A German, however fickle, could do no wrong in the eyes of Sarah Austin, praising Germany to the skies in the short history she wrote in 1854 of a country that had become as admired for its tolerance as for its ardent engagement with culture and philanthropy. While the appointment of Baron Charles de Bunsen as Prussia’s official representative in London in 1841 had already ensured that this brilliant and devout friend of Prince Albert and Baron Stockmar was in a position to import some of that enlightened spirit into England, George Eliot was eager to visit Germany, a country whose bold views on religion had earned the admiration of a non-believer.
George Eliot, in 1854, was thirty-five years old. Not yet known by her famous pseudonym, nor as the anonymous translator, aged twenty-seven, of David Strauss’s 1500-page The Life of Jesus (a book that outraged orthodox Christian readers by suggesting that Christ was not divine and that his miracles were mythical), Eliot had just made use of her own name, Marian Evans, to translate an equally controversial work, Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity.
Having exploded these German fireworks in an England where Lord Shaftesbury described Strauss’s work – which he read in her 1846 translation – as ‘the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell’, Eliot had settled into a blissful period of exile at Weimar, accompanied by her married lover, George Lewes.
In England, the religious-minded author Charles Kingsley was ready to dismiss the strong-featured, brilliant Miss Evans as Lewes’s ‘concubine’. In Germany, the unconventional couple suffered from no sense of ostracism, while winning appreciation for their open, intelligent minds.
An intellectually productive relationship (Lewes’s influence upon Eliot’s literary development was immense) added a glow of its own to the happiness of Weimar’s English visitors. The place enchanted them. Lewes, like Eliot, was charmed by the little town’s old-fashioned atmosphere: the pretty riverside walks, a park laid out upon the anglicised designs drawn up by Prince Pückler, the glimpses of ladies knitting on their doorsteps, a leafy chestnut avenue linking the town to the Belvedere, home to Weimar’s benevolent rulers. Writing home to his young sons, Lewes told them that Weimar was ‘the Athens of Germany’, home of ‘the greatest of them all . . . I mean Goethe. I am writing his life.’1
Lewes’s projected life of Goethe, the chief reason for the couple’s journey to Weimar, was published the following year when, besides becoming the standard English biography, it won the rarer compliment of an admiring audience in Germany.
Lewes’s only problem in 1854, as he researched the background for his book, was that Goethe had been dead for over twenty years, surviving only in an eclectic variety of monuments. (Eliot, while repelled by a statue at the Belvedere of Goethe naked and attended by a cringing Psyche, viewed the poet’s unspoiled house with keen approval, favourably comparing his simple study with the baronial trappings of Walter Scott’s home at Abbotsford.2)
For a glimpse of Goethe in life, rather than in statuary and shrines, Lewes turned to his colleague, William Thackeray. VanityFair, published with great success as a serial in the 1840s, had described the imaginary German duchy of Pumpernickel in a way that artfully combined references to a Rhenish spa with allusions to Weimar, where – as Lewes knew – Thackeray had stayed as a young man. Lewes’s request must have reached the busy English author on a day of untypical serenity; his response was both tender and prompt.
Thackeray had been a boy of nineteen when he visited Germany in 1830; recollection had robbed the experience of none of its charm. Life for the twenty or so young Englishmen studying German culture in Weimar had been, as the author recalled in his letter to Lewes, both playful and ceremonious. Performances of Shakespeare and Schiller at the conscientiously high-minded town theatre were attended at least three nights in every week; invitations to visit Goethe were a rare and terrifying honour. Thackeray himself was granted just one interview, during which his ancient, grey-robed host impressed a future journalist both by evincing a keen interest in British affairs and by the number of English newspapers spread about his room. (Extracts of these were translated for Goethe’s benefit by his English-speaking daughter-in-law.)
Invitations to the homely little ducal court of Weimar were apparently less intimidating, but the palace’s relaxed atmosphere did not mean that a guest could show up for a reception without wearing some kind of uniform. Thackeray, having none of his own, resourcefully purchased an old dress sword belonging to Schiller and thrust it, with a swagger, across a tightly buckled waist. The sword, still hanging aslant his study wall, served as a pleasant reminder of those far-off days, the now-famous author added with a sigh for the happiness that his youthful self had experienced. ‘I think’, Thackeray concluded, ‘I have never seen a society more simple, more charitable, courteous and gentlemanlike, than that of the dear little Saxon court where the good Schiller and the great Goethe lived and lie buried.’3
Lewes’s delight at Thackeray’s letter is not in doubt; he incorporated it, entire, into a biography which paid handsome tribute to Goethe, while offering a portrait of Weimar that echoed Thackeray’s own nostalgic tenderness.
