Author: Croft, Thomas Elmsley
Biography:
CROFT, Thomas Elmsley (1798-1835: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 2 Sept. 1798 and baptised at St. James’s, Piccadilly, Westminster, London, on 27 Sept., the third and eldest surviving son of Sir Richard Croft, MD, sixth baronet (1762-1818) and his wife Margaret Denman (1766-1847), who had married in 1789. He was educated at Westminster school and then entered the army as Ensign in 1814 in the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards. He was severely wounded at Quatre Bras (Waterloo) on 16 June 1815. Various sources refer to his physical and mental distress afterwards and he suffered from epilepsy. He succeeded his father as 7th Baronet in 1818, went on army half-pay in 1820, and formally retired in 1831. He married Sophia Jane Lateward-Lateward (1807-90) on 9 Sept. 1824 at Caversham, Oxfordshire. They had one daughter. He obtained a divorce in the Ecclesiastical Court in December 1829. He had evidently revisited Belgium several times and had written a poem on revisiting Quatre Bras in 1821. At some point his wife seems to have remained in Belgium. Within a week of his death, she declared her intention to marry a Colonel William Lyster, in Brussels. After his death, she married again and died at Chateau St. Pry, Calais, France, in 1890. Croft died of epilepsy on 29 Oct. 1835 at Wellington Square, Hastings, Sussex, and was buried at St. Mary de Castro. He was nursed in his final illness by his mother, to whom he was very close. There is a plaque in the family church of St. James’s, Piccadilly. His Poetical Remains (1836) were edited after his death with a memoir, possibly by one of his brothers. (ancestry.co.uk 31 May 2023; findmypast.co.uk 31 May 2023; “Biographical Notice,” Poetical Remains [1836] [ix]-xix; Cambridge Chronicle 17 Sept. 1824; John Bull 1 Nov. 1835; GM Jan. 1836, 90-1; Old England 21 Nov. 1835; The Records of Old Westminsters 1540-1883, hughpagan.com/oww-records) AA