The death of the emperor was caused by a singular accident.  He was not very well, and was lying upon a couch in one of the chambers of his palace.  He had an infant son, but a few weeks old, lying in a cradle in the nursery.  A fire broke out in the apartment of the young prince.  The whole palace was instantly in clamor and confusion.  Some attendants seized the cradle of the young prince, and rushed with it to the chamber of the emperor.  In their haste and terror they struck the cradle with such violence against the wall that it was broken to pieces and the child fell, screaming, upon the floor.  The cry of fire, the tumult, the bursting into the room, the dashing of the cradle and the shrieks of the child, so shocked the debilitated king that he died within an hour.

Leopold was but eighteen years of age when he succeeded to the sovereignty of all the Austrian dominions, including the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia.  It was the first great object of his ambition to secure the imperial throne also, which his father had failed to obtain for him.  Louis XIV. was now the youthful sovereign of France.  He, through his ambitious and able minister, Mazarin, did every thing in his power to thwart the endeavors of Ferdinand, and to obtain the brilliant prize for himself.  The King of Sweden united with the French court in the endeavor to abase the pride of the house of Austria.  But notwithstanding all their efforts, Leopold carried his point, and was unanimously elected emperor, and crowned on the 31st of July, 1657.  The princes of the empire, however, greatly strengthened in their independence by the articles of the peace of Westphalia, increasingly jealous of their rights, attached forty-five conditions to their acceptance of Leopold as emperor.  Thus, notwithstanding the imperial title, Leopold had as little power over the States of the empire as the President of the United States has over the internal concerns of Maine or Louisiana.  In all such cases there is ever a conflict between two parties, the one seeking the centralization of power, and the other advocating its dispersion into various distant central points.

The flames of war which Charles Gustavus had kindled were still blazing.  Leopold continued the alliance which his father had formed with the Poles, and sent an army of sixteen thousand men into Poland, hoping to cut off the retreat of Charles Gustavus, and take him and all his army prisoners.  But the Swedish monarch was as sagacious and energetic as he was unscrupulous and ambitious.  Both parties formed alliances.  State after State was drawn into the conflict.  The flame spread like a conflagration.  Fleets met in deadly conflict on the Baltic, and crimsoned its waves with blood.  The thunders of war were soon again echoing over all the plains of northern and western Germany—­and all this because a proud, unprincipled young man, who chanced to be a king, wished to be called a hero.