The king did not suffer his claim to be subjected to any altercations, but, having published a declaration, in which he charged the bishop with violence and injustice, and remarked that the feudal laws allowed every man, whose possession was withheld from him, to enter it with an armed force, he immediately despatched two thousand soldiers into the controverted countries, where they lived without control, exercising every kind of military tyranny, till the cries of the inhabitants forced the bishop to relinquish them to the quiet government of Prussia.

This was but a petty acquisition; the time was now come when the king of Prussia was to form and execute greater designs.  On the 9th of October, 1740, half Europe was thrown into confusion by the death of Charles the sixth, emperour of Germany, by whose death all the hereditary dominions of the house of Austria descended, according to the pragmatick sanction, to his eldest daughter, who was married to the duke of Lorrain, at the time of the emperour’s death, duke of Tuscany.

By how many securities the pragmatick sanction was fortified, and how little it was regarded when those securities became necessary; how many claimants started up at once to the several dominions of the house of Austria; how vehemently their pretensions were enforced, and how many invasions were threatened or attempted; the distresses of the emperour’s daughter, known for several years by the title only of the queen of Hungary, because Hungary was the only country to which her claim had not been disputed:  the firmness with which she struggled with her difficulties, and the good fortune by which she surmounted them; the narrow plan of this essay will not suffer me to relate.  Let them be told by some other writer of more leisure and wider intelligence.

Upon the emperour’s death, many of the German princes fell upon the Austrian territories, as upon a dead carcass, to be dismembered among them without resistance.  Among these, with whatever justice, certainly with very little generosity, was the king of Prussia, who, having assembled his troops, as was imagined, to support the pragmatick sanction, on a sudden entered Silesia with thirty thousand men, publishing a declaration, in which he disclaims any design of injuring the rights of the house of Austria, but urges his claim to Silesia, as rising “from ancient conventions of family and confraternity between the house of Brandenburg and the princes of Silesia, and other honourable titles.”  He says, the fear of being defeated by other pretenders to the Austrian dominions, obliged him to enter Silesia without any previous expostulation with the queen, and that he shall “strenuously espouse the interests of the house of Austria.”

Such a declaration was, I believe, in the opinion of all Europe, nothing less than the aggravation of hostility by insult, and was received by the Austrians with suitable indignation.  The king pursued his purpose, marched forward, and in the frontiers of Silesia made a speech to his followers, in which he told them, that he considered them rather “as friends than subjects, that the troops of Brandenburg had been always eminent for their bravery, that they would always fight in his presence, and that he would recompense those who should distinguish themselves in his service, rather as a father than as a king.”