All the picturesque features of Election disappeared in the sixties, when new statutes were substituted for those of the Founder, and the relations between King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton entirely changed. In 1861 William Austen Leigh and Felix Cobbold were elected to King’s. With them ended the ancient succession of Eton scholars after it had continued, with few if any interruptions, under the statutes of Henry VI., for the period of four hundred and nineteen years, William Hatecliffe (1443), afterwards Secretary to King Edward IV., and Felix Thornley Cobbold (1862) being the first and last scholars. The right of the latter to a scholarship at King’s was, it should be added, disputed, as was that of William Austen Leigh, the Provost and Fellows of the Cambridge College urging that the new statutes were already in operation. This question, which never ought to have been raised, inasmuch as the names of these boys were on the indenture before the existence of the new statutes, was submitted to legal opinion and then to the “Visitor.” It was eventually justly decided that the two Eton scholars were entitled to scholarships at King’s College, with all their rights, emoluments, and consequences, and with this terminated the ancient and sisterly connection between the two Foundations.

The new statutes provided that four scholarships at King’s should be annually offered for competition to the scholars of Eton, tenable for six years, value £80 per annum, with tuition, rooms, and commons free. The injury done to the interests of Eton by the new arrangements was very great, for four scholarships per annum did not amount to the average of the old succession, which ranged from four and a half to five, while the difference between a scholarship of six years’ tenure and one which led to a Fellowship that might be held for life was so great as to be difficult to calculate. The remarkable features in these iniquitous changes were the earnestness with which they were pressed by King’s, which seemingly was anxious to rid itself of its connection with Eton—that is, as far as it could—and the weakness of Eton and its dereliction of duty to itself and its scholars in acquiescing in them without any attempt to obtain any mitigation or revision which might certainly have been effected. Henry Norris Churton, the first Colleger to be affected by the new state of affairs, declined to accept the scholarship at King’s to which he was elected in July, but Richard Durnford, elected in the same month, did accept, and thus became the first Eton scholar who went to King’s under the new statutes.

A few years later—in 1871—the repeal of the entire code of statutes which had regulated Eton since the 21st December, 1443, did a good deal more towards nullifying the wishes of Henry VI. The old statutes laid down that there should be seventy poor scholars—an important clause which the new ones abolished. At present, directly contrary to the Founder’s intention, there is nothing to prevent the son of a multi-millionaire from competing for an Eton scholarship.