my absolute conviction that the implementation of this plan would bring about England's ruin". Thomas Babington Macaulay however predicted "that it is destined to a long, a glorious and a beneficent existence". In April and May 1834, the renewed application for a charter was discussed by the Privy Council, with petitions against the application being heard from Oxford and Cambridge, the Royal College of Physicians, and the medical schools in London. The hearings were inconclusive and no recommendation was made before the Whig government, by then led by Lord Melbourne after Grey's retirement, fell in November 1834. In March 1835, another London University council member, William Tooke, proposed an address in the House of Commons praying the King to grant a charter to London University allowing it to grant degrees in all faculties except theology. This was carried 246 - 136 despite the opposition of the government. The response was that the Privy Council would be called upon to report on the matter. Then the Tory government fell and Melbourne returned as Prime Minister. Russell and Lansdowne returned to government with Melbourne, Russell being promoted to Home Secretary. But Brougham was out, with Melbourne telling Russell, "it can never be safe to place him … in an important executive or administrative office". On 30 July, in response to a question from Tooke, the Attorney General Sir John Campbell announced that two charters would be granted, one to the (then) London University (i.e. UCL) "not as a University but as a College", with "no power … of granting academical degrees", the second "for the purpose of establishing a Metropolitan University" - what was to become the University of London. This was condemned as a "barren collegiate charter" by Tooke, who called on the London University (UCL) "to consider whether, His Majesty in his most gracious answer to the Address of the House of Commons recognised by name, and in explicit terms, the , it is not by this royal and official sanction of its style as a University, entitled, without further pageantry or form, to confer all manner of degrees except in Theology and Medicine" (emphasis in original). On 2 December 1835, a meeting of the proprietors discussed the government plan. Brougham explained that while "it went a little to his heart … to sink into a college when they had originally started as an university" this would be worth it