[2] He was educated at the grammar school in Newark-on-Trent and Heath Academy in Yorkshire, and at the age of eighteen entered the Royal Navy.

Engaged afterwards under Sir Hugh Palliser and Admiral John Byron on the Newfoundland Station, he was appointed to act as chief magistrate of the settlement.

[7] a second edition appearing under the new title of The Legislative Rights of the Commonalty Vindicated (1777)[8] and advocated annual parliaments, the secret ballot and manhood suffrage.

In 1798, he conceived the project of a political association, which took shape in 1780 as the Society for Constitutional Information, including among its members some of the most distinguished men of the day.

In 1818, Knight, John Saxton and James Wroe formed the reformist and popularist newspaper the Manchester Observer.

Later in 1819, Cartwright was arrested for speaking at a parliamentary reform meeting in Birmingham, indicted for conspiracy and was condemned to pay a fine of £100.

He became the main patron of the Radical publisher Thomas Jonathan Wooler, best known for his satirical journal The Black Dwarf, who actively supported Cartwright's campaigning.

In 1821, he invited Jeremy Bentham to serve with him as one of "seven wise men" to act as "Guardians of Constitutional Reform", their reports and observations to concern "the entire Democracy or Commons of the United Kingdom".

Jefferson wrote to Cartwright in July 1824: Your age of eighty-four, and mine of eighty-one years, ensure us a speedy meeting.

We may then commune at leisure, and more fully, on the good and evil, which in the course of our long lives, we have both witnessed; and in the mean time, I pray you to accept assurances of my high veneration and esteem for your person and character.

[13] He turned over a large part of his estate to the cultivation of woad, creating dedicated buildings and improving the apparatus used to process the crop.

[20] By the time he leased the estate and moved to Enfield, Middlesex in 1803, Cartwright had developed the rich loam soil into a profitable site for the cultivation of woad.

[17][21][15] Marrat recounted in 1814 that Cartwright had sold off much of the land as separate farms and that the holding had consisted of around 880 acres (360 ha).

The business was not successful and the mill stood idle within a few years; it was advertised for sale in 1798 and eventually sold at great loss in 1805.

The housing estate was built by Tower Hamlets Council and a number of the blocks were named after social and political reformers.