While much more has been written about the loyalists who landed in Nova Scotia (part of which became New Brunswick in 1784) and others to Upper Canada, there is significantly less about the large number of loyalists who landed in England and the British Isles. You should certainly get your hands on Mary Beth Norton's The British Americans as this is EXACTLY what she outlines. There was a decent size population of American refugees in London. For the most part, they remained separated by their regions they came from, Carolinians frequented the "Charleston Coffeehouse," while New Englanders had their own hangouts. Just like in Halifax or Barbados, the Americans refugees were often looked down upon in London. Many Britons distrusted their American cousins who seemed prone to republicanism. As the war took a turn against British interests, many refugees gave up on hopes of returning to the Americas and moved out of London into the English countryside. Post 1783, many refugees who fled to Nova Scotia found the climate inhospitable and joined the earlier London contingent. Norton's book highlights some of the struggles and triumphs of this crowd. For one particularly interesting narrative, and one closely associated with my research, check out Carol Berkin's Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist, which documents one mans movement from Massachusetts to London and eventually to St. John New Brunswick. Also, check Maya Jasanoff's highly acclaimed Liberty's Exiles. You can catch her talking about that work here.

There certainly were some Loyalists that moved to England after the Revolution. These people tended to be among the wealthiest and most respected Loyalists, able to draw upon the financial and social connections that enabled them to survive in English society. The examples I'll focus on here all hailed from New York, as the most visible Loyalist leaders from that state all went to England during or after the war. Mary Beth Norton concluded that between 7,000 and 8,000 loyalists - almost all of them white - fled America to England. Maya Jasanoff challenges this claim in her very readable book Liberty's Exiles, suggesting that 8,000 should probably be the lowest acceptable number of white refugees, and adding in Cassandra Pybus' estimate of 5,000 black refugees. To reach her 8,000+, Jasanoff includes Loyalists who fled first to East Florida, then to England after the British ceded that territory to the Spanish at the end of the war.

Many of the refugees who fled to England appeared before Parliament's Loyalist Claims Commission in an effort to be reimbursed for the properties they lost for the loyalty to the crown. Their testimonies provide an invaluable resource in tracing the shape of the civil war inside the American Revolution. On the main, any relief granted by the LCC tended to be disappointing, never equally, and sometimes not even approaching, the sums lost. To be fair to Parliament, fully paying out the more prominent refugees would have been a substantial undertaking, as some loyalists had owned estates the size of counties. One of the main subjects of Jasanoff's book, for example, is Beverly Robinson. Robinson and his father-in-law, Fredrick Philpse, owned much of modern-day New York's Putnam and Dutchess Counties.

Still, the losses the most fortunate of these families were able to recoup, paired with their sterling military reputation born of hard fighting in the Revolution, secured these families entry into the British gentry. Robinson and some his family (his eldest sons opted for Canada over England), for example, settled as renters in the London suburb of Mortlake, joined by several other Loyalist families in the vicinity. Still, this small social scene apparently provided little comfort to the refugees, who complained until their deaths of feeling out of place and adrift.

A notable exception to this stagnation were those loyalists who remained in the British military. Oliver de Lancey was not a Loyalist in the traditional sense: though he was born in New York, he went to school in England and joined a regular regiment of the British Army in 1766. Despite his American origins, he became Barrack-Master-General of the British Army, a very senior general staff posting, in 1794. Two years later, he became a Member of Parliament. An American-born relation of his, William Howe De Lancey, died serving as a member of Wellington's staff at the Battle of Waterloo, cutting short a promising military career that had already netted him one of the most coveted staffing jobs in the army. Fredrick Philipse Robinson, son of Beverly, also secured a general's commission, fighting the French in the Peninsular Campaign during the Napoleonic Wars before being assigned to command a brigade tasked with invading New York from Canada during the War of 1812. Other De Lancey and Robinson sons became colonels, itself no small accomplishment.

What's remarkable about both the London and Canadian Loyalist families is how many of them moved back, often during the lifetime of the generation that fought (survived?) the Revolution. Members of the loyalist Robinson, De Lancey, Van Schaak, Colden, and Dyckman families - all of whom lived in London during or after the Revolution - returned to New York at some point. Some even regained their families' pre-war social standing. Peter Van Schaak, who had been a friend of John Jay before their political ideals drove them apart, tutored law students for the bar in the upstate town of Kinderhook (on the advice of Jay, he stayed out of even local politics, lest anyone take exception to a Loyalist trying to tell Patriots what to do). Some of Robinson's sons became successful merchants in New York, joined by other Loyalists who had returned from Canada like the Depeyster family. Cadwallader D. Colden, grandson of New York's last royal lieutenant governor and son of an outspoken (and eventually exiled) Loyalist, spent his youth either in British-occupied New York City or in London, but this did not stop him from becoming NYC's mayor in 1821.

In summary, the fate of the loyalists was a mixed bag. It should be no surprise that those who were wealthy and successful in America generally found some way to remain so in England. What is surprising is the extent to which these Loyalists, who had been chased from their homes by their neighbors as traitors, continued to see themselves as fundamentally American and out of place anywhere else. More surprising still is the ability of many of these families, within two generations from the end of the Revolution, to return to America and integrate into the young United States.

Sources:

Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles

Valerie McKito, From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens

Thomas Flexner, States Dyckman