Having been elected to Brooks’s on the 21st of February 1825, it may have been he and not his brother, John, who carried to Lord Lansdowne a message from the Whig meeting at the club in April 1827 urging him not to break off negotiations for joining the Canning administration.
Emma, of low birth, learned of this imminent poverty from Stephen Price, manager at Drury Lane, after the marriage and urged Calcraft to keep their situation a secret.
Emma refused to cohabit for fear of losing her theatre contract and sending both Calcraft and herself into the "horrors of poverty" as "neither of them [was] so constituted as to be able to endure" such a turn of events.
[5] Within months of the marriage Robert Sherard, 6th Earl of Harborough, had renewed a former interest in her, they had been romantically involved since 1824,[6] even as Calcraft sought her assurance that she would join him.
The husband and usurper did confront each other, whereupon Calcraft was said to have demanded satisfaction, but in July 1829 Emma eloped with Sherard while on tour in Nottingham and went to live in a cottage on his estate at Stapleford Park in Leicestershire.
"[1][7] The bill fell away following the dissolution of parliament, owing to Calcraft's inability to bear the expense as a result of losing his allowance, as he later claimed, and the marriage remained valid in law.
He presented the petition from Wareham for its retaining one seat, but the following day he conceded that, although the borough was prosperous and almost viable in terms of population, it could not be saved from some degree of disenfranchisement under schedule A.
Arriving late at the debate on adding Corfe Castle to the reprieved constituency of Wareham, he opposed the idea because it would give the nomination to the Bankes family, local Tory rivals.