Ludwig the Second, King of Bavaria. Clara Tschudi
moment was commented on and criticised in foreign and Bavarian newspapers. The only circumstance to explain and excuse his conduct was his youthful confidence that his kingdom would not be involved in the struggle.
On the 27th of May he opened the Chamber in person, expressing in the Speech from the Throne the hope, which he would not yet relinquish, that Germany might be spared a sister war. This was, however, on the eve of breaking out.
The sympathies of Bavaria were on the side of Austria, and on the 14th of June a military alliance was concluded with that country. The same day Prussia declared in Dresden, Hanover, and Cassel its ultimatum: Alliance or war! The Grand Duke of Hesse, who would not allow Prussia “to put a pistol to his breast,” was a Prussian prisoner of state five days later. King George of Hanover declared himself, “as a Christian, a monarch, and a Guelph,” to be against Prussia. But so rapid was the Prussian advance that the Hanoverian troops surrendered without conditions on the 29th of June, in spite of their victory at Langensalza.
On the 16th of June the war broke out in Bavaria. Austria had undertaken, in an agreement with this country, not to conclude peace on her own account. On the 25th of June Ludwig went for a day to the headquarters of the army, at Bamberg. He issued a proclamation to his troops, in which he said, “I do not bid you farewell; my thoughts will be with you,”
He left the command of the army to his father’s uncle, Field Marshal Prince Karl, then seventy-one years of age, who, together with Prince Alexander of Hesse, led the troops of Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden-Baden, and Hesse—the so-called reichs-armée, which consisted of nearly a hundred thousand men. In spite of his bravery and his military experience from the wars of Napoleon the Great, in which he had taken part, Prince Karl could do nothing against the dissensions of the allied troops, which hastened the enemy’s victory. The Prussians conquered the reichs-armée in a number of small battles.
Inactive, powerless, Ludwig was witness from his capital of the defeat of his faithful soldiers. His people were a vanquished people, and himself a vanquished King. Austria concluded peace with Prussia in Nikolsburg without paying any regard to the fate of her ally. Bavaria now also concluded peace. She did not lose any province, had only to renounce a strip of country hardly worth mentioning; but she was compelled to pay thirty millions of guldens for the expenses of the war. The Bavarian troops went each in their own direction. The war had lasted a month, but this month had been long enough to lay fields and woods bare, and to fill thousands of hearts with loss and sorrow.
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