A royalist figure of the First English Civil War, he was also the first editor of George Herbert and Thomas Jackson, and a personal friend of Nicholas Ferrar.
He was baptised in the parish church of Wakefield on 26 December 1602, as son of Francis Oley, a clerk, who married Mary Mattersouse on 25 June 1600.
He was elected probationer-fellow of the foundation of Lady Clare at his college on 28 November 1623, and a senior fellow in 1627, and filled the offices of tutor and president, one of his pupils being Peter Gunning.
[2] In 1633 Oley was appointed by his college to the vicarage of Great Gransden, Huntingdonshire, and held it until his death; but for several years he continued to reside at Cambridge.
For not residing at Cambridge, and for not appearing before the commission when summoned to attend, he was ejected by Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester from his fellowship on 8 April 1644.
Early in 1645, when Pontefract Castle was being defended for the king, he was within its walls, and preached to the garrison; and when Sir Marmaduke Langdale was condemned to death in 1648, but escaped from prison, and hid for some weeks in a haystack, he made his way to London in clerical dress supplied by Oley.
Through Gilbert Sheldon he was presented on 3 August 1660 to the third prebendal stall of Worcester Cathedral, and on 8 November 1679 he was collated, on the nomination of Gunning, his old pupil, to the archdeaconry of Ely.
The three volumes were reissued in 1673, with a general dedication to Sheldon, then Archbishop of Canterbury, and with a preface to the reader enlarged and edited from the three that existed (reprinted in Jackson's Works, ed.