But the resolution and energy of the queen remained indomitable.  Maria Theresa and Frederic were fairly pitted against each other.  It was Greek meeting Greek.  The queen immediately recalled the army from Alsace, and in person repaired to Presburg, where she summoned a diet of the Hungarian nobles.  In accordance with an ancient custom, a blood-red flag waved from all the castles in the kingdom, summoning the people to a levy en masse, or, as it was then called, to a general insurrection.  An army of nearly eighty thousand men was almost instantly raised.  A cotemporary historian, speaking of this event, says: 

“This amazing unanimity of a people so divided amongst themselves as the Hungarians, especially in point of religion, could only be effected by the address of Maria Theresa, who seemed to possess one part of the character of Elizabeth of England, that of making every man about her a hero.”

Prince Charles re-crossed the Rhine, and, by a vigorous march through Suabia, returned to Bohemia.  By surprise, with a vastly superior force, he assailed the fortresses garrisoned by the Prussian troops, gradually took one after another, and ere long drove the Prussians, with vast slaughter, out of the whole kingdom.  Though disaster, in this campaign, followed the banners of Maria Theresa in the Netherlands and in Italy, she forgot those reverses in exultation at the discomfiture of her great rival Frederic.  She had recovered Bohemia, and was now sanguine that she soon would regain Silesia, the loss of which province ever weighed heavily upon her heart.  But in her character woman’s weakness was allied with woman’s determination.  She imagined that she could rouse the chivalry of her allies as easily as that of the Hungarian barons, and that foreign courts, forgetful of their own grasping ambition, would place themselves as pliant instruments in her hands.

In this posture of affairs, the hand of Providence was again interposed, in an event which removed from the path of the queen a serious obstacle, and opened to her aspiring mind new visions of grandeur.  The Emperor Charles VII., an amiable man, of moderate abilities, was quite crushed in spirit by the calamities accumulating upon him.  Though he had regained his capital, he was in hourly peril of being driven from it again.  Anguish so preyed upon his mind, that, pale and wan, he was thrown upon a sick bed.  While in this state he was very injudiciously informed of a great defeat which his troops had encountered.  It was a death-blow to the emperor.  He moaned, turned over in his bed, and died, on the 20th of January, 1745.