When, at last, in 1847, a Constitution was granted by the King, it was too late. Sir Robert Peel seems to have been hopeful, and in a letter of twenty-two pages to Bunsen he expressed an opinion that the Prussian government might still be able to maintain the Constitution if only sincere in desiring its due development, and prepared in mind for that development. To the King, however, and to the party at court, the Constitution, if not actually hateful, was a mere plaything, and the idea of surrendering one particle of his independence never entered the King's mind. Besides, 1848 was at the door, and Bunsen certainly saw the coming storm from a distance, though he could not succeed in opening the eyes of those who stood at the helm in Prussia. Shortly before the hurricane broke loose, Bunsen had once more determined to throw up his official position, and retire to Bonn. But with 1848 all these hopes and plans were scattered to the winds. Bunsen's life became more restless than ever, and his body was gradually giving way under the constant tension of his mind. “I feel,” he writes in 1848 to Archdeacon Hare, “that I have entered into a new period of life. [pg 378] I have given up all private concerns, all studies and researches of my own, and live entirely for the present political emergencies of my country, to stand or to fall by and with it.”
With his love for England he deeply felt the want of sympathy on the part of England for Prussia in her struggle to unite and regenerate the whole of Germany. “It is quite entertaining,” he writes, with a touch of irony very unusual in his letters, “to see the stiff unbelief of the English in the future of Germany. Lord John is merely uninformed. Peel has somewhat staggered the mind of the excellent Prince by his unbelief; yet he has a statesmanlike good-will towards the Germanic nations, and even for the German nation. Aberdeen is the greatest sinner. He believes in God and the Emperor Nicholas!” The Schleswig-Holstein question embittered his feelings still more; and in absence of all determined convictions at Berlin, the want of moral courage and political faith among those in whose hands the destinies of Germany had been placed, roused him to wrath and fury, though he could never be driven to despair of the future of Prussia. For a time, indeed, he seemed to hesitate between Frankfort, then the seat of the German Parliament, and Berlin; and he would have accepted the Premiership at Frankfort if his friend Baron Stockmar had accepted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But very soon he perceived that, however paralyzed for the moment, Prussia was the only possible centre of life for a regeneration of Germany; that Prussia could not be merged in Germany, but that Germany had to be resuscitated and reinvigorated through Prussia. His patriotic nominalism, if we may so call his youthful [pg 379] dreams of a united Germany, had to yield to the force of that political realism which sacrifices names to things, poetry to prose, the ideal to the possible. What made his decision easier than it would otherwise have been to a heart so full of enthusiasm was his personal attachment to the King and to the Prince of Prussia. For a time, indeed, though for a short time only, Bunsen, after his interview with the King in January, 1849, believed that his hopes might still be realized, and he seems actually to have had the King's promise that he would accept the crown of a United Germany, without Austria. But as soon as Bunsen had left Berlin, new influences began to work on the King's brain; and when Bunsen returned, full of hope, he was told by the King himself that he had never repented in such a degree of any step as that which Bunsen had advised him to take; that the course entered upon was a wrong to Austria; that he would have nothing to do with such an abominable line of politics, but would leave that to the Ministry at Frankfort. Whenever the personal question should be addressed to him, then would he reply as one of the Hohenzollern, and thus live and die as an honest man. Bunsen, though mourning over the disappointed hopes that had once centred in Frederick William IV., and freely expressing the divergence of opinion that separated him from his sovereign, remained throughout a faithful servant and a loyal friend. His buoyant spirit, confident that nothing could ruin Prussia, was looking forward to the future, undismayed by the unbroken succession of blunders and failures of Prussian statesmen,—nay, enjoying with a prophetic fervor, at the time of the deepest degradation of Prussia at Olmütz, the final [pg 380] and inevitable triumph of that cause which counted among its heroes and martyrs such names as Stein, Gneisenau, Niebuhr, Arndt, and, we may now add, Bunsen.
