CHAP. being winter, the thick clothing of the king prevented XXXVI. the blow from taking full effect; it did little more than penetrate the skin. But it gave a fright to Louis, who took to his bed, sent for his confessor, and insisted on frequently receiving absolution.* The would-be assassin was seized and questioned. Poor maniac! he had been in the service of a parliamentarian, and had heard so much of the infamous conduct of the clergy in refusing the sacraments to the pious, and of the folly and injustice of the king in supporting them, that he resolved upon the extreme of regicide, to vindicate what he considered to be justice. The tortures are not to be described with which the act of the regicide was punished. When the king was known to be secluded in his own apartment and closeted with his confessor, the courtiers expected nothing less than a repetition of the scene of Metz. The king was in that vein. He spoke of resigning and giving up the government to the Dauphin. He even told his minister to go and transact business with that prince. He charged a great lord to warn Madame de Pompadour to begone. The courtier excused himself from the task, which the straightforward Machault undertook. Madame de Pompadour began to pack up for departure, when her friend, the Duchess of Mirepoix, entered, and observed, "he who left the game lost it." Pompadour kept her ground, and fears and scruples soon vanishing from the monarch's mind, he felt the old charm again, and underwent the wonted influence of his mistress. His first act was to dismiss Machault. Count d'Argenson was another of her enemies. Him she sought to retain, and visited him with the hopes of turning his enmity to alliance. The count, however, had gone too far with the Dauphin, whose speedy advent to power he expected. He therefore rejected all Pompadour's offers, and was in consequence dismissed from the war office. * Mémoires de Besenval. † Ibid. Madame de Hausset. A The department of foreign affairs at the same time passed from the hands of Rouillé into those of the Abbé, afterwards Cardinal, de Bernis, the chief instrument of the Austrian alliance. The new minister not only exaggerated this alliance, and the efforts which France was bound to make, but laboured not unsuccessfully to restore domestic peace. Taking advantage of the sentiment of loyalty called forth by the attempt on the king's life, Bernis negotiated peace with the bishops, and reinstated the parliament, with the exception of those magistrates and courts that had shown most inveteracy. But there was no amnesty for the philosophes, lenity to others being attended with a sweeping edict of proscription against the Encyclopedia, its authors, publishers, and all connected with it. Diderot's papers were seized. But the obnoxious writer was warned by the censor, Malesherbes, to whom he sent his most precious papers and correspondence, the police obtaining possession of nothing that was important. The opening of the campaign of 1757 seemed to realise the great hopes entertained of it by the allies. The French army, under the Maréchal d'Estrees, occupied without obstruction the dominions of the King of Prussia on the Rhine and in Westphalia. Frederick called on the English to defend these, but the Duke of Cumberland, with an army not half that of the French, kept behind the Weser. Frederick himself advanced early into Bohemia, and, having in view the capture of Prague, attacked the Austrians, under Prince Charles of Lorraine, on the heights overlooking the city, winning the victory, but with the loss of many of his bravest soldiers, Marshal Schwerin amongst them. Excited by this dear-bought triumph, Frederick rushed forward to win another at all risks, attacking precipitately Marshal Daun at Kollin, with a force far inferior to that of the imperialist general. He even CHAP. XXXVI. XXXVI. CHAP. forgot or flung aside his usual precautions for compenposition in front, though defended by two hundred and fifty cannon. This terminated in one of the most serious repulses that Frederick had ever suffered, and compelled him to raise hastily the siege of Prague, and retreat from Bohemia into Saxony. He accomplished this only to learn that the Duke of Cumberland was defeated at Hastenbeck, and driven to the furthest limits of Hanover. The resistance of the duke had indeed not been serious. The left of his line terminated at a wooded height, on which was a redoubt. The French general Chevert captured it at day-break, when Cumberland retreated. How little occasion there was for this appeared from the fact of a straggling band of the Hanoverian army recapturing this very redoubt, though afterwards obliged to abandon it, and accompany the retreat of their army.* The courts of England and Hanover had been all along striving to obtain neutrality for the electorate, which France and Austria would only accede to on condition that their troops might traverse the electorate to the attack of Prussia. This George the Second could not consent to. And yet it was out of his power to send a sufficient force to defend the electorate, even the most warlike of the English ministers, Pitt himself, being opposed to the despatch or employ of a body of troops in Germany capable of resisting the French. The result was the disgraceful capitulation of Kloster-Seven, concluded between the Duke of Cumberland and Marshal Richelieu, by which the British troops were to retire, the greater part of them beyond the Elbe, and take no further part in the war.† This news reached Frederick at the same time with an account of the repulse of his eastern army by the Russians at Jägerndorf. Resistance to so many enemies, * Mémoires de Besenval, and of Rochambeau. † Sir Andrew Mitchell's Correspondence. XXXVI. and against such multiplied misfortune, seemed hope- CHAP. less. But like William of Orange, whose preventive to seeing his country conquered was to die in its last ditch, Frederick was determined to die on his last field, and not cease combating till then. Fortune, however, gave Frederick some consolation, and retrieval. Whilst a French army under Richelieu was overrunning Hanover, another under Soubise was on the Saale (1757). The war minister, Belleisle, pressed the prince very urgently to advance, it being a shame, he said, that the Prussians should hold Saxony for the winter with a force but one-third of that opposed to them, and commanded by Richelieu and Soubise,* notwithstanding letters from the court, which dissuaded such advance. Soubise, with the Duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen, commanding the German troops of the cercles, approached Leipzig. Frederick encamped near them, at Rosbach, when the Duke of Saxe insisted on fighting. Soubise was for retreating, but the duke represented that, by marching to turn the left wing of the King of Prussia, he must be beaten. The manœuvre was tried. Frederick awaited it, and when he perceived his enemies extended and almost divided by these manœuvres, he sprang upon them. He took but half an hour to march up, form his own line, and attack, whilst those opposed to him required infinitely more time to concentrate and to form. His first charge drove in their right wing of cavalry. Then the Prussian infantry advanced with the bayonet against the French regiment of Piedmont, which responded with sating inferiority of numbers, and attacked the Austrian XXXVI. CHAP. the same arm, but ere they met, the Piedmontese regiment turned and fled, its example being followed by the whole of the French and German infantry. It was a complete rout; the fugitives leaving 7,000 muskets upon the field. But for the night intervening, the French would not have saved a man. Frederick had not time to follow up his victory; Breslau, the capital of Silesia, had been taken by the Austrians, and Schweidnitz, its principal fortress, reduced. To retain his winter quarters under such a loss was impossible. Late as it was in November, Frederick hurried to the scene of disaster, mustered the troops which had been beaten there, and attacked Marshal Daun at Leuthen early in December. Napoleon considered this battle the master-piece of Frederick. It cleared Silesia, and flung the Austrians into Bohemia. Whilst these victories proved so decisive to Frederick, that of the Maréchal de Richelieu evaporated, by the negligence with which he had drawn up the conditions of KlosterSeven. By that arrangement there was to be a suspension of arms, no term being fixed for its expiring. The auxiliary German troops were to retain theirs, but there was no clause that they should not recur to war. The French government accordingly hesitated to sanction the convention of Kloster-Seven, and demanded fresh articles; the Hanoverians took advantage of this to declare the whole convention null; and Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, assuming the command of them and of the English, declared hostilities to have recommenced. The campaign of 1758 was more favourable to Frederick, although the number of his enemies was undiminished, and although England was far from making the same efforts in his favour that France did for his destruction. A new spirit, however, came to vance, in the Mitchell Papers, B. M. vol. lxiv. *Account by the Count de St. Germain, who led the French ad |