In April 1849, Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, having been elected ‘Emperor of the Germans’ by the National Assembly, declined the honour bestowed upon him, invoking the grace of God as the sole source of monarchical legitimacy. This meant that the efforts made in St Paul’s Church to draw up a constitution and establish a German nation state had effectively come to naught. In view of the reinvigoration of the monarchist forces of the Restoration in the individual German states, the Assembly, which was rapidly losing popular support, bowed to the inevitable and dissolved itself at the end of May. Neither the rump parliament which reconvened in Stuttgart, consisting mainly of left-wing members of the Assembly in St Paul’s Church, nor the campaign to defend the imperial constitution that was waged, sometimes violently, in the south-west of Germany could stem the counter-revolutionary tide. With the dissolution of the rump parliament in Stuttgart and the capture of the fortress of Rastatt in Baden in the summer of 1849, the final resistance of the revolutionaries was broken, and the high hopes with which the liberal and democratic movement for unity and freedom of 1848/49 had set out were finally shattered.