After the reaction of 1849 Bunsen's political influence ceased altogether, and as Minister in England he had almost always to carry out instructions of which he disapproved. More and more he longed for rest and freedom, for “leisure for reflection on the Divine which subsists in things human, and for writing, if God enables me to do so. I live as one lamed; the pinions that might have furthered my progress are bound,—yet not broken.” Yet he would not give up his place as long as his enemies at Berlin did all they could to oust him. He would not be beaten by them, nor did he altogether despair of better days. His opinion of the Prince of Prussia (the present King) had been raised very high since he had come to know him more intimately, and he expected much in the hour of need from his soldier-like decision and sense of honor. The negotiations about the Schleswig-Holstein question soon roused again all his German sympathies, and he exerted himself to the utmost to defend the just cause of the Schleswig-Holsteiners, which had been so shamefully misrepresented by unscrupulous partisans. The history of these negotiations cannot yet be written, but it will some day surprise the student of history when he finds out in what way public opinion in England was dosed and stupefied on that simple question. He found himself isolated and opposed by nearly all his English friends. One statesman only, but the greatest of English statesmen, saw clearly where the right and where the wrong was, but even he could only dare to be silent. On the 31st of July, 1850, Bunsen writes:—
“Palmerston had yielded, when in a scrape, first to Russia, then to France; the prize has been the protocol; the victim, Germany. They shall never have my signature to such a piece of iniquity and folly.”
However, on the 8th of May, 1852, Bunsen had to sign that very piece of iniquity. It was done, machine like, at the King's command; yet, if Bunsen had followed his own better judgment, he would not have signed, but sent in his resignation. “The first cannon-shot in Europe,” he used to say, “will tear this Pragmatic Sanction to tatters;” and so it was; but alas! he did not live to see the Nemesis of that iniquity. One thing, however, is certain, that the humiliation inflicted on Prussia by that protocol was never forgotten by one brave soldier, who, though not allowed at that time to draw his royal sword, has ever since been working at the reform of Prussia's army, till on the field of Sadowa the disgrace of the London protocol and the disgrace of Olmütz were wiped out together, and German questions can no longer be settled by the Great Powers of Europe, “with or without the consent of Prussia.”
Bunsen remained in England two years longer, full of literary work, delighted by the success of Prince Albert's Great Exhibition, entering heartily into all that interested and agitated English society, but nevertheless carrying in his breast a heavy heart. Prussia and Germany were not what he wished them to be. At last the complications that led to the Crimean War held out to his mind a last prospect of rescuing Prussia from her Russian thralldom. If Prussia could have been brought over to join England and France, the unity of Northern Germany might have been her reward, as the unity of Italy was the reward of Cavour's alliance with the Western Powers. Bunsen used all his influence [pg 382] to bring this about, but he used it in vain, and in April, 1854, he succumbed, and his resignation was accepted.
Now, at last, Bunsen was free. He writes to a son:—
“You know how I struggled, almost desperately, to retire from public employment in 1850. Now the cord is broken, and the bird is free. The Lord be praised!”
But sixty-two years of his life were gone. The foundations of literary work which he had laid as a young man were difficult to recover; and if anything was to be finished, it had to be finished in haste. Bunsen retired to Heidelberg, hoping there to realize the ideal of his life, and realizing it, too, in a certain degree,—i.e. as long as he was able to forget his sixty-two years, his shaken health, and his blasted hopes. His new edition of “Hippolytus,” under the title of “Christianity and Mankind,” had been finished in seven volumes before he left England. At Heidelberg his principal work was the new translation of the Bible, and his “Life of Christ,” an enormous undertaking, enough to fill a man's life, yet with Bunsen by no means the only work to which he devoted his remaining powers. Egyptian studies continued to interest him while superintending the English translation of his “Egypt.” His anger at the machinations of the Jesuits in Church and State would rouse him suddenly to address the German nation in his “Signs of the Times.” And the prayer of his early youth, “to be allowed to recognize and trace the firm path of God through the stream of ages,” was fulfilled in his last work, “God in History.” There were many blessings in his life at Heidelberg, and no one could have [pg 383] acknowledged them more gratefully than Bunsen. “Yet,” he writes,—
“I miss John Bull, the sea, ‘The Times’ in the morning, and, besides, some dozens of fellow-creatures. The learned class has greatly sunk in Germany, more than I supposed; all behindhand.... Nothing appears of any importance; the most wretched trifles are cried up.”