By the time the petition of UCL and KCL arrived at the Privy Council Office in the summer of 1887, some observers of the higher educational scene were confident that a far more wide-ranging inquiry than hearings of petitions by Privy Council Committees was inevitable. ‘Of course,’ wrote the Journal of Education, on 1 July, ‘there will be a Royal Commission to consider them and the cognate petitions from the Doctors and Surgeons’, and did not doubt ‘that the upshot will be a Teaching University for London’. But despite a steady stream of letters to the Times, and articles in the medical press, it is unlikely that even the few Ministers who were aware of the argument going on in and between the institutions mainly concerned were prepared for what developed in the following six or eight months. They may well have been taken aback to discover how the proposals for the Albert University and for awarding degree-giving powers to the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons were to be challenged by provincial Britain and within the medical profession. In the months after July, 1887, petitions filling thirty files in the records of the Privy Council were received, mostly from Universities and Medical Schools, all but three either opposing the proposals outright, or asking that institutions should be recognised and their places ensured in any settlement.

The Senate excited some scorn for rejecting the idea of the Albert University while not offering direct opposition to the proposals of the Royal Colleges. But what is particularly striking was the opposition within medical circles to the scheme of those Colleges. The Lancet felt that