The Queen Victoria Clergy Fund was formally founded in 1896 as the Clergy Sustentation Fund for the Two Provinces of York and Canterbury. The following year, appreciating the value of associating itself with the monarch in her golden jubilee year, they applied for a charter from Queen Victoria and thus became the Queen Victoria Clergy Fund (henceforth the QVCF).
The QVCF was setup with the intention of 1) impressing upon the entire church the need to contribute to the support of the clergy; 2) supplementing and extending the diocesan organisation for the support of the clergy; and 3) generally promoting the sustentation of the clergy.
It was funded by the annual payments from affiliated dioceses and revenue from annual subscriptions, donations, church collections, legacies and the occasional public appeal. In return, the Fund made block grants to the Diocesan funds, in proportion to their needs, who in turn were left to distribute grants as they saw fit.
At the beginning the QVCF looked like it might prove a great success - the connection with Queen Victoria and her golden jubilee proved particularly important; the monarch herself gifted the Fund £1000. From its foundation to the end of 1897 it raised over £140,000 and by the end of 1899 all but three dioceses were affiliated.
However, this initial success was not to last. Subscriptions and donations fell rapidly to the point that QVCF became largely dependent, besides the diocesan quotas, on the returns from capitalised legacies and the minimal returns from special appeals. Its subsequent history was to show that, despite doing much good, it was not by itself able to seriously address the problem of clerical poverty.
Firstly, there was the difficulty of persuading the general laity that clerical poverty was a true problem in face of the common belief that the Church of England and most of its clergy were wealthy, and any poverty could be addressed by better management of available resources. Secondly, not unconnected to the first problem, there was growing resentment towards the Church in the early twentieth century, derived from amongst other things the acute unpopularity of tithe rent-charges, and growing indifference as society became ever more secularised. And thirdly, there was from the outset an acute tension between the central fund, the affiliated funds and the Diocese over the amounts paid out by the QVCF in its block grants that derived ultimately from a resentment of richer Dioceses to subsidise their poorer brethren, despite such redistribution being an explicit aim of the QVCF.
Despite this the QVCF still exists as a charitable body due to its small size and its continual adaption to the changes affecting the Church.
