England's possessions
and not England one of Hanover's. But the fact that the court became a
German court prepared the soil, so to speak; English politics were
already subconsciously committed to two centuries of the belittlement of
France and the gross exaggeration of Germany. The period can be
symbolically marked out by Carteret, proud of talking German at the
beginning of the period, and Lord Haldane, proud of talking German at
the end of it. Culture is already almost beginning to be spelt with a k.
But all such pacific and only slowly growing Teutonism was brought to a
crisis and a decision when the voice of Pitt called us, like a trumpet,
to the rescue of the Protestant Hero.

Among all the monarchs of that faithless age, the nearest to a man was a
woman. Maria Theresa of Austria was a German of the more generous sort,
limited in a domestic rather than a national sense, firm in the ancient
faith at which all her own courtiers were sneering, and as brave as a
young lioness. Frederick hated her as he hated everything German and
everything good. He sets forth in his own memoirs, with that clearness
which adds something almost superhuman to the mysterious vileness of his
character, how he calculated on her youth, her inexperience and her lack
of friends as proof that she could be despoiled with safety. He invaded
Silesia in advance of his own declaration of war (as if he had run on
ahead to say it was coming) and this new anarchic trick, combined with
the corruptibility of nearly all the other courts, left him after the
two Silesian wars in possession of the stolen goods. But Maria Theresa
had refused to submit to the immorality of nine points of the law. By
appeals and concessions to France, Russia, and other powers, she
contrived to create something which, against the atheist innovator even
in that atheist age, stood up for an instant like a spectre of the
Crusades. Had that Crusade been universal and whole-hearted, the great
new precedent of mere force and fraud would have been broken; and the
whole appalling judgment which is fallen upon Christendom would have
passed us by. But the other Crusaders were only half in earnest for
Europe; Frederick was quite in earnest for Prussia; and he sought for
allies, by whose aid this weak revival of good might be stamped out, and
his adamantine impudence endure for ever. The allies he found were the
English. It is not pleasant for an Englishman to have to write the
words.

T