timate 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 (1830-1841), he was destined to pass the rest of his official
life. The accession to the throne of Prussia of Frederick William IV., on
June 7th, 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, 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 Holste