The defeat woke England to its danger; for it was certain that war in America would soon be followed by war in Europe itself. Newcastle and his fellow-ministers were still true in the main to Walpole's policy. They looked on a league with Prussia as indispensable to the formation of any sound alliance which could check France. "If you gain Prussia," wrote the veteran Lord Chancellor, Hardwicke, to Newcastle in 1748, "the Confederacy will be restored and made whole, and become a real strength; if you do not, it will continue lame and weak, and much in the power of France." Frederick however held cautiously aloof from any engagement. The league between Prussia and the Queen of Hungary, which England desired, Frederick knew in fact to be impossible. He knew that the Queen's passionate resolve to recover Silesia must end in a contest in which England must take one part or the other; and as yet, if the choice had to be made, Austria seemed likely to be the favoured ally. The traditional friendship of the Whigs for that power combined with the tendencies of George the Second to make an Austrian alliance more probable than a Prussian one. The advances of England to Frederick only served therefore to alienate Maria Theresa, whose one desire was to regain Silesia, and whose hatred and jealousy of the new Protestant power which had so suddenly risen into rivalry with her house for the supremacy of Germany blinded her to the older rivalry between her house and France. The two powers of the House of Bourbon were still bound by the Family Compact, and eager for allies in the strife with England which the struggles in India and America were bringing hourly nearer. It was as early as 1752 that by a startling change of policy Maria Theresa drew to their alliance. The jealousy which Russia entertained of the growth of a strong power in North Germany brought the Czarina Elizabeth to promise aid to the schemes of the Queen of Hungary; and in 1755 the league of the four powers and of Saxony was practically completed. So secret were these negotiations that they remained unknown to Henry Pelham and to his brother the Duke of Newcastle, who succeeded him on his death in 1754 as the head of the ministry. But they were detected from the first by the keen eye of Frederick of Prussia, who saw himself fronted by a line of foes that stretched from Paris to St. Petersburg. [Sidenote: Alliance with Prussia.]