Travelling on from Weimar to Berlin, Eliot found less to charm her. The beds, both here and elsewhere in Germany, were short, high and generally unsuited to the inclinations of an amorous couple. (Eliot’s husband John Cross would later primly correct the observations made upon this indelicate subject in his late wife’s journals.) Neither did Miss Evans care for the ubiquitous presence in Prussia’s capital of officers in blue and scarlet broadcloth: the tall and strutting ‘puppets in uniform’ of whom all English visitors to Berlin complained.
Nevertheless, reviewing her experiences abroad from a Dover hotel on 27 March 1855, George Eliot decided that the warmth and lack of bigotry and prejudice among the Germans more than made up for their ‘unreadable’ books, ‘un-sit-out-able’ comic plays, and an obsession with military etiquette which did not extend to the dinner table. (She was aghast by the German habit of using knives like spoons.)
‘Recollections of Weimar’, an unpublished essay still preserved in a manuscript book at Yale, suggests that Eliot, like Thackeray, never forgot the happiness she and George Lewes had once experienced at that little town whose innocence would later be so compromised and tainted.
Munich, Nuremberg, the Rhine and Dresden remained unvisited. ‘May the time come soon!’ Eliot noted with longing in 1855. In 1858, her wish was granted by a three-month journey with Lewes to Munich – a disappointment – and, more happily, to Nuremberg and Dresden. Here, in the paintings by Pieter de Hooch on display at Dresden’s celebrated gallery, George Eliot found what she described as ‘the precious quality of truthfulness’. The richly domestic interiors of Adam Bede, published the following year, owe as much to recollections of the Dutch interiors Eliot had admired at Dresden and Berlin as they do to memories of her English country childhood at Arbury Hall.4
Lewes and Eliot were visiting Germany during a period steeped in the consciousness that England and Germany shared far more than divided them, and that they could serve each other best by a system of mutual support. ‘The combination in the Napoleonic Wars should never be forgotten,’ a Blackwood’s writer urged his readers in 1841. A ‘warm-hearted sympathy’ had come to prevail between the two countries, and this anonymous author believed that it should be cherished. ‘An Anglo-German alliance is worth three times as much as a hollow friendship with France,’ he admonished any Francophiles who happened to be perusing his lines.5
Victoria’s marriage to Albert in 1840 would famously come to epitomise the flourishing relationship between two nations that shared literary, royal, philanthropic and mercantile interests. Evidence of a growing mutual attachment between England and Germany was, however, apparent for at least a decade before the royal wedding gave visible form to this international romance. United more strongly in their victory over Napoleon than by the continued presence of a Hanoverian monarchy in England, the countries had been further welded together by their shared respect for the benefits of democracy and – a century before the birth of the welfare state – the importance of philanthropy.
Upholding this bond of virtuous attachment in the middle of the century, as Prussia’s envoy to the Court of St James’s, was Charles de Bunsen, a Protestant diplomat who had charmed Henry Crabb Robinson as much as had his energetic English wife when Robinson visited their lively and bilingual home in Rome, in 1826.
Born into a poor German family in 1791, Charles de Bunsen’s exceptional gift for languages became evident while he was still a child. Taught English by a pastor, he went on to master Hebrew, Greek, Danish, Icelandic, Persian and Arabic. He was planning the further study of Sanskrit at Oxford when he was abruptly summoned to Rome, to join the historian Georg Niebuhr (founder of the modern scientific study of history) at the Prussian Legation. Rosy-cheeked, flaxen-haired and quietly spoken, Niebuhr’s protégé soon made a good impression. The young de Bunsen was, in the words of another eminent historian, Leopold von Ranke, ‘a winning personality respected by all’.6
All that Charles de Bunsen lacked in his early life was prosperity. That drawback was agreeably removed when he married Fanny Waddington, a lively and highly educated Welsh heiress whose mother had taught her to revere Madame de Staël. Fanny had been taken to London to meet the famous author of De l’Allemagne in 1814, a year after the book’s publication. Listening to her mother’s discussion with Madame de Staël was an experience Fanny never forgot (‘In my life I never was so highly gratified by conversation’).
