DECREE OF THE AULIC COUNCIL.

The defeat of the French army at Rosbach, and the retreat of the Russians from Pomerania, had entirely changed the face of affairs in the empire. The French king was soon obliged to abandon his conquests on that sida of the Rhine, and his threats sounded no longer terrible in the ears of the Hanoverian and Prussian allies. As little formidable were the denunciations of the emperor, who had, by a decree of the Aulic council, communicated to the diet certain mandates, issued in the month of August in the preceding year, on pain of the ban of the empire, with avocatory letters annexed against the king of Great Britain, elector of Hanover, and the other princes acting in concert with the king of Prussia. The French court likewise published a virulent memorial, after the convention of Closter-Seven had been violated and set aside, drawing an invidious parallel between the conduct of the French king and the proceedings of his Britannic majesty; in which the latter is taxed with breach of faith, and almost every meanness that could stain the character of a monarch. In answer to the emperor’s decree and this virulent charge, baron Gimmengen, the electoral minister of Brunswick-Lunenbourg, presented to the diet, in November, a long memorial, recapitulating the important services his sovereign had done the house of Austria, and the ungrateful returns he had reaped, in the queen’s refusing to assist him, when his dominions were threatened with an invasion. He enumerated many instances in which she had assisted, encouraged, and even joined the enemies of the electorate, in contempt of her former engagements, and directly contrary to the constitution of the empire. He refuted every article of the charge which the French court had brought against him in their virulent libel, retorted the imputations of perfidy and ambition, and, with respect to France, justified every particular of his own conduct.