COMMUNICATION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND OSTEND BROKE OFF.

It will be proper here to take notice of some events which could not easily be mentioned before, without breaking through the order we have proposed to ourselves in the writing of this history.—The empress-queen, more embittered than ever against the king of Prussia and his allies, recalled her ministers, count Coloredo and monsieur Zohern, from London, towards the beginning of July; and about the same time count Kaunitz, great chancellor of the empire, informed Mr. Keith, the British minister at Vienna, that the court of London, by the succours it had given, and still continued to give, the king of Prussia, as well as by other circumstances relating to the present state of affairs, having broken the solemn engagements which united this crown with the house of Austria, her majesty the empress-queen had thought proper to recall her minister from England, and consequently to break off all correspondence. Mr. Keith, in pursuance of this notice, set out from Vienna on the twenty-ninth of July; as did also Mr. Desrolles, his Britannic majesty’s minister at the court of Brussels, from this last place, about the same time. On the seventh of July, general Pisa, commandant of Ostend, Nieuport, and the maritime ports of Flanders, sent his adjutant to the English vice-consul at Ostend, at six o’clock in the morning, to tell him, that by orders from his court all communication with England was broke off; and desired the vice-consul to intimate to the packet-boats and British shipping at Ostend, Bruges, and Nieuport, to depart in twenty-four hours, and not to return into any of the ports of the empress-queen till further disposition should be made. The reasons alleged by the court of Vienna for debarring the subjects of his Britannic majesty from the use of these ports, obtained for the house of Austria by the arms and treasures of Great Britain, were, “That her imperial majesty the empress-queen, could not, with indifference, see England, instead of giving the succours due to her by the most solemn treaties, enter into an alliance with her enemy the king of Prussia, and actually afford him all manner of assistance, assembling armies to oppose those which the most christian king, her ally, had sent to her aid, and suffering privateers to exercise open violence in her roads, under the cannon of her ports and coasts, without giving the least satisfaction or answer to the complaints made on that account; and the king of Great Britain himself, at the very time she was offering him a neutrality for Hanover, publishing, by a message to his parliament, that she had formed, with the most christian king, dangerous designs against that electorate; therefore, her majesty, desirous of providing for the security of her ports, judged it expedient to give the forementioned orders; and at the same time to declare, that she could no longer permit a free communication between her subjects and the English, which had hitherto been founded upon treaties that Great Britain had, without scruple, openly violated.” Notwithstanding these orders, the English packet-boats, with letters, were allowed to pass as usual to and from Ostend; the ministers of her imperial majesty wisely considering how good a revenue the postage of English letters brings in to the post-office of the Austrian Netherlands. Ostend and Nieuport, by order of her imperial majesty, received each of them a French garrison; the former on the nineteenth of July, and the latter next day, under the command of M. de la Motte, upon whose arrival the Austrian troops evacuated those places; though the empress-queen still reserved to herself, in both of them, the full and free exercise of all her rights of sovereignty; to which purpose an oath was administered to the French commandant by her majesty’s minister-plenipotentiary for the government of the Low-Countries. At the same time, their imperial and most christian majesties notified to the magistracy of Hamburgh, that they must not admit any English men of war, or transports, into their port, on pain of having a French garrison imposed on them. The city of Gueldres, which had been blocked up by the French ever since the beginning of summer, was forced by famine to capitulate on the twenty-fourth of August, and the garrison marched out with all the honours of war, in order to be conducted to Berlin; but so many of them deserted, that when they passed by Cologn, the whole garrison consisted only of the commandant and forty-seven men. By the surrender of this place the whole country lay open to the French and their allies quite up to Magdeburgh; and the empress-queen immediately received two hundred thousand crowns from the revenues of Cleves and la Marcke alone. To return to the affairs more immediately relating to the king of Prussia. The advanced posts of the prince of Anhault-Dessau at Pirna were attacked, on the tenth of August, by a body of hussars and other irregular troops of the Austrians; but the Prussians soon obliged them to retire, with the loss of several men and two pieces of cannon. On the nineteenth of the same month, early in the morning, a great number of Austrian pan-dours surrounded a little town called Gotliebe, in which a Prussian garrison was quartered, with a design to take it by surprise. The pandours attacked it on all sides, and in the beginning killed twenty-three Prussians, and wounded many; but the Prussians having rallied, repulsed the assailants with great loss. These, however, were but a sort of preludes to much more decisive actions which happened soon after. Silesia, which had hitherto been undisturbed this year, began now to feel the effects of war. Baron Jahnus, an Austrian colonel, entering that country with only an handful of men, made himself master of Hirschberg, Waldenberg, Gottesberg, Frankenstein, and Landshut. They were, indeed, but open places; and he was repulsed in an attempt upon Strigau. On the side of Franconia the army of the empire was assembling with all speed, under the prince of Saxe-Hildburghausen; the French were marching a second army from their interior provinces into Alsace, in order to join the Imperialists: the first division of their troops had already entered the empire, and were advanced as far as Hanau. The Swedes were now preparing, with the utmost expedition, to send a numerous army into Pomerania; and the Russians, who since the taking of Memel had not done the king of Prussia much damage, besides that of obliging him to keep an army in Prussia to oppose them, and interrupting the trade of Konigsberg by their squadrons, were again advancing with hasty strides towards Prussia, marking their steps with horrid desolation. Field-mareschal Lehwald, who had been left in Prussia with an army of thirty thousand men, to guard that kingdom during the absence of his master, was encamped near Velau, when the Russians, to the number of eighty thousand, after taking Memel, advanced against the territories of the Prussian king, whose situation now drew upon him the attention of all Europe. In the night between the seventh and eighth of August, colonel Malachowsti, one of mareschal Lehwald’s officers, marched to reconnoitre the position of the enemy, when a skirmish happened, which lasted near two hours, between his advanced ranks and a Russian detachment three times stronger than the Prussians. The Russians were repulsed, and fled into the woods, after having fifty men killed and a great number wounded. The Prussians lost but one man, and had fourteen wounded.