The French department of Alsace, upon the Rhine, embraced over forty thousand square miles of territory, and contained a population of about a million.  While Marshal Saxe was ravaging the Netherlands, an Austrian army, sixty thousand strong, crossed the Rhine, like a torrent burst into Alsace, and spread equal ravages through the cities and villages of France.  Bombardment echoed to bombardment; conflagration blazed in response to conflagration; and the shrieks of the widow, and the moans of the orphan which rose from the marshes of Burgundy, were reechoed in an undying wail along the valleys of the Rhine.

The King of France, alarmed by the progress which the Austrians were making in his own territories, ordered thirty thousand troops, from the army in the Netherlands, to be dispatched to the protection of Alsace.  Again the tide was turning against Maria Theresa.  She had become so arrogant and exacting, that she had excited the displeasure of nearly all the empire.  She persistently refused to acknowledge the emperor, who, beyond all dispute, was legally elected; she treated the diet contemptuously; she did not disguise her determination to hold Bavaria by the right of conquest, and to annex it to Austria; she had compelled the Bavarians to take the oath of allegiance to her; she was avowedly meditating gigantic projects in the conquest of France and Italy; and it was very evident that she was maturing her plans for the reconquest of Silesia.  Such inordinate ambition alarmed all the neighboring courts.  Frederic of Prussia was particularly alarmed lest he should lose Silesia.  With his accustomed energy he again drew his sword against the queen, and became the soul of a new confederacy which combined many of the princes of the empire whom the haughty queen had treated with so much indignity.  In this new league, formed by Frederic, the Elector Palatine and the King of Sweden were brought into the field against Maria Theresa.  All this was effected with the utmost secrecy, and the queen had no intimation of her danger until the troops were in motion.  Frederic published a manifesto in which he declared that he took up arms “to restore to the German empire its liberty, to the emperor his dignity, and to Europe repose.”

With his strong army he burst into Bohemia, now drained of its troops to meet the war in the Netherlands and on the Rhine.  With a lion’s tread, brushing all opposition away, he advanced to Prague.  The capital was compelled to surrender, and the garrison of fifteen thousand troops became prisoners of war.  Nearly all the fortresses of the kingdom fell into his hands.  Establishing garrisons at Tabor, Budweiss, Frauenberg, and other important posts, he then made an irruption into Bavaria, scattered the Austrian troops in all directions, entered Munich in triumph, and reinstated the emperor in the possession of his capital and his duchy.  Such are the fortunes of war.  The queen heard these tidings of accumulated disaster in dismay.  In a few weeks of a summer’s campaign, when she supposed that Europe was almost a suppliant at her feet, she found herself deprived of the Netherlands, of the whole kingdom of Bohemia, the brightest jewel in her crown, and of the electorate of Bavaria.