Queen Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837 was a turbulent time for Manchester, as it had been in the previous century; however a number of changes prompted a more favourable outlook of the British monarchy to slowly emerge among the town's working classes. Manchester had historically been divided politically and the Industrial Revolution had created new men at all levels, including the lower social orders and dissatisfaction with the 1832 Reform Act had provoked widespread agitation among the working classes. As Victoria came to the throne, so Chartism came to the masses and in Manchester this manifested itself in the Manchester Political Union who sponsored a massive rally at Kersal Moor in Salford. The party, solely concerned with the working people, supported the general strikes of 1842, known as Plug Plot, in which thousands of mill workers protested against wage cuts, but shortly afterwards the Chartist movement declined. At the same time the town's cultural diversity had continued to widen, as an influx of Irish immigrants had entered the town and later, in the 1880s, Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Russia also settled in Manchester. Both nationalities were representative of everything the English working man, at this time, was not, a point emphasised by Tory politics, which, whilst not openly advocating extreme sectarian attitudes, maintained that the Monarch and the Church of England were at the heart of the Englishman's national identity. Furthermore, attitudes towards the Monarchy were improving, as the public saw Queen Victoria as a better example of the constitutional monarch, not involving herself in politics, which, when combined with Prince Albert's philanthropic activities, in the late 1840s, with education and housing for the poor, resulted in a shift in public opinion and the popularity of the Royal family increased. Finally, the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 had enabled many working men to vote, from which popular Toryism emerged and needless to say the party's ethos of constitution, Queen and Church attracted the working classes, which despite nineteenth-century England's shift towards a secularised state manifested itself in open displays of loyalty to the Crown.