This very allegiance to principle had its drawbacks in the world of practical politics, of corruption and compromise. Three times Major Cartwright stood for parliament: for the county of Nottingham in 1780, for Boston in 1806 and 1807; and on each occasion he was at the bottom of the poll. His nominations for Westminster in 1818 and 1819 received no serious support at all. The old major was no more distressed by any feeling of personal disappointment at these defeats than he was cast down at seeing no signs of the triumph of political democracy in his lifetime. At eighty-four we find him writing cheerfully, “To despair in a good cause is to approach towards atheism.” Cartwright did not live to see the passage of the great Reform Bill of 1832. Wilkes’ motion for reform in 1776 had been negatived in the House of Commons without a division. In 1780 the Duke of Richmond’s motion in the House of Lords for manhood suffrage and annual parliaments was mocked by the outbreak of the Gordon (“No Popery”) Riots in London on the very day the motion was made. Pitt’s third and last effort for parliamentary reform was rejected in 1785. The French Revolution turned men’s minds in Great Britain towards democracy, but reaction followed hard on the Terror in Paris, and for a time a government terror crushed every expression in favour of political liberty in England. Sir Francis Burdett became the parliamentary leader of the “radical reformers” early in the nineteenth century, and in 1809 found fifteen supporters in the House of Commons. Ten years later the government, in the face of a strong working-class movement for political reform, brought out the military against the people at a peaceful meeting held at Peterloo, near Manchester, and followed this up by six repressive acts of parliament, and a general prosecution of the leaders of the reform agitation. Cartwright was eighty when, with several friends, he was charged “with being a malicious, seditious, evil-minded person, and with unlawfully and maliciously intending and designing to raise disaffection and discontent in the minds of his majesty’s subjects.” All England knew that Major Cartwright was a single-minded and high-principled man, in whose heart was neither guile nor malice, a man who had proved his loyalty and patriotism over and over again, and was no more seditious than he was evil-minded or disaffected. Apart from his advocacy of political reform and his services to the militia, Cartwright had done much for farming and agriculture, he had helped Clarkson and Wilberforce in their anti-slavery work, and he had called the attention of the government, as loudly as he could, to the defenceless state of the east coast against foreign invasion. Yet in 1820 a British jury, obedient to the orders of a political judge, found John Cartwright guilty of “maliciously intending and designing to raise disaffection and discontent,” and a fine of £100 was inflicted.