 Despite these wide and varied interests, the government’s betrayal over the panopticon continued to anger Bentham for many years, generating a deep-seated scepticism of the motives of those in positions of power and influence. Added to his own first-hand experience of the maneuvers of aristocratic landowners determined to prevent the erection of a panopticon in the vicinity of their London estates, there was also a suggestion that the King himself, outraged by Bentham’s “Anti-Machiavel” letters and disturbed by rumours of his Jacobinism, may have directly intervened to thwart the project (1830–31 [1838–43, XI, 96–105]). In Bentham’s mind such actions were representative of the “sinister interests” typically ranged against beneficial schemes of reform. This insight served to draw Bentham into an open engagement with parliamentary reform. A further catalyst came from his association with James Mill, whom he met in late 1808, and who for many years thereafter acted as his philosophical and political aide-de-camp.