Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/485

A.D. 1743.] the queen of Hungary. No sooner had parliament closed, than George, accompanied by his son, the duke of Cumberland, and lord Carteret, hastened off to Germany. The pacific cardinal Fleury had died the preceding January, and that check which he had so long imposed on the martial spirit of France was withdrawn. The young king, absorbed by his own pleasures, left public affairs to his ministers, who were now count D'Argenson, as minister of war, and cardinal Tencin, an ambitious priest of an indifferent character, and who was strongly devoted to the interests of the Stuart family. His sister, Madame de Tencin, who had been a nun, but had soon found conventual restraints totally opposed to her tastes, led a gay and dissipated life, having generally more than one paramour. Chief in her favour had for a long time been Bolingbroke, who was strongly asserted to be, by her, the father of the celebrated revolutionary philosopher, D'Alembert. Bolingbroke had now quitted France and returned to England, where he located himself near Battersea, and still drew round him, and secretly pointed, the efforts of the opposition; but he had long abandoned in disgust the party of the pretender.

Under D'Argensen and Tencin a new stimulus was given to the war. The rebuff which the French arms had met with in Germany, roused them to make fresh efforts. The army of De Broglie, in the command of which he had superseded Maillebois, had retreated to the banks of the Neckar, and their unfortunate ally, the old elector of Bavaria, but now emperor of Germany, a sovereign deprived of his only territory of Bavaria, and destitute of revenue, had taken refuge in the free city of Frankfort-on-Maine. Voltaire, in his "Twelfth Night Verses" for this year, ridiculed the position of the various exiled kings. "The Epiphany; or Twelfth day," is, in French, called Le Jour de Rois, the Day of Kings; and the witty infidel seized on this idea to laugh at the pretender, rejectcd by  England, telling his beads in Italy; Stanislaus, ex-king of; Poland, smoking pipes inAustria; the emperor beloved of the French living at an inn in Franconia; and the beautiful queen of Hungary laughing at this epiphany.



The forces which Franco sent under marshal de Noailles to support Broglie, only arrived just in time. Broglie, keenly pursued by the brave Hungarian cavalry, was still in anxious retreat, when a detachment of the troops of Noailles, twelve thousand in number, came up. He then faced about and endeavoured to keep in check the Austrians under prince Charles of Lorraine. The British army, which the king had ordered to march from Flanders into Germany, to aid the Austrians, had set out at the end of February. They were commanded by lord Stair, and on their route were joined by several Austrian regiments under the duke of Aremberg and the sixteen thousand Hanoverians in British pay, which had wintered at Liege. They marched so slowly that they only crossed the Rhine in the middle of May. They halted at Hochst, betwixt Mayence and Frankfort, awaiting the six thousand Hanoverians in electoral pay, and by an equal number of Hessians, who had been garrisoning the fortresses of Flanders, but who were now relieved by Dutch troops. Stair had now forty thousand men, and might easily have seized the emperor at Frankfort. All parties had respected, however, the neutrality of Frankfort, and Stair did the same, probably because the emperor, having no subjects to ransom him, might have proved rather a burden on his hands, than of any advantages in prosecuting the war.

De Noailles, on his part, had sixty thousand men, independent of the twelve thousand furnished to Broglie. He kept an active eye on the motions of the allied army, and as Stair encamped on the northern bank of the Maine, he also passed the Rhine and encamped on the southern bank of the Maine. The two camps lay only four leagues from each other, presenting a most anomalous aspect. There was still no declaration of war. France had still its ambassador at London, and England at Paris, yet they were fighting against each other as auxiliaries. A ridiculous situation, as Horace Walpole truly styled it, saying, "We had the name