He sought for ordination in the Church of England, and, having obtained a title for the curacy of Broad Clyst, was ordained by John Ross, bishop of Exeter, becoming deacon and priest within a week in June 1787.
Harassed by failing health and money troubles, he assisted for the last six months of his life at the Octagon Chapel, Bath; and whilst on a visit to Sir John Chichester, one of his Devon patrons, at his town house in Queen Street, Mayfair, London, died on 19 May 1788.
He was likewise a poet prefiguring the Romantic, return-to-nature genre of Wordsworth and Coleridge, with a poem titled "The Hermitage" composed in 1781 "on a sweet sequestered spot in that highly cultivated and elegant seat Castle-Hill, the residence of Earl of Fortescue near South-Molton" after he re-settled there.
This, and an article by him the next year on 'Priestley's Letters to Dr. Horsley,' produced two answers from Priestley and pamphlets from J. E. Hamilton and Edward Harwood.
A sermon which Badcock preached at the Octagon Chapel, Bath, for the benefit of the General Infirmary, 23 December 1787, was printed for private distribution.
Robert Burd Gabriel alleged that he was the virtual author of Dr. Joseph White's Bampton lectures on the effects of Christianity and Mahometanism.
The papers which William Chapple had collected for an improved edition of Tristram Risdon's Survey of Devon, were entrusted to Badcock's care for arrangement and revision.