Author: Okely, Francis
Biography:
OKELY, Francis (1718-94: ODNB)
Although ODNB gives 27 Mar. 1719 as the date of his birth in Bedford, Bedfordshire, he was almost certainly the Francis Oakley baptised there on 22 Mar. 1718, the son of Francis and Anne (Battison) Oakley. (The 1718 date matches his Cambridge record.) His father, a wig maker, died in a debtors’ prison about 1733 and his mother became a milliner and shopkeeper in Bedford. He was educated at the Charterhouse School in London and at St. John’s College, Cambridge (matric. 1736, BA 1739-40). His search for religious conviction led him to be rebaptised in 1740 and to serve for a short time as a Baptist minister. Between 1743 and 1747 he spent time in Germany where he was received into the evangelical Moravian church (1743) and ordained as a minister (1747). He married Elizabeth Collins (1725-1801), who was later ordained a deaconess, on 3 Feb. 1747 at Herrnhaag, Germany. They had at least four children. On his return to England, Okely served as a minister at Bedford, Bristol, and elsewhere, settling in 1767 at Northampton, where in 1770 he opened a new chapel. He was a powerful extempore preacher and an eclectic student of religious thought. Two thinkers particularly influential for him were William Law (1686-1761), whom he met, and the German mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1623). He published a memoir of Boehme’s life and writings, with translations of selected passages (1780), and there are references to his versified version of the teachings of William Law as Seasonally Alarming . . .Truths (1774)—but no extant copy has been discovered. He died at Bedford on 9 May 1794 and was buried in the Moravian burial ground there on 15 May. (ODNB 20 Mar. 2024; ancestry.com 20 Mar. 2024; findmypast.com 20 Mar. 2024; ACAD [“Okeley”])