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Pressure-Group Politics and the Church of England: the Church Defence Institution 1859–1896

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of political mobilisation for religious organisations. This is a well-established fact in the case of English nonconformity – not quite such a well-established fact in the case of the Established Church. My concern in this paper is to trace the response of the Church of England to the extension of electoral politics, a response chiefly evidenced in the work of the Church Institution. This body, founded in 1859 and reconstructed as the Church Defence Institution in 1871, survived until 1896 as the most important independent pressure group acting on behalf of the Established Church in English politics.