On 9th May 1832, at the height of the Reform Bill crisis, Joshua Watson's doomsday scenario came true. The Radical MP Joseph Hume launched a furious Commons attack on the ‘established and enormously overpaid Church’, moving successfully for a detailed Return of clerical pluralism in the Church of England. This was a transparent preliminary to corrective measures. The Radical assault on the Established Church was under way.

Joshua Watson had in early 1831 proposed a Royal Commission of Enquiry to obtain ‘accurate information on the state of Church revenues, with a view to the suggestion of the best practical remedies for the evils of translations, of unseemly commendams, and offensive pluralities’. Significantly, he wanted no lay membership: ‘Laymen would of necessity be the Minister's nominees’, and Grey's nominees could not be trusted to guard the Church's interests. In practice the lay membership of Grey's Commission of Enquiry, announced on 23rd June, was unexceptionable: its most radical member was Stephen Lushington, a Whig ecclesiastical lawyer whom Liverpool had appointed to the Church Building Commission and Wellington to the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission.

Van Mildert was a Commissioner, with Howley, Vernon Harcourt of York, Blomfield, Kaye of Lincoln and Bethell of Bangor: all except York associates of the Hackney Phalanx, although Blomfield and Kaye were Reform Act defectors.