Dr Wace was not slow to follow up his success, just before the fall of the Rosebery Government, in persuading Lord Salisbury to arrange for draft amendments to be put forward for inclusion in Playfair’s Bill which would protect KCL from the threat of losing its grant of public money, and to ensure that there should be an appeal to the Privy Council from decisions of the proposed Statutory Commission. Those were matters for the longer term, but Dr Wace arranged a meeting with the Prime Minister for 14 August 1895, to discuss the College’s immediate financial problem, and sent a letter on the previous day, reminding Lord Salisbury that KCL had been deprived, since March, 1894, of £1700 a year, while grants were being paid to both UCL and Bedford College.

It is highly likely that Lord Salisbury made clear to Wace, on 14 August, that some re-instatement of the grant would be forthcoming. But any early payment was not a prospect welcomed by the Treasury. When Gorst, the Vice- President of the Council, was told by his officials that ‘No application has been made by King’s College to the Treasury with reference to the suspended grant’, he noted on the file that ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer does not wish any hint to be given to King’s College to make a formal application.’ In part, the Treasury’s reluctance may simply have reflected the fact that there was no money left in the allocation for grants in 1895–96, and the known success of KCL in having appealed for more funds from Church sources.

There was, however, a more significant factor at work. The Prime Minister appears to have accepted that some gesture would have to be made by KCL to modify its insistence that almost all its personnel be of the Anglican persuasion. Sometime in late September or early October, Webster, the Attorney General, told the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, ‘that the authorities of King’s College had pause, and were willing, to adopt a Conscience Clause for students’. Hicks Beach then told Webster, ‘with the full concurrence of the Prime Minister, that this must be a condition of the renewal of the grant’. And in an interview with Hicks Beach, Wace was told that ‘it would be impossible permanently to subsidize the college unless it should relax its religious requirements’.