Via Switzerland To England, Ambassador
After leaving Rome, where he had become intimate with all that was most interesting in the cosmopolitan society of the papal capital, Bunsen went to England, where, except for a short term as Prussian ambassador to Switzerland (1839–1841), he was destined to pass the rest of his official life. The accession to the throne of Prussia of Frederick William IV, on 7 June 1840, made a great change in Bunsen's career. Ever since their first meeting in 1828 the two men had been close friends and had exchanged ideas in an intimate correspondence, published under Ranke's editorship in 1873. Enthusiasm for evangelical religion and admiration for the Anglican Church they held in common, and Bunsen was the instrument naturally selected for realizing the king's fantastic scheme of setting up at Jerusalem a Prusso-Anglican bishopric as a sort of advertisement of the unity and aggressive force of Protestantism.
The special mission of Bunsen to England, from June to November 1841, was completely successful, in spite of the opposition of English high churchmen and Lutheran extremists. The Jerusalem bishopric, with the consent of the British government and the active encouragement of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, was duly established, endowed with Prussian and English money, and remained for some forty years an isolated symbol of Protestant unity and a rock of stumbling to Anglican Catholics.
During his stay in England Bunsen had made himself very popular among all classes of society, and he was selected by Queen Victoria, out of three names proposed by the king of Prussia, as ambassador to the Court of St. James's. In this post he remained for thirteen years. His tenure of the office coincided with the critical period in Prussian and European affairs which culminated in the revolutions of 1848. With the visionary schemes of Frederick William, whether that of setting up a strict episcopal organization in the Evangelical Church in Prussia, or that of reviving the defunct ideal of the medieval Empire, Bunsen found himself increasingly out of sympathy. He realized the significance of the signs that heralded the coming storm, and tried in vain to move the king to a policy which would have placed him at the head of a Germany united and free. He felt bitterly the humiliation of Prussia by Austria after the victory of the reaction; and in 1852 he set his signature reluctantly to the treaty which, in his view, surrendered the "constitutional rights of Schleswig and Holstein". His whole influence was now directed to withdrawing Prussia from the blighting influence of Austria and Russia, and attempting to draw closer the ties that bound her to Britain. On the outbreak of the Crimean War he urged Frederick William to throw in his lot with the western powers, and create a diversion in the north-east which would have forced Russia at once to terms. The rejection of his advice, and the proclamation of Prussia's attitude of "benevolent neutrality", led him in April 1854 to offer his resignation, which was accepted.
Read more about this topic: Christian Charles Josias Von Bunsen
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