After the departure of the princess from Ohlau the English government concentrated its attention upon the unfortunate father of the bride, for it was obvious that as long as the head of the family continued to advocate the marriage, all efforts to dissolve the betrothal would prove abortive. He was therefore made the object of countless intrigues on the part of England's staunch ally the emperor. A special commissioner, Count Praschma, then governor of Silesia, was sent by the imperial court to Ohlau. On the 14th of October he met Prince Sobiesky, but, though the interview lasted from three o'clock in the afternoon till a late hour of the night, the count did not succeed in bringing Sobiesky to more reasonable views. Sobiesky refused to give him then and there a definite answer, and begged him to come again the next day. "The matter," he said, "was of too vital importance for him to give a decisive answer that day." The result of the next day's interview was that Count Praschma set down in writing, at the prince's dictation, two separate minutes--the one addressed to the emperor personally, the other also nominally addressed to him, but specially prepared for the scrutiny of the English ambassador at Vienna. Did we not know that the courier who left for Vienna the same evening with these two documents was also the bearer of a third, a private letter from Praschma to the emperor, we should naturally wonder at the count's willingness to comply with this whim of Sobiesky--a proceeding which would have been fraught with some danger for the imperial commissioner. These documents are not without interest, for they give us a picture of the political intrigues forming such unstable links between the courts of St. James and Vienna. The limited space of this paper, however, compels us to confine ourselves to a brief résumé of their contents. In the first, addressed to the emperor personally, Prince Sobiesky lays great stress upon "the certainty that the marriage with the Pretender would prove to be a source of great political advantage to Austria"--an argument which, we must confess, was well adapted to find favor in the eyes of Charles VI., the last male descendant of a house in the history of which marriage had played such a momentous rôle. He pointed out to the emperor that "His British Majesty" would find in the annulment of the betrothal no help in suppressing rebellion in his kingdom; and, moreover, that it would be quite impossible for the king by any means to prevent the Pretender's marrying. "It is well known," he goes on to say, "that the English"--meaning the rebels--"wait only for the marriage of the Pretender, and not for an alliance with a foreign power." He begs his imperial kinsman not to shut his eyes to the obvious precariousness of King George's tenure of the throne, nor to the well-known fact that dire necessity alone had impelled the king to come to his aid by sending the English fleet to Naples.