MOTIVES OF THE WAR IN GERMANY.

Having thus, to the best of our power, given a faithful and exact detail of every material event in which Great Britain was concerned, either at home, or in her settlements abroad, during the greatest part of the year one thousand seven hundred and fifty-six, we shall now return to Europe, and endeavour to explain the beginning of a bloody war in Germany, which then seemed to have become the chief object of the British councils. On the eve of a rupture between France and England, it was natural for his Britannic majesty to provide for the safety of his electoral dominions, the only quarter by which he was at all accessible to the efforts of the enemy, who he foresaw would not fail to annoy him through that avenue. He, at that time, stood upon indifferent terms with the king of Prussia, who was considered as a partisan and ally of France; and he knew that the house of Austria alone would not be sufficient to support him against two such powerful antagonists. In this emergency, he had recourse to the empress of Russia, who, in consequence of a large subsidy granted by England, engaged to furnish a strong body of forces for the defence of Hanover. His Prussian majesty, startled at the conditions of this treaty, took an opportunity to declare that he would not suffer foreign forces of any nation to enter the empire, either as principals or auxiliaries; a declaration which probably flowed from a jealousy and aversion he had conceived to the court of Petersburgh, as well as from a resolution he had formed of striking some great stroke in Germany, without any risk of being restricted or controlled. He knew he should give umbrage to the French king, who had already made preparations for penetrating into Westphalia; but he took it for granted he should be able to exchange his connexions with France for the alliance with Great Britain, which would be much less troublesome, and much more productive of advantage: indeed, such an alliance was the necessary consequence of his declaration. Had his Britannic majesty made a requisition of the Russian auxiliaries, he must have exposed himself to the resentment of a warlike monarch, who hovered on the skirts of his electorate at the head of one hundred and forty thousand men, and could have subdued the whole country in one week; and if he forbore to avail himself of the treaty with the czarina, he did not know how soon the king of Prussia might be reconciled to his most christian majesty’s design of invasion. As for the empress-queen, her attention was engrossed by schemes for her interest or preservation; and her hands so full, that she either could not, or would not, fulfil the engagements she had contracted with her former and firmest allies. In these circumstances the king of England sought and obtained the alliance of Prussia, which, to the best of our comprehension, entailed upon Great Britain the enormous burden of extravagant subsidies, together with the intolerable expense of a continental war, without being productive of one advantage, either positive or negative, to England or Hanover. On the contrary, this connexion threw the empress-queen into the arms of France, whose friendship she bought at the expense of the barrier in the Netherlands, acquired with infinite labour, by the blood and treasure of the maritime powers; it gave birth to a confederacy of despotic princes; sufficient, if their joint force was fully exerted, to overthrow the liberties of all the free states in Europe; and, after all, Hanover has been overrun, and subdued by the enemy; and the king of Prussia put to the ban of the empire. All these consequences are, we apprehend, fairly deducible from the resolution which his Prussian majesty took, at this juncture, to precipitate a war with the house of Austria. The apparent motives that prompted him to this measure we shall presently explain. In the meantime, the defensive treaty between the empress-queen and France was no sooner ratified, than the czarina was invited to accede to the alliance, and a private minister sent from Paris to Petersburgh, to negotiate the conditions of this accession, which the empress of Russia accordingly embraced: a circumstance so agreeable to the court of Versailles, that the marquis de l’Hôpital was immediately appointed ambassador-extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the court of Russia. Applications were likewise made to the courts of Madrid and Turin, soliciting their concurrence; but their catholic and Sardinian majesties wisely resolved to observe a neutrality. At the same time, intrigues were begun by the French emissaries in the senate of Sweden, in order to kindle up a war between that nation and Prussia; and their endeavours succeeded in the sequel, even contrary to the inclination of their sovereign. At present, a plot was discovered for altering the form of government, by increasing the power of the crown; and several persons of rank being convicted upon trial, were beheaded as principals in this conspiracy. Although it did not appear that the king or queen were at all concerned in the scheme, his Swedish majesty thought himself so hardly treated by the diet, that he threatened to resign his royalty, and retire into his own hereditary dominions. This design was extremely disagreeable to the people in general, who espoused his cause in opposition to the diet, by whom they conceived themselves more oppressed than they should have been under an unlimited monarchy.