This overbearing character the King of Würtemberg showed just as much in his relations with his family as in the exercise of his royal power. There was an instance of it when he forced his son into a marriage against his will. He acted in a similar manner with regard to his daughter when he made her marry Jérôme, King of Westphalia, the brother of Napoleon. No sooner had the latter fallen than Frederick wished the marriage to be dissolved. Attached by a sincere affection to her husband, and at any rate to her child, the Queen of Westphalia opposed a stubborn refusal to her father’s demands. ‘United by bonds due to politics,’ she wrote to him, ‘I am not going to recount the happiness of seven years; but if he had been the worst of husbands, you, my dear father, by consulting the real principles of honour, could only command me not to leave him now that misfortune has overtaken him, and considering that this misfortune is not of his own making. My first idea, my first impulse, was to go and fling myself into your arms, but accompanied by him, the father of my child. Where, in fact, would be my tranquillity if I did not share it now with him to whom are due more than ever all my powers of consolation?’ In another letter, she expressed herself as follows: ‘Though I married for political reasons, it seemed ordained that I should become the happiest woman in existence. I bear my husband three feelings combined, love, tenderness, and esteem. A time will come, I trust, when you will be convinced of having judged him wrongly; and when that time arrives you shall find in him and in me the most respectful and affectionate children.’ Such a noble resistance ended by disarming the father, whose children had both been forced by him into unions which were in the end to prove happy in the case of his daughter, the reverse in the case of his son. This departure of the King of Würtemberg put an end to all the hopes of the German noblesse. A few days afterwards, the deputies, tired of being deluded with promises that had no prospect of realisation, did not wait until they were positively bowed out, but left the Austrian capital of their own accord. As a matter of course, the epigrams which generally accompany failure were not spared to them; their going was attributed to their exhausted finances, and the next morning they were forgotten. People were merely talking about a new entertainment, namely, a sleighing party. The snow, which lay thick, and the sharp frost, which seemed to have set in for good during the last few days, favoured that kind of amusement, borrowed from the stern climate of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The Austrian Court made immense preparations, and the magnificence to be displayed was to rival that of the imperial _carrousel_. [Illustration: ROBERT LORD VISCOUNT CASTLEREAGH, MARQUESS OF LONDONDERRY.]