whom any master could act as tutor, that number being forty; Browning had forty-three. Although given a temporary dispensation from this rule by the provost, this expired in the summer of 1875. Browning did not seek a renewal of permission, but continued to tutor his excess pupils. This act of insubordination, the latest in a long line of infringements and subversion of regulations, and alongside the suspicions arising from the Curzon relationship, proved to be the last straw for Hornby. On 16 September 1875, after a series of tense meetings, he wrote a formal letter to Browning dismissing him from his post. This sudden action stunned Browning and all of Eton. Most of the assistant masters, and many of the parents of the boys in his house, petitioned Hornby and the Governing Body to retract the dismissal. On 9 November 1875, when the governing body met to consider the matter, they ratified Hornby's decision. An appeal by Browning to public opinion led to a spate of supportive letters and editorials in the leading newspapers, but to no avail. At the end of 1875 Browning closed his house and left Eton, his final request for a measure of financial compensation being rejected. Browning spent the first months of 1876 with his family, and that summer travelled with them to Leipzig, taking along four of his former Eton pupils. He found time in August to visit Bayreuth, where he attended the first full performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle. Meanwhile, a petition against the rights of public school masters to dismiss their staff at will was presented to the House of Commons by Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen, but the House upheld such rights. A writer in The Saturday Review ridiculed the presumption of assistant masters in seeking to challenge the powers of headmasters, and stressed the dangers to schoolboys of such an example of insubordination. As to Browning, according to this anonymous correspondent, "Mr Browning has peculiar ideas as to the proper method of educating boys at a public school" – ideas inimical to Eton's traditions of "manliness and common sense". Fellow of King's Reforming don In September 1876, Browning returned to Cambridge and his King's College Fellowship where, despite an outwardly cordial reception, he faced some animosity. Many of his King's colleagues, all Etonians, were unimpressed by the circumstances of his departure from the school, and his reputation as a radical reformer gave further