Introduction

In the first half of Queen Victoria's reign, until Gladstone's electoral victory of 1868, the Church of England enjoyed its last comparatively secure period of national strength. Roman Catholicism, awakened out of a century and a half of sleep by the conversion of Newman and Manning, was disappointed that the subsequent flow of defections from the Church of England never amounted to more than a trickle. Administratively the Church of England remained perhaps the least reformed, most abuse-ridden Church in Christendom. The Ecclesiastical Commission incorporated in 1836 as a result of the Conservative leader, Sir Robert Peel's initiative and kept up to the mark by its dominant member Blomfield, the bishop of London, did precisely this. It worked amid cries of derision from Nonconformists and Radicals who thought it did too little, and cries of horror especially from high churchmen who thought it did too much, did the wrong things, and did them without proper ecclesiastical authority.