War being finished, Frederick occupied a mansion at Reinsberg with his princess, and things went well, if economically, with much correspondence with the other original mind of those days, Voltaire.  But big events are coming now.  Mr. Jenkins’s ear re-emerges from cotton-wool after seven years, and Walpole has to declare war with Spain in 1739.  Moreover, Friedrich Wilhelm is exceedingly ill.  In May 1740 comes a message—­Frederick must come to Potsdam quickly if he is to see his father again.  The son comes.  “Am not I happy to have such a son to leave behind me?” says the dying king.  On May 31 he dies.  No baresark of them, nor Odin’s self, was a bit of truer stuff.

III.—­The Silesian Wars

Shall we, then, have the philosopher-king, as Europe dimly seems to half expect?  He begins, indeed, with opening corn magazines, abolishing legal torture; will have freedom of conscience and the Press; encourage philosophers and men of letters.  In those days he had his first meeting with Voltaire, recorded for us by the Frenchman twenty years later; for his own reasons, vitriolically and with inaccuracies, the record amounting to not much.  Frederick was suffering from a quartan fever.  Of which ague he was cured by the news that Kaiser Carl died on October 20, and Maria Theresa was proclaimed sovereign of the Hapsburg inheritance, according to the Pragmatic Sanction.

Whereupon, without delay, Frederick forms a resolution, which had sprung and got to sudden fixity in the head of the young king himself, and met with little save opposition from all others—­to make good his rights in Silesia.  A most momentous resolution; not the peaceable magnanimities, but the warlike, are the thing appointed for Frederick henceforth.

In mid-December the troops entered Silesia; except in the hills, where Catholics predominate, with marked approbation of the population, we find.  Of warlike preparation to meet the Prussians is practically none, and in seven weeks Silesia is held, save three fortresses easy to manage in spring.  Will the hold be maintained?

Meanwhile, France will have something to say, moved by a figure not much remembered, yet notable, Marshal Belleisle; perhaps, after Frederick and Voltaire, the most notable of that time.  A man of large schemes, altogether accordant with French interests, but not, unfortunately, with facts and law of gravitation.  For whom the first thing needful is that Grand Duke Franz, husband of Maria Theresa, shall not be elected kaiser; who shall be is another matter—­why not Karl Albert of Bavaria as well as another?

After brief absence, Frederick is soon back in Silesia, to pay attention to blockaded Glogau and Brieg and Neisse; harassed, however, by Austrian Pandours out of Glatz, a troublesome kind of cavalry.  The siege of Neisse is to open on April 4, when we find Austrian Neipperg with his army approaching; by good fortune a dilatory Neipperg; of which comes the battle of Mollwitz.