Reign of George III. (continued.) page 9

Within ten days after the arrival of the news of the arrest of Caroline Matilda, her mother, and the king's, the princess dowager of Wales died of a cancer, in her fifty- third year. Whatever may have been her private virtues,. her public conduct had exerted a mischievous influence on this country. Her connection with the marquis of Bute was maintained to the last, in utter defiance of public opinion. By her influence he was enabled to acquire his pernicious power over the king, and to seize the reins of government to the great misfortune and dishonour of the country. By the neglect of the education of her children, though most ample provision was made for it by the country, she contributed most materially to the national losses and misfortunes of George III.'s reign, and to stigmatise royalty in the person of.her illiterate and debauched son, the duke of Cumberland.

At the same time with the events just recorded in Denmark, a revolution took place in Sweden. The senate, on the death of Charles II., had instantly usurped, and still retained, the greater part of the royal prerogatives. But now Gustavus III., a young and ambitious king, determined to recover this ancient power to the crown. Ever since the usurpation of the senate, the country had been divided into two factions, under the names of the Hats and the Caps. Gustavus availed himself of these divisions. He courted the caps - that is, the citizens and the people - and thus received the services of the burgher guard of the capital. The caps were only too ready to assist in pulling down the haughty and oppressive aristocracy. A dearth of corn worked them up to the proper pitch. Gustavus was assisted with money from France. Suddenly he surrounded the senate, and took the members all prisoners. The revolution was complete. The army, the officers, both civil and military, and the citizens at large, took the oath to the ancient form of the constitution, and Sweden was no longer an oligarchy but a regal despotism. Gustavus summoned a diet, which, surrounded by troops and with artillery pointed at the hall in which they assembled, took the oaths dictated by the king.

Catherine of Russia professed great indignation at this arbitrary overthrow of the institutions of Sweden, an-d threatened to take the field for the restoration of the powers of the nobles, whom she had been able to bribe so as to keep Sweden subservient to her own views. But the czarina was too much occupied with maintaining her own seat at home to carry out her measure against Gustavus III. Her usurped throne, from the hour of her murder of her husband, Peter III., had been continually in danger from rivals or impostors. We have seen that she seized and imprisoned again Ivan, the nephew of the czarina Anne, who had been left her heir, but had been dethroned by the czarina Elizabeth, and whom Peter had compassionated and set at large.

Catherine confined the unhappy youth in the doleful castle of Schlusselburg, on an island in the Neva, and it was given out that he was dead. Rumours of his being still alive, nevertheless, continued to circulate, and his place of captivity became known to one who hated the czarina, and determined to liberate him. This was Vasili Mirovitch, the grandson of the Mirovitch who lost his estates by engaging in the rebellion of Mazeppa with Charles XII. of Sweden in the Ukraine. Mirovitch, now a lieutenant of the regiment of Smolensko serving in Schlusselburg, had petitioned the czarina in vain for the restoration of his estates, and now resolved in revenge to liberate Ivan, and proclaim him the true emperor. Inducing one or two brother officers to engage in the scheme, on the 4th of July, 1764, they marched at midnight up to the door of the cell where Ivan was confined, and demanded admittance in the name of the emperor. Ivan's guards, however, refused to admit them, when they fired on the door and endeavoured to force it in. Suddenly it was flung open, and the body of the murdered Ivan was presented to their view. The officers in charge had had standing orders, that on any attempt to rescue the prisoner they should instantly dispatch him. They had executed their order, and said, pointing to the bloody corpse, " Here is your emperor! "

Mirovitch was beheaded, the soldiers who had acted ignorantly were barbarously punished, and, to prevent any mistake as to the actual death of Ivan now, his body was publicly exhibited in only a shirt and pair of drawers. But though the murderous Catherine had freed herself of Ivan, she was beset by a whole tribe of impostors, in one part or other, who pretended to be Peter III., who, they said, had escaped. The chief of these was Pugatchef, a Cossack of the Don, who, from 1771 to 1774, continued to harass her: He completely convinced the Cossacks of his identity; at one time he was at the head of seventy thousand men, took town after town, and even menaced Moscow.

