He had charge of the embassy during his chief's two visits to the Crimea in 1855, but left the East to work under Lord Napier at Washington in 1857.

Just as he had understood his Constantinople chief, Stratford de Redcliffe, and had never been broken by his suspicious rages, so too he achieved a sympathetic understanding of Bismarck.

He withstood the Iron Chancellor's rages about real or imaginary plots, dispelled his darkest suspicions of British policy, and penetrated to the core of Bismarckian motives and strategy.

Nor was the objectivity of his dispatches compromised by his private belief that Kulturkampf must fail, or by his revulsion at Bismarck's persecution of Roman Catholicism.

Together, they had six children:[10] Lord Ampthill died of peritonitis on 25 August 1884, aged 55, at his summer villa at Potsdam, and was interred on 3 September in the 'Bedford Chapel' at St. Michael's Church, Chenies, Buckinghamshire, England.