prosperity, were employed in new and universal grief and anxiety by the death of their young stadtholder, which happened at The Hague, October 13, 1751.  He had long been kept out of the government, though by no means deficient in the talents suited to his station.  His son, William V., aged but three years and a half, succeeded him, under the guardianship of his mother, Anne of England, daughter of George II., a princess represented to be of a proud and ambitious temper, who immediately assumed a high tone of authority in the state.

The war of seven years, which agitated the north of Europe, and deluged its plains with blood, was almost the only one in which the republic was able to preserve a strict neutrality throughout.  But this happy state of tranquillity was not, as on former occasions, attended by that prodigious increase of commerce, and that accumulation of wealth, which had so often astonished the world.  Differing with England on the policy which led the latter to weaken and humiliate France, jealousies sprung up between the two countries, and Dutch commerce became the object of the most vexatious and injurious efforts on the part of England.  Remonstrance was vain; resistance impossible; and the decline of the republic hurried rapidly on.  The Hanseatic towns, the American colonies, the northern states of Europe, and France itself, all entered into the rivalry with Holland, in which, however, England carried off the most important prizes.  Several private and petty encounters took place between the vessels of England and Holland, in consequence of the pretensions of the former to the right of search; and had the republic possessed the ability of former periods, and the talents of a Tromp or a De Ruyter, a new war would no doubt have been the result.  But it was forced to submit; and a degrading but irritating tranquillity was the consequence for several years; the national feelings receiving a salve for home-decline by some extension of colonial settlements in the East, in which the island of Ceylon was included.

In the midst of this inglorious state of things, and the domestic abundance which was the only compensation for the gradual loss of national influence, the installation of William V., in 1766; his marriage with the princess of Prussia, niece of Frederick the Great, in 1768; and the birth of two sons, the eldest on the 24th of August, 1772; successively took place.  Magnificent fetes celebrated these events; the satisfied citizens little imagining, amid their indolent rejoicings, the dismal futurity of revolution and distress which was silently but rapidly preparing for their country.

Maria Theresa, reduced to widowhood by the death of her husband, whom she had elevated to the imperial dignity by the title of Francis I., continued for a while to rule singly her vast possessions; and had profited so little by the sufferings of her own early reign that she joined in the iniquitous dismemberment of Poland, which has left an indelible stain on her memory, and on that of Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia.  In her own dominions she was adored; and her name is to this day cherished in Belgium among the dearest recollections of the people.