But, before Catherine had freed herself from her pretenders, she became involved in war with the Turks, on account of Poland, and her successes against them awoke in her mind the most extensive ideas of aggrandising Russia at the expense of both Poland and Turkey. Peter, called the Great, is said to have sketched in his will a most stupendous scheme of enlargement of Russia by conquest, which was only to terminate when the seat of empire was transferred to Constantinople, and the Russian fleets commanded the Mediterranean; and he laid it as a sacred duty on all his successors to do their utmost towards the advance of this great plan. Whether the will be genuine or not, every Russian ruler since has steadily exerted himself by arms and the most unprincipled diplomacy to such an end. Catherine, equally celebrated for her ability and her numerous lovers, led the way in this direction with wonderful success.

Poland, lying contiguous to Russia, had for ages been in a condition calculated to attract the cupidity of ambitious neighbours. Its nobles usurped all authority. They kept the whole mass of the people in hopeless serfdom; they usurped the whole of the land; they elected their own king, and were too fond of power themselves to leave him more than a puppet in their hands. To make the condition of the country worse, it was violently divided on the subject of religion. One part of the nobles consisted of Roman catholics, another of what were called dissidents, made up of members of the Greek church, and protestants, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Arians. Although by what was called the Pacta Conventa the dissidents had been admitted to an equality of rights, this was totally disregarded by the overbearing catholics; and in 1736 the Pacta Conventa was formally abolished. Every dissident was, by this measure, for ever excluded from government, and from all interest in it. The dissidents were shut out from all affairs of state; from all courts of judicature; and might be vexed and oppressed, without any chance of redress. The catholic church was declared to be the religion of the state; any one who voted for the election of a prince, not a catholic, was declared an enemy of the country, and condemned to death. Whoever quitted the church was branded as an apostate, and was condemned to perpetual exile.

Thus the whole country was torn by violent religious animosity; the nobles were insolent to the crown, and the people were nothing. Such was the condition of Poland, which led to its dismemberment. All nobility of mind was destroyed; pride and oppression were the inseparable consequences of such a system. There was no middle class, no popular class; it was a country of lords and slaves - of one class domineering over the other. The catholics were the dissidents, and the dissidents, seeking aid from Russia - which was also Greek in religion - and, to insure this aid, condescending to the lowest arts of solicitation, - to the practice of fawning, stooping, and cringing to the great barbarous power of Russia on one side, and to the equally barbarous power of Turkey on the other. The nobles could bring large bodies of cavalry into the field, as many, at times, as a hundred thousand; but as they had no free people, and dreaded to arm their slaves, they had little or no infantry, except such as they hired, and even this was in no condition to withstand the heavy masses of Russian infantry, much less such armies as Prussia or Austria might be tempted to bring against them.

The contending religionists formed themselves into two hostile confederations: the confederation at Radom was that of the dissidents; the confederation at Bar was that of the catholics. Russia, glad to have a pretence for getting a footing in Poland, supported the confederation of Radom; France supported the confederation of Bar; and it was at the instigation of France that Turkey, in 1768, was induced to declare war on Russia, and to support the catholic confederates of Bar.

From the moment that Russia was called in, she became, or aimed to become, the dominant power there. She pressed on the whole line of the Polish frontier with her armies, inundated the kingdom with her troops, and levied contributions for their support as if she had been in a conquered country. The fierce warfare that raged betwixt the dissidents and catholics was more fiercely embittered by the catholics claiming the character of patriots, and branding the dissidents as traitors, for bringing in a foreign power. From that hour, too, the kings were elected rather by foreign armies than by the Poles themselves. Stanislaus Poniatowski, the present king, was the nominee of Catherine of Russia, whose lover he had been till superseded by Orloff. She had placed him on the throne by force of arms, and he was incapable of doing anything except through her power.

