LOUDON, ERNST GIDEON, FREIHERR VON (1717-1790), Austrian soldier, was born at Tootzen in Livonia, on the 2nd of February 1717. His family, of Scottish origin,[1] had been settled in that country since before 1400. His father was a lieutenant-colonel, retired on a meagre pension from the Swedish service, and the boy was sent in 1732 into the Russian army as a cadet. He took part in Field Marshal Münnich's siege of Danzig in 1734, in the march of a Russian corps to the Rhine in 1735 and in the Turkish war 1738-1739. Dissatisfied with his prospects he resigned in 1741 and sought military employment elsewhere. He applied first to Frederick the Great, who declined his services. At Vienna he had better fortune, being made a captain in Trenck's free corps. He took part in its forays and marches, though not in its atrocities, until wounded and taken prisoner in Alsace. He was shortly released by the advance of the main Austrian army. His next active service, still under Trenck, was in the Silesian mountains in 1745, in which campaign he greatly distinguished himself as a leader of light troops. He was present also at Soor. He retired shortly afterwards, owing to his distaste for the lawless habits of his comrades in the irregulars, and after long waiting in poverty for a regular commission he was at last made a captain in one of the frontier regiments, spending the next ten years in half-military, half-administrative work in the Carlstadt district. At Bunich, where he was stationed, he built a church and planted an oak forest now called by his name. He had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel when the outbreak of the Seven Years' War called him again into the field. From this point began his fame as a soldier. Soon promoted colonel, he distinguished himself repeatedly and was in 1757 made a General-feldwacht-meister (major-general of cavalry) and a knight of the newly founded order of Maria Theresa. In the campaign of 1758 came his first opportunity for fighting an action as a commander-in-chief, and he used it so well that Frederick the Great was obliged to give up the siege of Olmütz and retire into Bohemia (action of Dom-stadtl, 30th of June). He was rewarded with the grade of lieutenant-field-marshal and having again shown himself an active and daring commander in the campaign of Hochkirch, he was created a Freiherr in the Austrian nobility by Maria Theresa and in the peerage of the Holy Roman Empire by her husband the emperor Francis. Maria Theresa gave him, further, the grand cross of the order she had founded and an estate near Kuttenberg in Bohemia. He was placed in command of the Austrian contingent sent to join the Russians on the Oder. At Kunersdorf he turned defeat into a brilliant victory, and was promoted Feldzeugmeister and made commander-in-chief in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. In 1760 he destroyed a whole corps of Frederick's army under Fouqué at Landshut and stormed the important fortress of Glatz.