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Oliver Cromwell, The English Civil Wars &
Parliamentarianism
In 1547 Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, and
this effectively ended the life of the ecclesiastical collegiate church
at Manchester. By 1540 Manchester had been granted the right of Sanctuary,
and this also ended with the dissolution.
By 1579 the Lordship of Manchester had been purchased by Richard Lacy,
a local mercer, and in 1596, Sir Richard Mosley, former Lord Mayor
of London, gained the Lordship of the "Manor of Manchester".
In 1642, with the outbreak of hostilities in the Civil War, and with
Manchester taking a distinctly Parliamentarian side, the town was
besieged by Royalist forces - probably the first siege of the Civil
War.
The town's fortified location evidently proved unassailable, for in
1644 Prince Rupert decided to bypass Manchester and went on to sack
the township of Bolton
and lay siege to Liverpool. A year later, there was an outbreak of
the plague in Manchester, and many London supporters raised money
to provide assistance.
In 1656, when Oliver Cromwell had dissolved Parliament and proclaimed
a Commonwealth with himself as Protector, the parliamentary mace was
given by Cromwell to the town as mark of gratitude or its support,
and was brought to Manchester by Lieutenant Colonel Charles
Worsley.
Throughout this period Manchester was regarded
as a Roundhead Parliamentary stronghold. Interestingly, this parliamentarian
ethic still survived until the 19th century, when, controversially,
in 1875, Matthew Noble's statue of Cromwell was erected by local liberal
politicians outside the cathedral, facing the Exchange Railway Station
(demolished in the 1980s - now a car park!). The realistic likeness,
showing Cromwell in battledress with drawn sword and leather body
armour, (based on Lely's famous painting) with its "pimples, warts
and everything", dismayed local conservatives and outraged the large
Irish immigrant population of the city (Cromwell had tyrannically
put down Irish uprisings).
This statue stood outside the cathedral until it was moved in the
1980s as part of extensive inner city redevelopment, and is relocated
outside Wythenshawe
Hall in Wythenshawe Park, which had been used as a billet
for Roundhead troops. The statue's controversial nature spread wider
than local politics : when Queen Victoria was invited to open the
new Manchester
Town Hall, she said that she would consent provided the
Cromwell statue was removed. In the event, the statue remained, Victoria
declined, and the Town Hall was opened by the Lord Mayor. Ironically,
the Houses of Parliament itself installed a statue of Cromwell later,
which still stands outside the Palace of Westminster today
Sources: See
Bibliography - Books about Manchester
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