er; and sixty
battalions of foot, and the greatest part of the horse belonging to the
French army, were directed to attack the Prussian territories. Mareschal
Richelieu himself arrived at Brunswick on the fifteenth of September;
and having, in a few days after, assembled an hundred and ten
battalions, and an hundred and fifty squadrons, with an hundred pieces
of cannon, near Wolfenbuttel, he entered the king of Prussia's dominions
with his army on the twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth of
the same month, in three columns, which penetrated into Halberstadt
and Brandenburgh, plundering the towns, exacting contributions, and
committing many enormities, at which their general is said to have
connived. In the meantime the duke of Cumberland returned to England,
where he arrived on the eleventh of October, and shortly after resigned
all his military commands.

Had the allied army, after the battle of Hastenbeck, marched directly
to the Leine, as it might easily have done, and then taken post on the
other side of Wolfenbuttel, Halberstadt, and Magdeburgh, it might have
waited securely under the cannon of the latter place for the junction of
the Prussian forces; instead of which, they injudiciously turned off
to the Lower Weser, retiring successively from Hamelen to Nienburgh,
Verden, Rothenburgh, Buxtehude, and lastly to Stade, where, for want of
subsistence and elbow-room, the troops were all made prisoners of war at
large. They made a march of an hundred and fifty miles to be cooped up
in a nook, instead of taking the other route, which was only about an
hundred miles, and would have led them to a place of safety. By this
unaccountable conduct, the king of Prussia was not only deprived of the
assistance of near forty thousand good troops, which, in the close of
the campaign, might have put him upon an equality with the French and
the army of the empire; but also exposed to, and actually invaded by,
his numerous enemies on all sides, insomuch that his situation became
now more dangerous than ever; and the fate which seemed to have
threatened the empress a few months before, through his means, was,
to all appearance, turned against himself. His ruin was predicted,
nor could human prudence foresee how he might be extricated from his
complicated distress; for, besides the invasion of his territories by
the French under the duke de Richelieu, the Russians, who had made for
a long time a dilatory march, and seemed unc