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 watching the movement of foreign politics, and winning a respectable practice at the local bar. Here his greatest achievement was his able defence of the Fenian prisoners, convicted in 1867 of the murder of Police Sergeant Brett. He remained poor, but obtained a good position in Radical circles, contesting Manchester in 1868, when, though unsuccessful, he received more than ten thousand votes. He died in January 1869, and the public display which attended his burial in Ardwick cemetery was only second to that which had marked the interment of O'Connor.

Jones's bitter enemy, George W. M. Reynolds (1814–1879), survived for another ten years. He ended as he had begun, as a journalist, and Reynolds' Weekly Newspaper, started by him in 1850, and still published, early obtained a position as the organ of republican and extreme labour opinions. Three of O'Connor's enemies still had much work before them. Robert Gammage, the historian of Chartism, found, after the collapse of the movement, a new occupation in the practice of medicine at Newcastle and Sunderland, from which he only retired shortly before his death in 1888. Lovett survived until 1877, mainly absorbed in his declining years in the work of popular education, which had always seemed to him the most essential condition of social progress. Cooper lived on until 1892, even more divorced from politics than Lovett, and finding consolation in his last years in upholding in his lectures the evidences for Christianity. Frost, the Newport rebel, after his return to England, lived quietly near Bristol, where he died in 1877 when over ninety. Notable among the younger men, who could still strike out fresh lines, was George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906), the young Birmingham Chartist whose long public life ranged from the Bull Ring Riots of 1839 to his many battles for co-operation and secularism, continued until a very advanced age. Even more noteworthy was the career of William James Linton (1812–1898), who, after he had thrown off the trammels of O'Connorism, won reputation as an ardent political reformer, a true poet, and, above all, as the most distinguished wood-engraver of his time.

The great band of Chartist patriarchs show that the reproaches of mediocrity and ineffectiveness, often levelled