[2] He was the seventh son of Thomas Butterworth Bayley, of Hope Hall, near Manchester, where he was born 6 December 1777; his mother was Mary, only child of Vincent Leggatt.
[2] Bayley was educated at the grammar school of Winwick in Lancashire, and at Eton College, which he entered in May 1789, and left 9 December 1795.
Richard Porson pronounced him the first Greek scholar of his standing in England, and in 1802 he was elected a Fellow of his college.
Tomline preferred him to the rectory of Stilton, Huntingdonshire, and to the sub-deanery of Lincoln, vacant by the death of William Paley in May 1805.
Later he was preferred to the archdeaconry of Stow with the prebend of Liddington (1823); to the rectory of Westmeon with Privet, in Hampshire (1826); and to the twelfth stall in Westminster Abbey (1828), when he resigned his subdeanery and canonry at Lincoln.
He was buried in the same vault with his wife, who had died at Westmeon 17 June 1839, and the new church was consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester on 5 May 1846.
In 1843 he became unable to write or read, and abandoned schemes for a new edition of Thomas Secker's Eight Charges, and for a selection from the old and new versions of the Psalms of David.