Frederick Oakeley

[3] The youngest child of Sir Charles Oakeley, 1st Baronet, he was born on 5 September 1802 at the Abbey House, Shrewsbury.

The Bishop of London, Charles Blomfield; appointed him Whitehall preacher in 1837, when he resigned his tutorship at Balliol, but he retained his fellowship.

Partly under the influence of William George Ward, he had grown dissatisfied with evangelicalism, and in the preface to his first volume of Whitehall Sermons (1837) he avowed himself a member of the new Oxford school.

[4] During the six years that Oakeley passed as minister of Margaret Chapel (1839–45), he became, according to a friend's description, the "introducer of that form of worship which is now called ritualism".

He was supported by prominent men, among the friends of Margaret Chapel being Mr. Serjeant Bellasis, Mr Beresford Hope, and William Gladstone.

According to an account by Mr. Wakeling the innovations of Oakeley's time were limited to the proper furnishing of the altar, a good standard of preaching but little more in the way of ritual.

The furore over this last Tract led Oakeley, like Ward, to despair of his church and university; and in two pamphlets, published separately at the time both in London and Oxford, he asserted that he held, "as distinct from teaching, all Roman doctrine".

In the summer of 1848 he joined the staff of the newly-built St George's Cathedral, Southwark; on 22 January 1850 he took charge of St John's, Islington; in 1852, on the establishment of the new hierarchy under Wiseman as cardinal-archbishop, he was created a canon of the Westminster diocese, and held this office for nearly thirty years, till his death at the end of January 1880,[4] aged 77.