However, the first fruits of the royal "holiness" was a noble conception. A visit to Winchester in the July of 1440, where Henry studied carefully from personal observation the working of William of Wykeham's system of education, seems to have fired him with the desire to rival that great pioneer of schoolcraft's magnificent foundations at Winchester and Oxford. The suppression of the alien priories, decreed by Parliament in the preceding reign and carried out in his own, provided a convenient means of carrying out the project. Henry V. had already appropriated their revenues for the purposes of war in France. Henry VI. proceeded to confiscate them permanently as an endowment for his college foundations. It would appear, however, that the first intention of the King had been that his two foundations should have been independent of one another, and that the connection of Eton with King's, after the manner of Winchester and New College, came rather as an afterthought and as part of a later scheme. The determination, however, that the Eton scholars should participate in the Cambridge foundation forms part of the King's scheme in the second charter of his college granted on 10th July 1443, in which he says:-- "It is our fixed and unalterable purpose, being moved thereto, as we trust, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that our poor scholars of our Royal foundation of S. Mary of Eton, after they have been sufficiently taught the first rudiments of grammar, shall be transferred thence to our aforesaid College of Cambridge, which we will shall be henceforth denominated our College Royal of S. Mary and S. Nicholas, there to be more thoroughly instructed in a liberal course of study, in other branches of knowledge, and other professions." [Illustration: The West Doorway King's College Chapel] The first site chosen for the College was a very cramped and inconvenient one. It had Milne Street, then one of the principal thoroughfares of the town, on the west, the University Library and schools on the east, and School Street on the north. On the south side only had it any outlet at all. A court was formed by placing buildings on the three unoccupied sides, the University buildings forming a fourth. These buildings, however, were never completely finished, except in a temporary manner, and indeed so remained until the end of the last century, when they were more or less incorporated in the new buildings of the University Library facing Trinity Hall Lane, erected by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1868. The old gateway facing Clare College, which had been begun in 1444, was at last completed from the designs of Mr. Pearson in 1890, and remains one of the most beautiful architectural gates in Cambridge. [Illustration: King's College Chapel]