Cartwright had been again directing his attention to agricultural improvements. In 1793 had appeared a letter from him to Sir John Sinclair on a new reaping machine of his invention, and in June 1801 he received a prize from the board of agriculture for an essay on husbandry. In 1800 the ninth duke of Bedford gave him the management of an experimental farm at Woburn. The duke died in the following spring, and Cartwright preached a funeral sermon which was severely censured, as improper from a clergyman, in a published letter, signed ‘Christianus Laicus,’ addressed to Charles James Fox. The tenth duke of Bedford retained his services until 1807. In that year appeared a volume of affectionately didactic ‘Letters and Sonnets’ addressed by Cartwright to Lord John Russell, then a boy of fifteen. During his stay at Woburn, Cartwright's zealous promotion of agricultural improvement procured him distinctions from the Society of Arts and the board of agriculture. In 1806 the university of Oxford conferred on him his B.D. and D.D. degrees, and he officiated as domestic chaplain to the Duke of Bedford. He remained rector of Goadby Marwood until 1808 at least.
In 1804 Cartwright's patent for the power-loom expired. For several years after his abandonment of the Doncaster factory his power-loom was little used, but, with improvements effected in it, it came gradually into some favour. About 1806 Cartwright found his invention to have become a source of considerable profit to Lancashire manufacturers. He wrote an indignant letter to a Manchester friend. In August 1807 some fifty prominent Manchester firms signed a memorial to the Duke of Portland, as prime minister, asking the government to bestow a substantial recognition on the services rendered to the country by Cartwright's invention of the power-loom. Cartwright petitioned the House of Commons, which on 10 June 1809 voted him 10,000l.
Cartwright now became independent. He bought a small farm at Hollander, between Sevenoaks and Tunbridge, and occupied himself during the rest of his life in cultivating it and in useful inventions, agricultural and general. In his eighty-third year he sent to the Royal Society, which did not publish it, a paper containing a new theory of the movement of the planets round the sun. At Hollander he was kind to the poor and active as a magistrate. Crabbe's son speaks of Cartwright as ‘a portly dignified old gentleman, grave and polite, but full of humour and spirit.’ Inventing to the last, he died at Hastings on 30 Oct. 1823, and was buried in the church of Battle, where his family erected a mural monument to his memory. Cartwright left several children, among them Edmund, rector of Earnley; Elizabeth, wife of the Rev. John Penrose, better known as the Mrs. Markham of juvenile historical literature; Frances Dorothy [q. v.], the biographer of her uncle, Major Cartwright; and Mary, the wife of Henry Eustatius Strickland, no doubt the authoress of the meritorious biography of her father, which was published anonymously, but to the preface of which its writer affixed the signature ‘M. S.’
[A Memoir of the Life, Writings, and Mechanical Inventions of Edmund Cartwright, D.D., &c. (1843); Bennett Woodcroft's Brief Biographies of Inventors for the Manufacture of Textile Fabrics (1863); Abridgments of Specifications relating to Weaving (1861); Report from the Committee on Dr. Cartwright's Petition respecting his weaving machine, together with the minutes of evidence: House of Commons' Papers (1808); E. Baines's History of Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1833); Barlow's History and Principles of Weaving by Hand and by Power (1878); James's History of the Worsted Manufacture in England from the earliest times (1857); Tredgold's Steam-engine, its Invention and Progressive Improvement (1838).]
CARTWRIGHT, FRANCES DOROTHY (1780–1863), poetess and biographer, youngest child of the Rev. Edmund Cartwright, D.D. [q. v.] inventor of the powerloom, &c., by his first wife, Alice, was born 28 Oct. 1780. She was adopted by her uncle. Major Cartwright [q. v.], the energetic politician, on her mother's death, while she was still an infant; and was sent to school at Richmond. In 1802 she began to write small poems, and in 1823, being much interested by the Spanish patriots received by her uncle, she learnt Spanish and translated a few of Riego's poems into English. On the death of her uncle in 1824 she prepared her first published work, 'The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright,' published in 1826. She retired with Major Cartwright's widow to Worthing, and published her poems there anonymously, in a little volume, 'Poems, chiefly Devotional,' dated 13 Nov. 1835. Her translations of Riego's poems appeared, with her initials, in the poet's 'Obras Póstumas Poéticas' (1844). She died at Brighton 13 Jan. 1863, aged 83.
[Frances Cartwright's Life of her uncle, i. 163, 405, 408-12, ii. 163, 243, 245, 279. 301: her Poems. 18, 21-6. 41, 47, 48. 50; El Romancero and Obras Póstumas Poéticas of E. A. del Riego y Nuñez and R. del Riogo y Nuñez, on coloured leaves, not paged; Brighton Examiner, 20 Jan. 1863.]
