The representatives of the people then summoned the nephew of the emperor to join the camp, and as Palatine[*] to lead the troops against the rebels.  He not only obeyed the summons, but made public professions of his devotion to the cause.  As soon, however, as an engagement threatened, he fled secretly from the camp and the country, like a coward traitor.  Among his papers a plan, formed by him some time previously, was found, according to which Hungary was to be simultaneously attacked on nine sides at once—­from Styria, Austria, Moravia, Silesia, Galicia, and Transylvania.

[Footnote *:  The Palatine was a high officer elected by the Diet, as its organ, and the defender of its Constitution.  In fact, they always elected a prince of the blood royal.  He was virtually a Viceroy.]

From a correspondence with the Minister of War, seized at the same time, it was discovered that the commanding generals in the military frontier and the Austrian provinces adjoining Hungary had received orders to enter Hungary, and support the rebels with their united forces.

This attack from nine points at once really began.  The most painful aggression took place in Transylvania; for the traitorous commander in that district did not content himself with the practices considered lawful in war by disciplined troops.  He stirred up the Wallachian peasants to take up arms against their own constitutional rights, and, aided by the rebellious Servian hordes, commenced a course of Vandalism and extinction, sparing neither women, children, nor aged men; murdering and torturing the defenceless Hungarian inhabitants; burning the most flourishing villages and towns, among which, Nagy-Igmand, the seat of learning for Transylvania, was reduced to a heap of ruins.

But the Hungarian nation, although taken by surprise, unarmed and unprepared, did not abandon its future prospects in any agony of despair.

Measures were immediately taken to increase the small standing army by volunteers and the levy of the people.  These troops, supplying the want of experience by the enthusiasm arising from the feeling that they had right on their side, defeated the Croatian armaments, and drove them out of the country.***

The defeated army fled in the direction of Vienna, where the emperor continued his demoralizing policy, and nominated the beaten and flying rebel as his plenipotentiary and substitute in Hungary, suspending by this act the constitution and institutions of the country, all its authorities, courts of justice, and tribunals, laying the kingdom under martial law, and placing in the hand of, and under the unlimited authority of, a rebel, the honour, the property and the lives of the people; in the hand of a man who, with armed bands, had braved the laws, and attacked the Constitution of the country.

But the house of Austria was not contented with the unjustifiable violation of oaths taken by its head.