In the civil wars, the town was besieged by the Royalists, but was successfully defended. The year 1694 witnessed the trial and acquittal of those concerned in the "Lancashire Plot." In the rising of 1715 the clergy ranged themselves to a large extent on the side of the Pretender; and in the rebellion of 1745, when the town was occupied by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, a regiment known afterwards as the Manchester Regiment, was formed and placed under the command of Colonel Francis Townley. In the retreat the Manchester contingent was left to garrison Carlisle, and surrendered to the duke of Cumberland. The officers were taken to London, where they were tried for high treason and be headed on Kennington common. The variations of political action in Manchester had been very marked. In the 16th century, al though it produced both Roman Catholic and Protestant martyrs, it was in favour of the Reformed faith, and in the succeeding century it became a stronghold of Puritanism. Yet the successors of the Roundheads who defeated the army of Charles I. were Jacobite in their sympathies, and by the latter half of the 18th century had become imbued with the aggressive form of patriotic sentiment known as anti-Jacobinism.
A change, however, was imminent. The distress caused by war and taxation led to bitter discontent, while the scandal of the pocket boroughs was very sericus for Manchester, which was entirely without representation. The popular discontent was met by a policy of repression, culminating in the affair of Peterloo, which may be regarded as the starting-point of the modern reform agitation. This was in 1819, when an immense crowd assembled
at St. Peter's Fields (now covered by the Free Trade Hall and warehouses) to petition parliament for a redress of their griev ances. The Riot Act was read, but in such a manner as to be quite unheard by the mass of people; and drunken cavalry were then turned loose upon the unresisting mass of spectators. Several people were killed and many more injured, and the incident aroused the deepest indignation throughout the whole country. The Manchester politicians took an important part in the Reform agitations; when the Act of 1832 was passed, the town sent as its representatives the Right Hon. C. P. Thomson, vice-president of the Board of Trade, and Mark Phillips. Only two other men had represented the town in parliament before : these were Charles Worsley, the man commanded by Cromwell to "remove that bauble," and R. Radcliffe, both of whom sat in the 1654 parlia ment. The agitation for the repeal of the corn laws had its head quarters at Manchester, and the success which attended it, not less than the active interest taken by the inhabitants in public questions, has made the city the home of other projects of reform. The Lancashire cotton famine, caused by the Civil War in America, produced much distress in the Manchester district, and led to a national movement to help the starving operatives. The more recent annals of Manchester are a record of industrial and commercial developments and of increase in educational oppor tunities of all kinds.