f any sound alliance which could check France. "If you gain Prussia,"
wrote the veteran Lord Chancellor, Hardwicke, to Newcastle in 1748, "the
Confederacy will be restored and made whole, and become a real strength;
if you do not, it will continue lame and weak, and much in the power of
France." Frederick however held cautiously aloof from any engagement.
The league between Prussia and the Queen of Hungary, which England
desired, Frederick knew in fact to be impossible. He knew that the
Queen's passionate resolve to recover Silesia must end in a contest in
which England must take one part or the other; and as yet, if the choice
had to be made, Austria seemed likely to be the favoured ally. The
traditional friendship of the Whigs for that power combined with the
tendencies of George the Second to make an Austrian alliance more
probable than a Prussian one. The advances of England to Frederick only
served therefore to alienate Maria Theresa, whose one desire was to
regain Silesia, and whose hatred and jealousy of the new Protestant
power which had so suddenly risen into rivalry with her house for the
supremacy of Germany blinded her to the older rivalry between her house
and France. The two powers of the House of Bourbon were still bound by
the Family Compact, and eager for allies in the strife with England
which the struggles in India and America were bringing hourly nearer. It
was as early as 1752 that by a startling change of policy Maria Theresa
drew to their alliance. The jealousy which Russia entertained of the
growth of a strong power in North Germany brought the Czarina Elizabeth
to promise aid to the schemes of the Queen of Hungary; and in 1755 the
league of the four powers and of Saxony was practically completed. So
secret were these negotiations that they remained unknown to Henry
Pelham and to his brother the Duke of Newcastle, who succeeded him on
his death in 1754 as the head of the ministry. But they were detected
from the first by the keen eye of Frederick of Prussia, who saw himself
fronted by a line of foes that stretched from Paris to St. Petersburg.

[Sidenote: Alliance with Prussia.]

The danger to England was hardly less; for France appeared again on the
stage with a vigour and audacity which recalled the days of Lewis the
Fourteenth. The weakness and corruption of the French government were
screened for a time by the daring and scope of its plans, as by the
ability of the agents it found to carry th