religious testimonies (French, Italian and Dutch). A late short religious poem, An Evangelical Dialogue between Cornelius Cayley and Echo (1780?) is not listed for reasons of length. He died at York on 28 Mar. 1783. (ancestry.co.uk 14 July 2023; findmypast.co.uk 14 July 2023; DNB; ODNB 14 July 2023; Cumberland Pacquet 8 Apr. 1783; Leeds Intelligencer 7 Dec. 1779, 8 Apr. 1783; GM Dec. 1779, 615) AA
Other Names:
- C. Cayley