Editing Thomas Holcroft (section)

==Personal life==

[[File:William Daniell after George Dance the Younger - Thomas Holcroft - 11713.jpg|thumb|'Thomas Holcroft' - [[William Daniell]] after [[George Dance the Younger]], chalk and pencil drawing]]

Thomas Holcroft married four times.

From his first wife, whom he married around 1765 and whose name is unknown,<ref>There is no proof for saying he married his cousin, half-sister of Major [[Charles Marsack]] of [[Caversham Park]]. In 1765, Holcroft's cousin Margaretta, daughter of his uncle John Holcroft (or "Houldcraft") by his second marriage in 1754 with Margaret Marsack, was just ten years old. Till her death in January 1785 she remained unmarried, although a mother of three children by a relationship with William Roome. According to her will (National Archives PROB 11/1126/89, Kew, dated 1 February 1785), "Margaretta Holcroft Roome, Spinster of Saint Marylebone, Middlesex" named her half-brother Charles Marsack as her executor.</ref> he had a daughter Ann (1766–1841), who in 1797 married Colonel William Tooke Harwood (1757–1824), a close associate of [[John Horne Tooke]] (1736–1812) and a fervent follower of [[Joanna Southcott]] (1750–1814).

In 1772 Holcroft married Matilda Tipler from [[Nottingham]] and had with her two children: a son William (1773–1789), who being only sixteen, committed suicide while attempting to escape to the West Indies after robbing his father of £40 (Memoirs, pp.&nbsp;140–142), and a daughter Sophia (1775–1850), who in 1794 married William Cole, a merchant from Exeter. She resided later at Hamburg, and in 1805, after Cole's death, was married to [[Georges Danton]]'s cousin Georges Nicholas Mergez (1772–1846), a general in the Napoleonic army.

In 1778, three years after the death of his second wife, Holcroft married Diana Robinson, who died in 1780 after giving birth to a daughter [[Fanny Margaretta Holcroft|Fanny Margaretta]] (1780–1844). Fanny Holcroft was the author of the noted Romantic anti-slavery poem, "The Negro" (1797), as well as novels such as ''Fortitude and Frailty'' (1817) and ''The Wife and the Lover'' (1813–14).<ref>Corvey Library catalogue: [http://extra.shu.ac.uk/corvey/catalog/belleslettres/h.html Retrieved 30 July 2012.]</ref> From 1805 to 1806, she also translated seven plays (from German, Italian, and Spanish) for her father's "Theatrical Recorder" and later wrote a melodrama of her own.

After nine years as a widower, Holcroft married his fourth wife, Louisa Mercier (1779–1853), in March 1799. She was the daughter of a longstanding friend, Charles-André Mercier, brother of the French dramatist [[Louis-Sébastien Mercier]] (1740–1814). From this marriage came four sons and two daughters. The daughter Louisa (1801–1869) became the wife of Carlyle's friend John Badams (Carlyle, [[Reminiscences (Carlyle)|Reminiscences]], ed. C. E. Norton, 1887, i., pp.&nbsp;93–95) in 1828; after Badam's death (1833), she in 1835 married Barham Cole Mergez, her half-sister's Sophia son from her second marriage who in 1846 inherited the title "baron" from his father. The son Thomas Holcroft Jr. (1803–1852) was a clerk in the House of Commons and spent several years in India, before becoming a journalist in 1822, who some time was Paris correspondent for the ''Morning Herald'' and secretary of the Asiatic Society. The widowed Louisa Mercier Holcroft remarried [[James Kenney (dramatist)|James Kenney]] (1780–1849), the dramatist, in 1812 and became the mother of three sons and three daughters.