Arguably, the eloquent and voluble author served as a prime model for Fanny’s career as a hostess whose independent mind had instantly captured the interest of the clever young Prussian who – after attending one of Fanny’s mother’s ‘At Homes’ during a family visit to Rome in 1817 – revised his plans to pursue a scholarship in Calcutta. Fanny’s considerable fortune may have added to her charms as a prospective bride, but the marriage, celebrated that year, was a long and happy one. Ernest, born at Rome in 1819, was the first of a brood of ten.
In 1838, Charles de Bunsen and his family moved to England, responding in part to pressure from Fanny Waddington’s formidable old mother, who complained that her daughter, despite being one of the world’s most conscientious correspondents, had not stepped foot on British soil in twenty-one years. This was true. It was also true that Fanny, returning to England from the brilliant skies of Italy, was not immediately eager to settle in a country where ‘the standing rule is a sort of wet blanket of sky, letting through neither sun nor rain . . . a sort of negation, moving not, warming not, chilling not’.7
Fanny’s complaints, while vehement, were soon assuaged by the enterprise of doing up a handsome Waddington-owned property in Wimpole Street as the first de Bunsen residence, before deciding (since money was never an issue) that the family should also rent a manor house near Pevensey Bay from their friends, the Hares.
Charles de Bunsen, by contrast to his wife, was instantly at home in England and eager to renew his friendship with Thomas Arnold, a man whom he had first met – and instantly liked – in 1827, when both fathers were pondering how best to educate their sons. In 1828, Arnold became headmaster of Rugby, and a transformer of the old-fashioned English school syllabus, to which he added mathematics, history and modern languages. An expedition to Rugby (speeded up by the brand-new railway line from Euston Station to Birmingham) was one of de Bunsen’s first undertakings in England. The following year, hearing of Arnold’s imminent retirement, de Bunsen took it upon himself to fire off a passionate letter in support of his friend. Why, de Bunsen wished the influential Bishop of Norwich to tell him, was Thomas Arnold, ‘this great and good man’ being allowed to depart from his headmastership without appropriate recognition? Why did the English not follow the German custom of giving a professorship to such a man? Did they have no respect for the great leaders of their educational system? De Bunsen’s argument was effective; in 1841, Thomas Arnold was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford.
Charles de Bunsen’s primary commission in England, as in Rome, was an intricate one, requiring all of his considerable diplomatic skills. The ageing King of Prussia wanted the young English Queen’s support for the establishment, in Jerusalem, of an Anglo-Prussian bishopric. De Bunsen’s arguments were persuasive; Victoria gave her approval to the scheme. The German-designed church, crowned by a handsome Italianate bell-tower and displaying – somewhat bizarrely – a large Prussian eagle on its facade, survives to this day in the Christian quarter of Jerusalem.
Victoria had taken to Charles de Bunsen from their very first meeting. In 1840, the old King of Prussia was succeeded by his son, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, one of de Bunsen’s most devoted friends since their early Italian days, when both Fanny and Charles had been captivated by a visit from a young man possessed of such glowingly egalitarian spirit and altruistic zeal. Newly crowned, Friedrich Wilhelm invited Victoria to choose her own ambassador to the Court of St James’s. The young Queen’s response was unhesitating.
From the first year of his appointment (1841), Charles de Bunsen could rely upon the support of both the English and the Prussian court for his philanthropic endeavours. High among these ambitions stood the Ambassador’s desire to see a united Germany and to strengthen, by every possible means, an alliance between the two most productive – and increasingly competitive – Protestant powers in Europe.
Walking up the narrow but pretty staircase of the sole part of the Prussian Legation at Carlton House Terrace that escaped a Third Reich revamp, it’s still just possible to catch the atmosphere of the happy and active years when the de Bunsen family were in residence, when the walls were hung with views of Italy, when the piano lid was always open, and Fanny’s easel always offered some characterful new example of her work. Sometimes, the Ambassador, disliking formality, would open the tall mahogany entrance doors himself, perhaps welcoming in the majestic and downright prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, described by her host as ‘my favourite saint’. On another occasion, the unexpected visitor might be ‘My favourite and admired Miss Nightingale’, a young woman who had not yet discovered her nursing vocation, and who knew that she could always turn to Charles de Bunsen for wise advice and friendly support.
