“I am persuaded that your majesty is not unacquainted with the unheard of outrage committed by the arrest of the King of France, the queen my sister and the royal family, and that your sentiments accord with mine on an event which, threatening more atrocious consequences, and fixing the seal of illegality on the preceding excesses, concerns the honor and safety of all governments.  Resolved to fulfill what I owe to these considerations, and to my duty as chief of the German empire, and sovereign of the Austrian dominions, I propose to your majesty, in the same manner as I have proposed to the Kings of Spain, Prussia and Naples, as well as to the Empress of Russia, to unite with them, in a concert of measures for obtaining the liberty of the king and his family, and setting bounds to the dangerous excesses of the French Revolution.”

The British people nobly sympathized with the French in their efforts at emancipation, and the British government dared not then shock the public conscience by assailing the patriots in France.  Leopold consequently turned to Frederic William of Prussia, and held a private conference with him at Pilnitz, near Dresden, in Saxony, on the 27th of August, 1791.  The Count d’Artois, brother of Louis XVI., and who subsequently ascended the French throne as Charles X., joined them in this conference.  In the midst of these agitations and schemes Leopold II. was seized with a malignant dysentery, which was aggravated by a life of shameless debauchery, and died on the 1st of March, 1792, in the forty-fifth year of his age, and after a reign of but two years.

Leopold has the reputation of having been, on the whole, a kind-hearted man, but his court was a harem of unblushing profligacy.  His broken-hearted wife was compelled to submit to the degradation of daily intimacy with the mistress of her husband.  Upon one only of these mistresses the king lavished two hundred thousand dollars in drafts on the bank of Vienna.  The sums thus infamously squandered were wrested from the laboring poor.  His son, Francis II., who succeeded him upon the throne, was twenty-two years of age.  In most affecting terms the widowed queen entreated her son to avoid those vices of his father which had disgraced the monarchy and embittered her whole life.

The reign of Francis II. was so eventful, and was so intimately blended with the fortunes of the French Revolution, the Consulate and the Empire, that the reader must be referred to works upon those subjects for the continuation of the history.  During the wars with Napoleon Austria lost forty-five thousand square miles, and about three and a half millions of inhabitants.  But when at length the combined monarchs of Europe triumphed over Napoleon, the monarch of the people’s choice, and, in the carnage of Waterloo, swept constitutional liberty from the continent, Austria received again nearly all she had lost.

This powerful empire, as at present constituted, embraces: