Sympathetic to the early ideals of the French Revolution, Holcroft assisted in publishing the first part of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man in 1791.

In early December 1794 Holcroft was discharged without trial after those cases, against London Corresponding Society secretary Thomas Hardy, and SCI figure John Horne Tooke, resulted in acquittals.

[3] As one of what Secretary of War William Windham called "acquitted felons", Holcroft's post-arrest reputation meant that his plays achieved little success after 1795, although he was instrumental in bringing melodrama to Britain at the end of the decade with his Deaf and Dumb (1801) and A Tale of Mystery (1802, an unacknowledged translation of de Pixerécourt's Cœlina, ou, l'enfant du mystère).

[citation needed] His Memoirs written by Himself and continued down to the Time of his Death, from his Diary, Notes and other Papers, by William Hazlitt, appeared in 1816, and was reprinted, in a slightly abridged form, in 1852.

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.

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 (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).

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.