Background
Noel was born in the Leith district of Edinburgh.
evangelical clergyman minister
Noel was born in the Leith district of Edinburgh.
Not to be confused with Wriothesley Baptist Noel, 2nd Earl of Gainsborough
He was minister of Street John"s Chapel, Bedford Row, London, from 1827 to 1848 and afterwards became a Baptist minister at the nearby John Street Baptist Church in Bloomsbury. Noel twice served as President of the Baptist Union. A portrait of him hangs outside the library of Regent"s Park College, Oxford.
He was the tenth son and sixteenth of eighteen children born to Sir Gerard Noel and Diana, Baroness Barham.
Noel attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge before entering the Middle Temple to become a barrister. In 1824, the year his mother died, he became an Anglican cleric.
He rapidly became a leader of the Evangelical party, being appointed to one of the most prominent Evangelical Anglican churches in London (Street John"s, Bedford Row), only three years after his ordination. Noel published some eighty books and pamphlets in his lifetime, chiefly concerned either with social and political reform, or with evangelical beliefs and attitudes, or with the nature of the Christian Church as a spiritual fellowship embracing all true believers.
Baptist Noel retired from active ministry in 1868 and spent his remaining years at Stanmore, Middlesex.
