College, London) in 1826. London University was founded, with the backing of Utilitarians, Jews and Nonconformists, as a secular institution, intended to educate "the youth of our middling rich people between the ages of 15 or 16 and 20 or later" giving its nickname, "the godless college in Gower Street". The need for such an institution was a result of the religious and social nature of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which then educated solely the sons of wealthy Anglicans. The secular nature of London University gained disapproval, indeed, "the storms of opposition which raged around it threatened to crush every spark of vital energy which remained".
The creation of King's College as a rival institution represented a Tory response to reaffirm the educational values of the established order. More widely, King's was one of the first of a series of institutions which came about in the early nineteenth century as a result of the Industrial Revolution and great social changes in England following the Napoleonic Wars. By virtue of its foundation, King's enjoys the patronage of the monarch, the Archbishop of Canterbury as its visitor, and during the nineteenth century counted among its official governors the Lord Chancellor, Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Mayor of London.
==== Duel in Battersea Fields, 21 March 1829 ====
The simultaneous support of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (who was also Prime Minister of the United Kingdom then), for an Anglican King's College London and the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which was to lead to the granting of almost full civil rights to Catholics, was challenged by George Finch-Hatton, 10th Earl of Winchilsea, in early 1829. Winchilsea and his supporters wished for King's to be subject to the Test Acts, like the universities of Oxford, where only members of the Church of England could matriculate, and Cambridge, where non-Anglicans could matriculate but not graduate, but this was not Wellington's intent.
Winchilsea and about 150 other contributors …
