Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
So the quondam soldier fell out of humor with Marbach, went into the army again, and when the Seven Years' War broke out, in 1756, he took the field with a Wuerttemberg regiment to fight the King of Prussia.
To Frau von Wolzogen, who had been admonishing him never to forget his debt to the Stuttgart Academy, he wrote: 'However it may be with regard to that, you have my word that I will never belittle the Duke of Wuerttemberg. Toward the end of December the wintry dullness of his Bauerbach cottage was brightened by the arrival of its owner and her daughter.
What led him to make fresh overtures to the man whom, a few months before, he had treated so shabbily, is not difficult to make out. He had become convinced that there was after all nothing to be feared from the Duke of Wuerttemberg. Moreover, since the peremptory rejection of 'Fiesco' the Mannheim theater had been doing a very poor business.
We have already noted that southern Germany had rejected aristocratic Lutheranism, partially at least because of Luther's bitter words to the peasants. Catholicism, however, was not destined to have complete sway in those regions, for democratic Calvinism permeated Wuerttemberg, Baden, and the Rhenish provinces, and the Reformed doctrines gained numerous converts among the middle-class.
Before the troops of the Third Coalition could threaten the eastern frontier of France, Napoleon abandoned his military projects against Great Britain, broke up his huge armaments along the Atlantic coast, and, with his usual rapidity of march, hurled his finely trained army upon the Austrians near the town of Ulm in Wuerttemberg.
On the whole, the people of Wuerttemberg, who had suffered much from mistresses of a different ilk, had reason to bless their ruler's fondness for his amiable 'Franzele'. She was not unworthy to sit for the portrait of Lady Milford. An educational project, the founding of a school which later came to be known as the Karlschule, marks the beginning of the duke's career in his new role.
On the outbreak of the Seven Years' War the French king demanded the promised troops; and so it came about that the Suabian Protestants were compelled, in defiance of public sentiment, to make war against their co-religionists of Prussia. In the inglorious campaigns which followed, the Duke of Wuerttemberg cut a rather sorry figure, but criticism only exasperated him.
About an hour's march from Wilna the retreating masses encountered the hill and defile of Ponary and it was at this point where the imperial treasure, so far conscientiously guarded by German troops from Baden and Wuerttemberg, was lost.
Having come to his ducal throne prematurely, through the influence of the King of Prussia, he began well, but after a few years shook off the restraints of good advice and entered upon a course of autocratic folly that made Wuerttemberg a far-shining example of the evils of absolutism under the Old Regime.
Late in December, 1805, the emperors Francis II and Napoleon signed the treaty of Pressburg, whereby the former ceded Venetia to the kingdom of Italy and recognized Napoleon as its king, and resigned the Tyrol to Bavaria, and outlying provinces in western Germany to Wuerttemberg. Both Bavaria and Wuerttemberg were converted into kingdoms.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking