Jonathan Boucher - Return To England

Return To England

With George Washington forced to make a hard choice between protecting his argumentative friend and showing loyalty to the colonists' cause, in the autumn of 1775 Boucher returned to England with his wife, Eleanor Addison of Oxon Hill, Maryland, where his loyalism was rewarded by a government pension.

In 1784 he became vicar of Epsom in Surrey, where he continued until his death on 27 April 1804, becoming known as one of the most eloquent preachers of his day.

He was an accomplished writer and scholar, contributed largely to William Hutchinson's History of the County of Cumberland (2 vols., 1794 seq.), and published A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (1797), dedicated to General George Washington, and consisting of thirteen discourses delivered in America between 1763 and 1775. His philological studies, to which the last fourteen years of his life were devoted, resulted in the compilation of A Glossary of Provincial and Archaic Words, intended as a supplement to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, but never published except in part, which finally in 1831 passed into the hands of the English compilers of Webster's Dictionary, by whom it was utilized. His "Reminiscences of an American Loyalist" were also belatedly published, first in serial form in "Notes and Queries" in the 1870s.

His son, Barton Boucher (1794–1865), rector of Fonthill Bishop, Wiltshire, in 1856, was well known as the author of religious tracts, hymns and novels, whilst his daughter Eleanor married Edward Hawke Locker, Civil Commissioner of the Greenwich Hospital.