John William Fletcher - Marriage

Marriage

In 1781, Fletcher returned from the Continent where he had been convalescing from a severe respiratory disorder. Upon his return he picked up a correspondence with a woman he had met nearly thirty years previous, Mary Bosanquet, who in the early 1770s had become the first woman preacher authorized by John Wesley to preach. Mr. Fletcher and Miss Bosanquet carried on a correspondence during the summer of 1781, finding they had both at one time considered the other as a suitable spouse. They were married at Batley Church in Yorkshire on 12 November 1781. Fletcher exchanged pulpits with the evangelical vicar of Bradford, John Crosse, in order to settle his wife's affairs in Yorkshire. They returned to Madeley together on 2 January 1782. Their marriage was to be short-lived, for Fletcher died less than four years later, on 14 August 1785. After his death, Mary Fletcher was allowed to continue living in the vicarage by the new vicar, Henry Burton, a pluralist clergyman who was also the incumbent of Atcham parish near Shrewsbury. Though John Wesley attempted to persuade Mrs. Fletcher to leave Madeley for a ministry with the Methodists in London, she refused, believing she was called to carry on her late husband's work in the parish. This she did for the next thirty years. She died in the parish and was buried in the same grave as her husband in December 1815.