magnificent fetes, masquerades, and pastoral festivals given by him, as if in a time of the deepest peace, at Hohenheim, to have trusted more to his connection with England, by his marriage with the princess royal, Matilda,[10] with Russia, and with Austria (the emperor Paul, Catherine's successor, having married the princess Maria of Wurtemberg, and the emperor Francis II., her sister Elisabeth), than to the constitution, which he afterward annihilated. The weakness displayed by the empire and the increasing disunion between Austria and Prussia encouraged the French to further insolence. Not satisfied with garrisoning every fortification on the left bank of the Rhine, they boldly attacked, starved to submission, and razed to the ground, during peace time, the once impregnable fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, on the right bank of the Rhine, opposite Coblentz.[11] Not content with laying the Netherlands and Holland completely waste, they compelled the Hanse towns to grant them a loan of eighteen million livres. Lubeck refused, but Hamburg and Bremen, more nearly threatened and hopeless of aid from Prussia, were constrained to satisfy the demands of the French brigands. In the Netherlands, the German faction once more rose in open insurrection; in 1798, the young men, infuriated by the conscription and by their enrolment into French regiments, flew to arms, and torrents of blood were shed in the struggle, in which they were unaided by their German brethren, before they were again reduced to submission. The English also landed at Ostend, but for the sole purpose of destroying the sluices of the canal at Bruges. The French divided the beautiful Rhenish provinces, yielded to them almost without a blow by Germany, into four departments: First, Roer, capital Aix-la-Chapelle; besides Cologne and Cleves. Secondly, Donnersberg, capital Mayence; besides Spires and Zweibrucken. Thirdly, Saar, capital Treves. Fourthly, Rhine and Moselle, capital Coblentz; besides Bonn. Each department was subdivided into cantons, each canton into communes. The department was governed by a perfect, the canton by a sub-prefect, the commune by a mayor. All distinction of rank, nobility, and all feudal rights were abolished. Each individual was a citizen, free and equal. All ecclesiastical establishments were abandoned to plunder, the churches alone excepted, they being still granted as places of worship to believers, notwithstanding the contempt and ridicule into which the clergy had fallen. The monasteries were closed. The peasantry, more particularly in Treves, nevertheless, still manifested great attachment to Popery. Guilds and corporations were also abolished. The introduction of the ancient German oral law formerly in use throughout the empire, the institution of trial by jury, which, to the disgrace of Germany, the Rhenish princes, after the lapse of a thousand years, learned from their Gallic foe, was a great and signal benefit.