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Updated: June 16, 2025
She recalls how the Duke of Hesse-Cassel sold his peasants for the American war, to give with their pay jewels to his mistress, and how, on her astonishment being expressed, the servant replied they only cost seven thousand children of the soil just sent to America.
The Swedish monarch was rendered propitious to the project by assurances that the house of Hesse-Cassel, of which he was the head, should be elevated into an electorate.
Having learned that the electoral princess of Hesse-Cassel, sister of the king, was still ill at the end of her confinement, the Emperor ascended to the apartment of this princess, and, after quite a long visit, gave orders that she should be treated with all the deference due to her rank and unfortunate situation.
The French, therefore, had a vast mass of seasoned fighters, a good base of operations, and a clear plan of attack. The Prussians, on the contrary, could muster barely 128,000 men, including the Saxons, for service in the field; and of these 27,000 with Rüchel were on the frontier of Hesse-Cassel seeking to assure the alliance of the Elector.
Also, if Hanover should eventually be annexed to the Kingdom of Westphalia, a Westphalian district with a population of from three to four hundred thousand souls would be retroceded to Prussia. Finally, the chiefs of the Houses of Orange-Nassau, Hesse-Cassel, and Brunswick were to receive pensions from Murat and Jerome Bonaparte, who dispossessed them.
He affirmed, that the convention with Hesse-Cassel had prevented a war in the empire, for which the court of Vienna had made great preparations; that the emperor had not only augmented his own forces by the help of Spanish subsidies, but also retained the troops of three electors; and if he had not been overawed by the Hessians, would certainly have rejected the preliminaries, and all other advances towards a pacification; that, therefore, they ought not to grudge an expense which had already proved so beneficial to the tranquillity of Europe.
Posterity will hardly believe, that the emperor and all the princes of Germany were in a conspiracy against their country, except the king of Prussia, the elector of Hanover, and the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel; and they will, no doubt, be surprised, that Great Britain, after all the treaties she had made, and the numberless subsidies she had granted, should not have an ally left, except one prince, so embarrassed in his own affairs, that he could grant lier no succour, whatever assistance he might demand.
He also acknowledged that he had resented the conduct, and chastised the injustice, of those co-estates who had assisted his enemies, and helped to ravage his dominions; inferring, that if the crown of France was free to pillage the estates of the duke of Brunswick and the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, because they had supplied the king of England with auxiliaries; if the empress-queen had a right to appropriate to herself half of the contributions raised by the French king in these countries; surely his Britannic majesty had an equal right to make those feel the burden of the war who had favoured the unjust enterprises of his enemies.
Prussia had seized the opportunity considerably to increase her own boundaries and round out her territory by annexing the North German states, with the exception of Saxony, that had gone to war with her. Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, and the free city of Frankfurt, along with the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, all became Prussian.
He flattered himself that the prince of Ysembourg, at the head of the Hessian troops, would find employment for the prince de Soubise, who had marched from Hanau, with a design to penetrate into the landgraviate of Hesse-Cassel: his vanguard had been already surprised and defeated by the militia of the country; and the prince Ysembourg was at the head of a considerable body of regular forces, assembled to oppose his further progress.
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