George II. then, we contend, putting his private life apart, which we must judge by the German standard of those days, was not a bad King under the conditions of his time and of his throne. He was perhaps the best of the Georges; better than George I. or George IV., better as a King than George III., though inferior no doubt in the domestic virtues. All things considered, it is wonderful that he was as good as he was, and he scarcely deserves the thoughtless opprobrium which he has incurred. CHAPTER IX. And now it is necessary to say a word of Continental affairs. A life of Pitt should concern itself with Pitt alone, or with the persons and events immediately relating to him. But as during this period of his life foreign policy was all in all, and Britain seemed a mere anxious appendage to the Continent, it is necessary to give a succinct sketch of the familiar but complicated sequence of events in Europe which occurred at this time, and which inspired almost all the debates in which Pitt took part. Walpole, as we have seen, had declared war against Spain in 1739, and the not very glorious course of those operations does not call for record. But the year 1740 marked a new and critical epoch. Death in those few months was busy lopping off the crowned heads of Europe, as if to clear the scene for two great figures. On February 6 died Pope Clement XII. On March 31 died the shrewd but brutal boor Frederick William I., and at the age of twenty-eight his son Frederick II. reigned in his stead. His accession was to unveil a mystery; and where mankind had hitherto seen a fiddling dilettante, contemptuous of his countrymen and craving for all that was French, to reveal the direct ancestor of German unity, the most practical and tenacious of conquerors. On October 20 the Emperor Charles VI., the figure-head for which we had fought in the War of the Succession, and, a week afterwards, Anne the Empress of Russia passed away. Rarely has the sickle of Eternity gathered so pompous a harvest. Between February and November it had garnered the Holy Roman Emperor, the Holy Roman Pontiff, the sovereign of Russia, and the sovereign of Prussia. Of these the death at Vienna was by far the most momentous. For Charles left behind him no son, but a young daughter of twenty-three, about to be a mother, whose succession he had attempted to secure by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1718, ratified and recognised by solemn international instruments. On the morning of his death she was promptly proclaimed sovereign of her father's dominions; but her treasury was empty and her ministers paralysed. Bavaria at once protested. Behind Bavaria stood Frederick armed to the teeth, eager to let slip the dogs of war. Every one saw his preparations; no one could tell at whom they were aimed.