Manchester was the largest and most important township in the parish that bore its name – an area of some 60 square miles covering much of modern greater Manchester. T.S. Willan, Elizabethan Manchester (Chetham Soc. ser. 3, xxvii), 1. The seventeenth-century town lay clustered along the banks of the River Irwell at the junction of the roads from London to Chester and from Chester to York. VCH Lancs. iv. 174. It had acquired the position of a borough by the late thirteenth century, although officially at least it remained a market town, for no royal charter granting it borough status or of incorporation was ever issued. VCH Lancs. iv. 231, 233. It was described in the 1670s as ‘a large, beautiful and well-inhabited town, much resorted unto, and enjoyeth a considerable trade for most commodities, but chiefly for its linen and woollen cloths, as also for its cottons, which are held in great esteem’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 133. The township contained about 1,150 adult males by 1642, which suggests an overall population of somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000. Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, 39; J.M. Gratton, ‘The Parliamentarian and Royalist War Effort in Lancs. 1642-51’ (Manchester Univ. PhD thesis, 1998), 40. According to the hearth tax roll for 1666, there were more than 1,300 householders in Manchester, which again indicates a population well in excess of 3,000 and perhaps above 4,000. VCH Lancs. iv. 223. The population of the parish as a whole was reckoned in 1650 to be in excess of 27,000, although this was almost certainly an exaggeration. J. Aikin, A Description of the County from Thirty to Forty Miles around Manchester (1795), 155.
Manchester’s economy rested primarily on the manufacture and marketing of cloth, and most of its leading inhabitants were clothiers or mercers by trade. Aikin, Description, 154; Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, 51-3, 63, 128; Gratton, ‘War Effort in Lancs.’, 40-1. Indeed, its importance as an entrepôt in the textile trade, linking the cloth producing areas of Lancashire (and possibly Cheshire, too) with the cloth markets of London, made it something of a regional centre in commercial terms. Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, 127-9. Moreover, the town was also noted for its weekly market, which was ‘very considerable’ for the sale of cloth and for ‘provisions’ generally. Blome, Britannia, 133; Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, 66-7. Manchester was governed through its manorial court leet, presided over by the lord of the manor’s steward. VCH Lancs. iv. 233; Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, 86. Each October the steward selected a jury, usually consisting of between 15 and 20 of the leading townsmen, and the jury, in turn, elected the court’s principal officers – notably, a boroughreeve, two constables, ‘market lookers’ and ‘affeerers’ or bailiffs. VCH Lancs. iv. 233-4; Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, 86.
Manchester was not only the largest and most economically developed town in Lancashire, it was also the region’s foremost centre for ‘religion and profession’, or in other words, puritanism. The strength of godly Protestantism in Manchester has been attributed primarily to its close trading links with London and to the presence in the town of the collegiate church – a centre for preaching excellence since the Reformation. Richardson, Puritanism, 9-13, 77; Gratton, ‘War Effort in Lancs.’, 69. Although not devoid of royalists, Manchester ‘from the beginning [of the civil war] ... opposed the king and declared magisterially for Parliament’; and in the autumn of 1642, the Mancunians, led by Richard Radclyffe*, Robert Duckenfeild* and other local parliamentarian gentlemen, successfully resisted a royalist siege of the town. Clarendon, Hist. ii. 470; Gratton, ‘War Effort in Lancs.’, 73, 90-1. The pastoral influence of leading members of the collegiate church – in particular, the warden Richard Heyricke and one of the four ‘ministers of God’s word’, Henry Newcome – helped to ensure that Manchester became a bastion of the Lancashire Presbyterian movement during the 1640s and 1650s. The Life of Adam Martindale ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc. o.s. iv), 55, 68, 128; Calamy Revised, 362-3, 555. Nevertheless, in the mid-1640s, the parish of Manchester sent several petitions to Parliament requesting that the collegiate church be abolished and its revenues used for ‘planting of a godly and constant ministry’ in the parishes’ nine chapels. The petitioners further requested that each chapelry be made into a parish in its own right and that the inhabitants of each ‘have liberty to elect their own ministers’. Greater Manchester RO, E7/28/5/8a-b.
Given such sentiments, it is perhaps not surprising that strong pockets of religious Independency also emerged in the parish; and it was probably a member of this community – Charles Worsley* – who was the principal local figure in securing Manchester’s enfranchisement under the Instrument of Government in 1653. Worsley, who hailed from the parish rather than the town of Manchester, was lieutenant colonel of Oliver Cromwell’s* own regiment and was apparently on familiar terms with the protector and probably also with the author of the Instrument, Major-general John Lambert*. Infra, ‘Charles Worsley’. Worsley’s input would help to explain why it was apparently not the town or putative borough of Manchester – a Presbyterian stronghold – that was enfranchised, but the entire parish. At any rate, the electoral returns state that the franchise was vested in the ‘gentlemen, burgesses and inhabitants of the town and parish of Manchester’ and that the returning officers were ‘the constables of the said town of Manchester and ... the rest of the constables within the parish of Manchester’. Manchester Central Lib. M91/M1/28/4, 5; Manchester Ct. Leet Recs. ed. J.P. Earwaker (Manchester, 1887), iv. pp. 117-18.
In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, the town and parish duly returned Worsley on 19 July. Manchester Central Lib. M91/M1/28/4; Manchester Ct. Leet Recs. ed. Earwaker, iv. pp. 117-18. Twenty-nine men were listed by name on the electoral return; and despite the fact that the newly-created constituency apparently covered the entire parish, all but five of these men can be identified from the Manchester court leet records and constables’ accounts as leading townsmen. Whether these 29 voters represented the entirety of the electorate or, as seems likely, the tip of a much larger grouping is not clear. Nor is it known exactly how Worsley was elected – whether simply by selection on the part of the leading voters or with the additional approbation of the assembled electorate.
Worsley died in June 1656, and in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament that summer, the town and parish returned the prominent Mancunian Richard Radclyffe on 19 August. C219/45, unfol.; Manchester Central Lib. M91/M1/28/5; Manchester Ct. Leet Recs. ed. Earwaker, iv. pp. 159-60. On this occasion 50 voters, including the town’s civil-war governor Richard Holland* and the manorial steward, were named in the return, of which only nine had appeared on the 1654 return – and of these 50, a mere dozen appear to have played no part in the town’s municipal affairs. In the absence of Worsley it is possible that the leading Presbyterian townsmen exercised a greater influence upon the election – hence the return of one of their own number, Radclyffe. Infra, ‘Richard Radclyffe’; Halley, Lancs. 299. It is certainly suggestive that he and his Presbyterian brother-in-law John Gell were among those MPs excluded from the Parliament as enemies of the protectorate.
Manchester lost its parliamentary seat in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, and it was to remain unrepresented at Westminster until the electoral reforms of the nineteenth century.
