racted 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'Hopital 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 t