by the game laws and the rights of the nobility, rose, after a dry
summer by which their misery had been greatly increased, to the number
of eighteen thousand, and sent one of their class to lay their
complaints before the elector, A.D. 1790. The unfortunate messenger
was instantly consigned to a madhouse, where he remained until 1809,
and the peasantry were dispersed by the military. A similar revolt of
the peasantry against the tyrannical nuns of Wormelen, in Westphalia,
merely deserves mention as being characteristic of the times. A revolt
of the peasantry, of equal unimportance, also took place in Buckeburg,
on account of the expulsion of three revolutionary priests, Froriep,
Meyer, and Rauschenbusch. In Breslau, a great emeute, which was put
down by means of artillery, was occasioned by the expulsion of a
tailor's apprentice, A.D. 1793.

In Austria, one Hebenstreit formed a conspiracy, which brought him to
the gallows, A.D. 1793. That formed by Martinowits, for the
establishment of the sovereignty of the people in Hungary and for the
expulsion of the magnates, was of a more dangerous character.
Martinowits was beheaded, A.D. 1793, with four of his associates.[17]
These attempts so greatly excited the apprehensions of the government
that the reaction, already begun on the death of Joseph II., was
brought at once to a climax; Thugut, the minister, established an
extremely active secret police and a system of surveillance, which
spread terror throughout Austria and was utterly uncalled for, no one,
with the exception of a few crack-brained individuals, being in the
slightest degree infected with the revolutionary mania.[18]

It may be recorded as a matter of curiosity that, during the
bloodstained year of 1793, the petty prince of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt
held, as though in the most undisturbed time of peace, a magnificent