Jonathan Boucher

Rev Jonathan Boucher FRSE FSA (12 March 1738 – 27 April 1804) was an English clergyman, teacher, preacher and philologist.

Boucher was born in Blencogo, near Wigton, Cumberland, and educated at the Wigton Grammar School. After training in Workington, Jonathan became a teacher, at St. Bees School and in 1759 went to Virginia, where he became a private tutor in the families of Virginia planters. Invited to become vicar of a nearby Anglican church, but lacking any religious qualifications, he briefly returned to England, to be ordained by the bishop of London in March 1762.

He landed in America again on 12 July, and remained until 1775 as rector of various Virginia and Maryland parishes, including St. Mary's, Caroline County, Virginia, Hanover, King George County, Virginia, and St Anne's in Annapolis, Maryland and in 1771, St. Barnabas Church, Upper Marlboro, Maryland.

He also kept a school, and among his charges, from 1768, was John Parke Custis, the stepson of George Washington with whom he began a close friendship. Earlier, on Whitsun Monday, 1766, he baptised 350 Black adults at his Caroline County parish, and preached to about 3,000 for about an hour.

He was widely known as an eloquent preacher, and his scholarly attainments won for him the friendship and esteem of some of the ablest scholars in the colonies. He was also an ardent Tory, believing firmly that protest against Government wrongs should be carried out within the law– but definitely not an uncritical supporter of British policy; for example, he considered the 1765 Stamp Act to be "oppressive, impolitic and illegal", and the Royal proclamation against the Westward Expansion of the thirteen colonies "unjust and impolitic". During his residence in Maryland he vigorously opposed the vestry act, by which the powers and emoluments of the Maryland pastors were greatly diminished. When the struggle between the colonies and the mother country began, although he felt much sympathy for the former, his opposition to any form of illegal obstruction to the Stamp Act and other measures, and his denunciation of a resort to force, created a breach between him and his parish, and for months, he preached with a pair of loaded pistols beside him. In a fiery farewell sermon at St. Barnabas in 1775, to a hostile crowd of 200 men, he preached after the opening of hostilities he stated:

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