the Professor's claim to
a veto, the Vice-Chancellor on his own responsibility stopped the
degree. A vexatious dispute lingered on for two or three years, with
actions in the Vice-Chancellor's Court, and distinguished lawyers to
plead for each side, and appeals to the University Court of Delegates,
who reversed the decision of the Vice-Chancellor's assessor. Somehow or
other, Mr. Macmullen at last got his degree, but at the cost of a great
deal of ill-blood in Oxford, for which Dr. Hampden, by his unwarranted
interference, and the University authorities, by their questionable
devices to save the credit and claims of one of their own body, must be
held mainly responsible.

Before the matter was ended, they were made to feel, in rather a
startling way, how greatly they had lost the confidence of the
University. One of the attempts to find a way out of the tangle of the
dispute was the introduction, in February 1844, of a Statute which
should give to the Professor the power which was now contested, and
practically place all the Divinity degrees under the control of a Board
in conjunction with the Vice-Chancellor.[104] The proposed legislation
raised such indignation in the University, that the Hebdomadal Board
took back their scheme for further revision, and introduced it again in
a modified shape, which still however gave new powers to the Professor
and the Vice-Chancellor. But the University would have none of it. No
one could say that the defeat of the altered Statute by 341 to 21 was
the work merely of a party.[105] It was the most decisive vote given in
the course of these conflicts. And it was observed that on the same day
Mr. Macmullen's degree was vetoed by the Vice-Chancellor at the instance
of Dr. Hampden at 10 o'clock in Congregation, and the Hebdomadal Board,
which had supported him, received the vote of want of confidence at noon
in Convocation.

Nothing could show more decisively that the authorities in the
Hebdomadal Board were out of touch with the feeling of the University,
or, at all events, of that part of it which was resident. The residents
were not, as a body, identified with the Tractarians; it would be more
true to say that the residents, as a body, looked on this marked school
with misgiving and apprehension; but they saw what manner of men these
Tractarians were; they lived with them in college and common-room; their
behaviour was before their brethren as a whole, with its strength and
its weakn