By the autumn of 1863, Convocation had been in existence for four and a half years, and, by then, its activists had accommodated themselves – if not without some resentment – to the legal and practical limits of their involvement in the University’s affairs, and had survived a period of difficult internal relations between some of their medical members and the majority. There was still one early constitutional adjustment to be made, within the Annual Committee, which would involve the medical graduates sharing their sixteen places with graduates in Science: but that seems to have been accepted without controversy. The framework thus established by 1865 would remain virtually unaltered for more than thirty years, until each of the four faculties of Arts, Laws, Medicine and Science were given nine members on the Annual Committee, renamed the Standing Committee, in May 1897.

Though there were to be no significant alterations to the formal scheme within which Senate and Convocation co-existed between 1865 and 1900, there was no shortage of controversy. It was accepted, essentially, that action in the context of University affairs would be conducted within the parameters settled by the end of the first five years of Convocation’s existence; and to no small extent the early era of confrontation gave place to a future apparently dominated by the notion of mutual accommodation, by both Senate and Convocation. But this relative calm was accompanied by a series of attempts to strengthen the position of Convocation, which were reflections of the discontents over the limited role allotted to it by the Charter of 1858. And those attempts were the precursors of the rancorous episodes which marked the arguments over the future of the University in the 1880s and 1890s, though those arguments were complex and, in reality, a conflict of many factions rather than a straightforward confrontation between the two principal institutions.

If one searches for a turning point in the transition from an atmosphere of touchiness and unease in the relations of Senate and Convocation to one of relatively relaxed co-operation, one is driven to point to the disappearance from the scene of the first Chairman of Convocation, Charles James Foster. Foster was a political activist of the first order. He was a leader who had a clear idea of what Convocation’s role – and his role – should be.