England had achieved a glorious peace. She was fatigued from her long efforts, and resolved henceforward to leave to the continental powers the care of settling their own quarrels. Austria and Prussia alone were left, the first to enter the lists, the only nations which retained a serious interest in the questions in dispute. Frederick the Great had based new hopes on the young czar, and a caprice of fortune had robbed him of his support. Catherine II., Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, was on bad terms with her husband. She took advantage of the indiscretions of Peter III. to excite a military insurrection against him. He was deposed, and shortly after died in his prison. Catherine was proclaimed sovereign in his place. The new sovereign was bold, ambitious, and as unscrupulous in her greed for power as in her private life. She remained neutral between Prussia and Austria. The states were at the end of their resources, the population decimated. In ten years Berlin had lost a tenth of her population, and thirty thousand of her inhabitants owed their subsistence to public charity. The two sovereigns agreed to an interchange of conquests. {262} All this disturbance and all this suffering ended for Germany in the maintenance of the _statu quo_. France was exhausted, deprived of her most flourishing colonies, degraded in her own eyes as well as in those of Europe. She had dragged Spain along in her misfortune. England alone emerged triumphant and aggrandized with booty. She had gained forever the Empire of India, and for some years at least almost the whole of civilized America obeyed her laws. She had gained what we had lost, not by the superiority of her arms, nor even of her generals, but by the natural and innate force of a free people skillfully and nobly governed. The peace had been accepted by the nation as well as by the Houses, but ill-will existed against Lord Bute, a Scotchman and favorite, who was attacked on all sides, both in pamphlets and in Parliament. More jealous of his influence with the royal family than he was of power, Lord Bute resolved to resign. He had written to one of his friends: "Isolated in a cabinet which I have formed, having no one to support me in the House of Lords but two peers, who are friends of mine, with my two secretaries of state maintaining silence, and the Lord Chancellor, whom I placed in his position, voting and speaking against me, I find myself upon ground which is undermined beneath me, and which makes me dread not only to fall myself, but to drag my royal master with me in my fall. It is time that I should retire." George Grenville succeeded him in power, and Fox passed to the House of Lords with the title of Lord Holland. {263}