This modern Messalina incited the Zaporavians - a savage race of Cossacks, inhabiting a wild region east of Poland - to pour down in legions on that devoted country. They were told that the catholic Poles, urged on by France, were intending to massacre all the Poles of the Greek church, to which these marauders belonged. They poured in fierce fanaticism into the country, laying it waste with fire and sword. The Russians armed the Polish peasants to guide and assist the flaming zealots from the Borysthenes, and, amid the most terrible barbarities, they are said to have destroyed fifty thousand of the wretched inhabitants.

The inroad of Russians, Cossacks, Calmucks, and Zaporavians induced the catholic Poles to call in the Turks. " To bring in the Turks to drive out the Russians," said one of the Polish catholic bishops, " is like setting fire to a house to drive away vermin." The Turks were at first 10th to engage in such a struggle, but, encouraged by France, they committed that fatal error. The Russians defeated them, and, pursuing them to Bar, thence followed them into Turkey. They defeated the grand vizier and the khan of Tartary; took the towns of Balta, Chocim, and Bender, opening their way into Moldavia and Bulgaria. The Russians were now triumphant over the confederate Poles, and their generals, counts Repnin and Valkonski, were now masters of the greater part of the country.

Some faint endeavours were made to shake off the yoke. Encouraged by France, the confederates again rushed down from the Carpathian mountains, to which they had fled, and cut to pieces several detachments of the Russians. They proclaimed Poniatowski deposed, and called on the people to aid them to drive out the invaders. But the people, long used to oppression from their own lords, did not answer to the call. In France, Choiseul had been hurled from power, and France left the Poles to their fate. It was now that Frederick of Prussia proposed to Austria to combine with Russia and share Poland between them. At this robber proposition, so in character \\ith Frederick, who had all his life been creating a kingdom by the plunder of his neighbours, Maria Theresa at first exclaimed in horror. She wrote to her celebrated minister, Kaunitz, who urged her to accede. " When all my lands were invaded, and when I did not even know where I could in quiet give birth to my child, then I firmly relied on my own good right and on the help of God. But in this present affair, when public right cries even to heaven against us, and when against us, also, are justice and sound reason, never in my whole life before did I feel so anxious, or was ashamed to let myself be seen. Consider what an example we shall be giving to the whole world, if, for a wretched piece of Poland or Wallachia, we give up our honour and fair fame."

But Maria Theresa was now old and failing, and she gave way, declaring that, long after she was dead and gone, people would see what would happen from their having broken through everything which had, till then, been deemed just and holy. Frederick of Prussia took the surest way to compel the Austrians to come in for a share of the spoils of Poland. He marched a body of soldiers out of Silesia - the territory which he had rent from Austria - into Posen, and Austria, not to be behind, had marched another army into the province of Starosty, or Zips, in the Carpathian mountains.

In vain did Poniatowski remonstrate; he had no means of resistance. The Turks could no longer defend themselves from Russian invasion, much less assist Poland. They applied to Frederick to intercede with Catherine for peace for them. Nothing could so entirely suit Frederick's plans. He sent Prince Henry of Prussia to negotiate with Catherine, who took the opportunity to represent to her the advantages to the three great powers, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, to strengthen themselves by appropriating portions of Poland. Whilst he was discussing this infamous plan, the Prussian emissaries were busy in Poland persuading the dissentients that as the Prussians, like them, were protestants, or opposed to Rome, they had better make common cause with them. At the same time, the catholic confederates, blind to their greater enemies through their hatred to their protestant countrymen, made a failing attempt, in November, 1771, to carry off the king Poniatowski.

In the spring of the present year, 1772, the confederates, under general Zaremba, now aided by two French officers - Viomenil and Choisi - made a fresh attempt and became masters of Cracow. Frederick advanced against them and defeated them. At this time arrived the news of the confederacy of Austria, Russia, and Prussia; fresh Austrian troops were on the march from Hungary through the Carpathian mountains, and the confederation broke up in consternation and despair. The Russians, relieved from contention with the Poles, now pushed on their victories against the Turks;