The duke of Cumberland remained encamped in the neighbourhood of Hoya till the twenty-fourth of August, when, upon advice that the enemy had laid two bridges over the Aller in the night, and had passed that river with a large body of troops, he ordered his army to march, to secure the important post and passage of Rothenbourg, lest they should attempt to march round on his left. He encamped that night at Hausen, having detached lieutenant-general Oberg, with eight battalions and six squadrons, to Ottersberg, to which place he marched next day, and encamped behind the Wummer, in a very strong situation, between Ottersberg and Eothenbourg. The French took possession of Verden on the twenty-sixth of August, and one of their detachments went on the twenty-ninth to Bremen, where the gates were immediately opened to them. The duke of Cumberland, now closely pressed on all sides, and in danger of having his communication with the Stade cut off, which the enemy was endeavouring to effect, by seizing upon all the posts round him, found it necessary to decamp again; to abandon Eothenbourg, of which the French immediately took possession; to retreat to Selsingen, where his head-quarters were, on the first of September; and from thence, on the third of the same month, to retire under the cannon of Stade. Here it was imagined that his army would have been able to maintain their ground between the Aller and the Elbe, till the severity of the season should put an end to the campaign. Accordingly, his royal highness, upon his taking this position, sent a detachment of his forces to Buck-Schantz, with some artillery, and orders to defend that place to the utmost; but as it could not possibly have held out many days, and as the French, who now hemmed him in on all sides, by making themselves masters of a little fort at the mouth of the river Swinga, would have cut off his communication with the Elbe, so that four English men of war, then in that river, could have been of no service to him, he was forced to accept of a mediation offered by the king of Denmark, by his minister the count de Lynar, and to sign the famous convention of Closter-Seven, 422 [See note 3K, at the end of this Vol.] by which thirty-eight thousand Hanoverians laid down their arms, and were dispersed into different quarters of cantonment.