The war was still being waged in Germany. With the fall of Walpole, England's neutrality had ended. Already a body of troops had taken the road for Flanders. Women of distinction, with the Duchess of Marlborough at their head, had collected by subscription the sum of one hundred thousand pounds sterling, which they successfully offered to the haughty Maria-Theresa. The king had taken into his pay six thousand Hessian soldiers. The cabinet proposed to raise in Hanover a body of sixteen thousand at England's expense. {191} The opposition violently inveighed against this measure. "It is too evident," said Pitt, "that this great kingdom, which is powerful and formidable, is regarded as a province of a pitiful Electorate, and that troops are only raised in pursuance of a design long matured, in order to swallow up all the resources of our unhappy country." The proposal passed, however, and the king put himself at the head of the forces he had collected in Germany. The States-General of Holland had united their troops with his. The fortune of war had changed. Charles VII., a fugitive in his turn, driven from his hereditary States, which Marshal Broglie had evacuated, had no longer any hope, save in the aid of France. She alone sustained all the burden of the war, which she had not yet officially declared. In England they laughed at the state of matters in Europe. "Our situation is absurd," said Horace Walpole, the intelligent son of the great minister, who was constantly dabbling in politics, as in literature. "We have declared war on Spain without making it, and we make war on France without having declared it."