The de Bunsen family letters conjure up a picture of early Victorian England at its best: erudite, cheerful, enterprising, religious and endlessly energetic. Intelligence was highly valued in this household: reading a book by Gladstone in 1838, de Bunsen told Fanny that he considered him ‘the first man in England as to intellectual power’. This, from a man who told a German friend that the English were shrewd, but incapable of the German habit of deep thought (‘only Coleridge has communicated something of this’), was high praise.
Sir Robert Peel was another politician who won de Bunsen’s approval, notably when the Prime Minister, declaring himself to be ‘a good German’ (one who shared de Bunsen’s own hopes for Germany’s speedy unification), took Prussia’s side in October 1841, at a time when the French were demanding to be given back the left bank of the Rhine that Napoleon had previously seized from Germany. (‘They shall not have the Rhine,’ Peel reassured his friend, quoting a line to de Bunsen from a newly popular German song about ‘den freien, deutschen Rhein’.) Both river banks, always a contentious boundary issue, remained, on this occasion, under German ownership.
The music-loving de Bunsens had made friends with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy during his frequent visits to his uncle, an art-loving German consul established in Rome. A musical family, they welcomed the handsome and immensely popular young composer to their London home as tenderly as if he were their own adopted son. De Bunsen shared Fanny’s anguish when Mendelssohn died in 1847, only a few months after giving a concert at Carlton House Terrace, during which the vocal contribution had been provided by Charles and Fanny’s eldest son (‘never did his voice sound so perfect,’ a proud Fanny informed Ernest’s grandmother in Wales). The Ambassador had grieved, Fanny sighed to old Madame Waddington on 12 November, ‘as though he [Mendelssohn] had belonged to him by ties of blood’.
The sadness was almost universal. In Germany, hymns were sung on every small station platform at which the funeral train drew in, all along the slow journey from Leipzig to Berlin. In England, the de Bunsen family attended a memorial performance of the composer’s great oratorio, Elijah, for which both orchestra and audience dressed in full mourning. A rare visit to the Legation from the Danish story-teller Hans Andersen, who willingly read his ‘delightful’ fairy-stories to cheer up the sad-faced children of the de Bunsen household, was quite overshadowed by the tragedy.
Grief was not a state that came naturally to the Ambassador’s ebullient wife. Well into middle age, Fanny managed, within a single day, to whisk some exhausted German visitors around London’s new National Gallery, St Paul’s, the Royal Exchange and even down into Brunel’s newly completed tunnel below the Thames – a risky adventure.
Less gregarious in his habits than his wife, Charles de Bunsen was happy for Fanny to perform the social niceties, while he focused upon the kind of work he most enjoyed. Thomas Carlyle discussed with him the creation of a new London Library; in 1841, de Bunsen became a founder member and a dedicated contributor of ideas at the committee meetings held at 14 St James’s Square, two minutes’ walk from the Legation. A glance at the titles of the books that Prince Albert donated to the new library’s German collection suggests that the Ambassador himself picked out a set of books that included the great history of Rome written by Niebuhr, de Bunsen’s own first patron and employer.
The suggestion of the Ambassador’s involvement in Prince Albert’s book choice is not far-fetched. The de Bunsens became cherished members of the royal circle from the first year of their arrival in England. An early high spot among their regular visits to the splendidly restored Windsor Castle came when Victoria invited the King of Prussia to stand godfather, in 1842, to the Prince of Wales. In Germany, where the news was received with delight, one hotelier promptly renamed his establishment the London Tavern; in Carlton House Terrace, preparations were made for celebrations on a scale that would not be matched again until the Prussian King’s nephew, Fritz, travelled to England in the winter of 1857 for his marriage to the Princess Royal.
At home, in the privacy of his study, the mild-mannered Charles de Bunsen sometimes burst out in fury against the ‘monstrous’ life of an ambassador. Attending Windsor for the christening, however, he had no complaints. A beaming Prussian king, a radiant English queen, a fine staging of The Merry Wives of Windsor: all was as an Anglophile German could have wished. Fanny, meanwhile, glowed with pride when the Queen delivered a special request for de Bunsen to take her arm for a quadrille.
Fanny, unlike her scholarly husband, adored court life. Writing to her mother after a visit to Windsor in 1846, she could hardly contain the rapture she had felt on entering the great Waterloo Chamber (a scene ‘such as fairy-tales present’), or in watching the round-faced little Queen promenade across the dance-floor, Victoria’s face (Fanny added with proprietorial satisfaction) ‘rayonnante with that expression of countenance that she has when pleased with what surrounds her, and which you know I like to see!’
