King's College London's founding sparked a pistol duel involving the Prime Minister
On 21 March 1829 the Duke of Wellington, then Prime Minister, faced the Earl of Winchilsea with pistols in Battersea Fields. Their quarrel began over a new Anglican college in London. Winchilsea never fired, Wellington shot wide, and King's College London went on to open two years later.
King's was a reaction. A London University founded in 1826 had no religious basis, which outraged many Anglicans, so a rival backed by King George IV and Wellington received a royal charter in 1829 as a Tory reassertion of the established order. Trouble arose because Wellington was also championing the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which would give Catholics nearly full civil rights. Winchilsea and about 150 other donors withdrew support, and his letter accusing the Duke of plotting to bring Popery into every department of the State ended in the duel. Wellington, known as a poor shot, insisted he missed on purpose; Winchilsea's sympathisers claimed otherwise.
The college opened in October 1831 under its first principal, the cleric William Otter, with the Archbishop of Canterbury presiding. Its junior department, King's College School, began in a basement with 85 pupils and three teachers, swelled to 500 by 1841, and moved to Wimbledon in 1897. Because no London institution could award degrees, the government set up an examining body that became the University of London in 1836, with King's as one of its two founding colleges.
Growth followed on many fronts. King's opened a hospital near Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1840, amid crowded slums, which moved to Denmark Hill in 1913. It trained army and East India Company officers from 1845, Anglican priests from 1846, and pioneered evening classes in London in 1855. An 1882 act ended its proprietorial status, a 1903 act dropped religious tests for staff outside theology, and in 1910 it merged into the University of London.
Later mergers brought in Queen Elizabeth College and Chelsea College in 1985, the Institute of Psychiatry in 1997 and the Guy's and St Thomas' medical schools in 1998. Its medical roots reach back to teaching recorded at St Thomas' in 1561. Alumni and staff across its merged institutions include 14 Nobel laureates.
Source: King's College London
