title of the house of
Brandenburg had been kept alive by repeated claims, though the seizure
of the territory had been hitherto forborne.

The king did not suffer his claim to be subjected to any altercations,
but, having published a declaration, in which he charged the bishop
with violence and injustice, and remarked that the feudal laws allowed
every man, whose possession was withheld from him, to enter it with an
armed force, he immediately despatched two thousand soldiers into the
controverted countries, where they lived without control, exercising
every kind of military tyranny, till the cries of the inhabitants
forced the bishop to relinquish them to the quiet government of
Prussia.

This was but a petty acquisition; the time was now come when the king
of Prussia was to form and execute greater designs. On the 9th of
October, 1740, half Europe was thrown into confusion by the death of
Charles the sixth, emperour of Germany, by whose death all the
hereditary dominions of the house of Austria descended, according to
the pragmatick sanction, to his eldest daughter, who was married to
the duke of Lorrain, at the time of the emperour's death, duke of
Tuscany.

By how many securities the pragmatick sanction was fortified, and how
little it was regarded when those securities became necessary; how
many claimants started up at once to the several dominions of the
house of Austria; how vehemently their pretensions were enforced, and
how many invasions were threatened or attempted; the distresses of the
emperour's daughter, known for several years by the title only of the
queen of Hungary, because Hungary was the only country to which her
claim had not been disputed: the firmness with which she struggled
with her difficulties, and the good fortune by which she surmounted
them; the narrow plan of this essay will not suffer me to relate. Let
them be told by some other writer of more leisure and wider
intelligence.

Upon the emperour's death, many of the German princes fell upon the
Austrian territories, as upon a dead carcass, to be dismembered among
them without resistance. Among these, with whatever justice, certainly
with very little generosity, was the king of Prussia, who, having
assembled his troops, as was imagined, to support the pragmatick
sanction, on a sudden entered Silesia with thirty thousand men,
publishing a declaration, in which he disclaims any design of injuring
the rights of the house of Austria, but