Frederick had treated the defensive alliance between the two Empresses as a conspiracy against himself. Early in February it became such; save that what he might once have termed a conspiracy now wore the aspect of a crusade. All the North was summoned to unite with Austria in curbing Prussia for ever, and Russia bound herself to keep 80,000 men in the field until the lost provinces had been regained. Frederick had even performed what Kaunitz and the Pompadour could not completely accomplish. France now gave in her whole-hearted adhesion to the league for the recovery of Silesia and Glatz. She pledged herself to pay Austria a heavy annual subsidy, to place 105,000 French troops in the field, and to enlist 10,000 Germans. The history of the negotiations, which were prolonged till May 1, 1757, shows how real were the difficulties to be overcome before Bourbon and Hapsburg could unite.
In May, 1757, when the new campaign began, Frederick thus stood face to face with what it is hardly an exaggeration to term a world in arms. He, and no other, had brought Prussia to this pass. A coalition unprecedented in history was the result of the aggressions of 1740 and 1756. All the world believed that the hour of reckoning had struck and that the Third Silesian War would bring the punishment from which chance had delivered the King who made the First.
To the biographer of Frederick, 1757 is welcome, for Frederick now begins to be a hero. Had a chance bullet at Lobositz struck him down, the world would have known only a king who promised to bring in a new era of government, but who owed to his father’s work and methods the chief part of whatever success he achieved. For creative power he would have taken rank below the Great Elector and Frederick William, for military renown below the Old Dessauer and Schwerin; for the aggrandisement of his House, who knows? for who can calculate what havoc the Coalition of 1757 would have wrought with his dominions? The Frederick who had bequeathed to Prussia several volumes of prose and verse in French and the memory of sixteen years’ tenure of Silesia would hardly be known to fame as Frederick the Great.
In 1757, however, he takes his stand for the existence of Prussia. At the moment that the military balance turns against him the moral balance turns in his favour. Courage, energy, resource, determination, all displayed through a score of lifetimes, if sensations rather than moments make up life,—Frederick is the embodiment of these things during the next six years. At first it is his daring that seems to eclipse all else. If Frederick feared not God, neither did he regard man. Far from being dazzled by the array of sceptres marshalled against him, he determined to strike before his foes could form.