On 25 March 1848, the de Bunsens’ orderly household was brusquely awakened at 8 a.m. by a hammering at the door. Revolution had broken out in Berlin and Prince William, the King of Prussia’s younger brother, had been advised to flee to England for safety. Behind him, so he told an astonished de Bunsen, he had left a city in a state of uproar, turmoil and consternation in which the rebels were calling for the very thing that Charles de Bunsen himself had always hoped for: the unification of the German states. Less reassuringly, despite the King’s swiftly expressed readiness to meet their demands, the insurgents were demanding a new constitution.
For the present, the de Bunsens did what was necessary. They offered a refuge to the future Emperor William I, while fondly noting that he had the same kindly and open face as his brother, the King. News came that an abdication was being discussed in Berlin; with this in mind, a series of diplomatic parties were hastily arranged for the Prince at the Legation’s new and larger quarters at 9 Carlton House Terrace. Writing to his close friend Baron Stockmar after the Prince had spent two months under his roof, de Bunsen made no reference to the talk of abdication. Instead, he spoke of his hopes for a new, unified Germany towards which he was confident that Victoria and Albert would extend their warmest approval. ‘There is no difficulty to be anticipated here, in the recognition of the German Empire,’ de Bunsen wrote on 15 July. And then, ever prudent, he added a coda: ‘when once it shall exist’.
The King of Prussia possessed, as de Bunsen knew, no history as a man of iron will. In 1848, he conceded, dithered and finally settled upon his irrevocable view: he would not support the rebels’ proposals for a united Germany. De Bunsen was appalled. In December, Charles travelled out to Berlin and spent a full four hours beseeching his royal master to accept the imperial crown of Germany, but – while Bunsen lost his voice in the attempt – Friedrich Wilhelm IV remained unmoved. He would not do it. Austria’s presence as the leading power (alongside Prussia) in Central Europe must not be tested by such a challenge to its authority.
Victoria, years later, looked back upon 1848 as the year when a great opportunity had been lost. That was the time when unification could first have been achieved; the time when the virtuous but weak King of Prussia had let them all down. In 1850, however, de Bunsen still believed that unification was imminent. He could not think of leaving England, he told his friend Archdeacon Hare on 29 February, not ‘at this eleventh hour when all the powers of evil double their efforts to prevent this great European birth, or rather this beginning of regeneration’.
The mention of departure is revealing. From 1848 on, de Bunsen had struggled to retain any respect for the ageing Prussian ruler in whom he had once placed such high hopes. His confidence sapped by disappointment, the diplomat began to think of the homeland he had left behind, and of the scholarly pleasures that might still lie in store there for a private individual. His family’s links to the beloved island he now regarded as his second home were already assured. One son, Henry, had become an Anglican clergyman; two others had married wealthy Norfolk Quakers. Both at Abbey Lodge in London, where Ernest de Bunsen lived with Elizabeth Gurney and their children, and at Old Keswick Hall, the Norfolk birthplace of Emma Birkbeck, the wife of Georg von Bunsen [sic], the de Bunsen presence in England appeared secure.
In 1854, Charles de Bunsen tendered his formal resignation; no opposition came from Prussia, where de Bunsen’s efforts to enlist support for Britain in the Crimean War (1853–6) had been badly received. Returning to Germany, he devoted himself to works of scholarship, including a translation of the Bible. In 1857, on the very day of the incapacitating stroke that led Prince William to take on the role of Prussia’s regent, Friedrich Wilhelm IV bestowed a barony on his faithful ambassador. That last independent action of his reign paid homage to a braver man than himself.
Baron de Bunsen died at Bonn in 1860. Fanny who survived him by sixteen years, divided the remainder of her life between winters at the quiet, slightly dull little German town of Carlsruhe, and summers at her home in the Black Forest. Here, at the Villa Waldeck, Charles and Fanny’s English-born grandchildren spent long and happy summer holidays each year, in the company of their young German cousins and their cheerful, lavish, reminiscing old Welsh-born grandmother. Talking to Fanny about life at Abbey Lodge, and listening to her grumbles about the ordeal of a year’s retreat to Switzerland (life for an old English lady in Germany was not considered fireproof during the Franco-Prussian war), the children slipped in and out of their shared languages without a thought. Riding along Norfolk lanes, or swimming in a lake in the Black Forest, they knew exactly who they were: two friendly cultures blended without blemish into one harmonious whole.