"He was found sitting in the hayfield among his workpeople, or sitting in his elbow-chair nibbling his stick, or with the tail of his damask gown rolled into his pocket busying himself in his garden even at the age of eighty."
In 1742 he married Elizabeth Clapham, of Stackhouse, who was also a member of an old Giggleswick family. She is said to have ridden on horseback behind her husband from Stackhouse to Peterborough. She was the most affectionate and careful of parents, a little, shrewd-looking, keen-eyed woman of remarkable strength of mind and spirits, one of those positive characters that decide promptly and execute at once, of a sanguine and irritable temper that led her to be always on the alert in thinking and acting. She also had a fortune of £400, which in this neighbourhood was almost sufficient to confer the title of an heiress (_Some Craven Worthies_).
Their son was William Paley, Archdeacon of Carlisle and author of "Evidences of Christianity." Born in 1744 he went to Christ's College at the age of fifteen, with a Burton Exhibition and received a Carr Scholarship, when he entered. As a boy he had been a fair scholar with eccentric habits. His great delight was in cock-fighting and he must have looked forward to each Potation Day, March 12, with considerable joy. There are many anecdotes about him. He is supposed, whilst in company with his father riding on his way to Cambridge to have fallen off his horse seven times, whereupon his father would merely call out "take care of thy money, lad." His mind was always original, indeed he was never regarded as a "safe" man and in consequence he did not attain that high position in the Church that his intellectual achievements entitled him to expect. When about to take his B.A. degree he proposed to write a thesis on "Aeternitas poenarum contradicit divinis attributis," but the Master of Christ's was so distressed that Paley was induced to appease him by the insertion of a "non." In 1765 he gained the Member's Prize as Senior Bachelor with a Latin essay which had long English notes. One of the examiners condemned it, because "he supposed the author had been assisted by his father, some country clergyman, who having forgotten his Latin had written the notes in English." Powell, the Master of S. John's, a learned doctor and the oracle of Cambridge on every question concerning subscription to the faith, spoke warmly in its favour "it contained more matter than was to be found in all the others ... it would be unfair to reject such a dissertation on mere suspicion, since the notes were applicable to the subject and shewed the author to be a young man of the most promising abilities and extensive reading." This opinion turned the balance in Paley's favour (_Baker's History of S. John's_). It also justified the father's opinion of his son. For when the younger Paley went to Cambridge, his father exclaimed that he would be "a great man, a very great man: for he has by far the cleverest head I ever met with in my life." He became Senior Wrangler.