'No fair judge,' Mr. Carlyle[147] tells us, can blame the 'young magnanimous King' for seizing this 'flaming opportunity.' The point is fortunately not one which a biographer of Pitt is called upon to discuss, except to note that hero-worship makes bad history. For our purpose it is sufficient to say that Frederick did avail himself of the new juncture of affairs. Charles had died on October 20; on December 6 the announcement was officially made in Berlin that the King had resolved to march a body of troops into Silesia; on December 13 these had passed the frontier, not as enemies of the Queen of Hungary or Silesia, it was declared, but as protective friends of Silesia and her Majesty's rights there. All this was preceded and accompanied by the strangest diplomacy that the world had seen, but which does not concern this abstract. Thus begins the first period of the Continental war. Britain, like Prussia, was bound by treaty to maintain the Pragmatic Sanction which assured the Austrian dominions to Maria Theresa. Our statesmen at this moment were engaged in a pastime of more immediate interest and excitement, for they were hunting Walpole to death; the exhaustion of the quarry was evident; the end could not be far off. But even then the nature of the aggression and the appeal of a young and beautiful Queen exercised the usual influence on the chivalrous sympathies of the nation. Maria Theresa could, moreover, appeal to treaty rights. So that Walpole found himself reluctantly forced into a new war while the former was still undecided and incomplete. He agreed to renew the pledges of England to maintain that Pragmatic Sanction which secured the succession to the daughter of Charles VI.; he agreed, moreover, to an immediate subsidy of 300,000_l._, and to sending a force of 12,000 men. Meanwhile Marshal Schwerin had defeated the Austrians at Molwitz at the very moment that the House of Commons was debating these proposals.