The fortunes of Maria Theresa now began to look more prosperous. Carteret got her to buy off the ablest of her assailants, the King of Prussia, by ceding him Silesia. When Frederic had withdrawn from the struggle, the French and Bavarians were driven back from Austria, and retreated up the Danube. It was against their flank that George was operating in 1743, when his rather rash advance into the midst of foes very superior in numbers brought on the battle of Dettingen (July 27, 1743).
Battle of Dettingen.
Finding that he was beset by forces nearly double the strength of his own 30,000 men, the king faced about, to retire up the banks of the Main. But the van of the French army of the Duc de Noailles outmarched him, and threw itself across his path at the village of Dettingen, while the main body of the enemy was rapidly coming up on his flank. George hastily formed up his troops as they arrived, and dashed forward to cut his way through, leading the advance in person. He was entirely successful, drove the French into the Main with great loss, and completely extricated himself from his difficulties. This was the last occasion on which a king of England has ever been under fire.
The Congress at Worms.
Further successes followed the victory of Dettingen. The Austrians overran Bavaria, and the Emperor Charles was obliged to lay down his arms and ask for peace. Carteret, who had followed the king to Germany, called together a congress at Worms, at which the representatives of England, Holland, Sardinia, and Saxony, guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction, and the integrity of the dominions of the house of Hapsburg. Next spring the allies pledged themselves to invade France, and Carteret, in his moment of triumph, drank to the restoration of Alsace to Germany—a wish not to be fulfilled for another 127 years.
Renewal of the war.
But England and Austria were still far from their goal. The attack on France had to be postponed, because the unscrupulous Frederic of Prussia renewed the war in the North, and fell upon the rear of the Austrians. They withdrew great bodies of troops to face him, and were left comparatively weak on their western front.
Carteret driven from office.
Not long afterwards Carteret, the soul of the continental war, lost his place at the head of the ministry. His jealous colleagues, the two Pelhams, were anxious to get rid of him, and took a mean advantage of his long absences in Germany. They allowed him to be attacked as favouring a Hanoverian, not an English policy, and as consulting the wishes of the king rather than those of the Parliament. Carteret was violently assailed by a young politician named William Pitt, whose cry was always that France should be assailed at sea and in her colonies, not on her continental frontiers. The Pelhams would not defend him, and suffered him to be loaded with many ungrounded accusations. The opposition called his ministry "the drunken administration," because he was somewhat flighty in his demeanour, and was known to love his bottle of port over-well. They accused him of lavishing on German allies money that should have gone to our own fleet, and raised such a storm of words against him that the Pelhams had their excuse for throwing him over—a feat which they accomplished in the end of 1744, to the great detriment of England. William Pitt, when a minister himself in later years, confessed that he had discovered in the course of time that Carteret's plans were excellent, and that he had himself put them into practice with success, after having so often denounced them as ruinous and reckless.
Ministry of Henry Pelham and the Duke of Newcastle.