ns, on pain of military execution. The states were
immediately convoked at Leipsic in order to deliberate on these demands;
and the city being unable to pay such a considerable sum, the Prussian
troops began to put their monarch's threats in execution. He justified
these proceedings, by declaring that the enemy had practised the same
violence and oppression on the territories of his allies; but how
the practice of his declared enemies, in the countries which they had
invaded and subdued in common course of war, should justify him in
pillaging and oppressing a people with whom neither he nor his allies
were at war, it is not easy to conceive. As little can we reconcile this
conduct to the character of a prince, assuming the title of protector of
the protestant religion, which is the established faith among those very
Saxons who were subjected to such grievous impositions; impositions the
more grievous and unmerited, as they had never taken any share in the
present war, but cautiously avoided every step that might be construed
into provocation, since the king of Prussia declared they might depend
upon his protection.

{GEORGE II. 1727-1760}

STATE of the ARMIES on the CONTINENT.

Before we proceed to enumerate the events of the campaign, it may be
necessary to inform the reader, that the forces brought into the field
by the empress-queen of Hungary, and the states of the empire, the
czarina, the kings of France and Sweden, fell very little short of three
hundred thousand men; and all these were destined to act against the
king of Prussia and the elector of Hanover. In opposition to this
formidable confederacy, his Prussian majesty was, by tha subsidy from
England, the spoils of Saxony, and the revenues of Brandenbourg, enabled
to maintain an army of one hundred and forty thousand men: while the
elector of Hanover assembled a body of sixty thousand men, composed
of his own electoral troops, with the auxiliary mercenaries of
Hesse-Cassel, Buckebourg, Saxe-Gotha, and Brunswick Wolfenbuttel, all of
them maintained by the pay of Great Britain. At this juncture, indeed,
there was no other fund for their subsistence, as the countries of
Hanover and Hesse were possessed by the enemy, and in the former the
government was entirely changed.

THE FRENCH KING CHANGES THE ADMINISTRATION OF HANOVER.

In the month of December in the preceding year, a fanner of the revenues
from Paris arrived at Hanover, where he establis