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On 16 December 1740, Frederick invaded the rich Habsburg province of Silesia, still writing to Algarotti but now grimly focused on advancing Prussia at any cost, even his own death in battle. Beleaguered in Vienna, Maria Theresa reflected, ‘I found myself without money, without credit, without army, without experience and knowledge of my own.’ Her generals were placemen. ‘As for the state in which I found the army, I can’t begin to describe it,’ she said. ‘History hardly knows of a crowned head who started under circumstances more grievous.’

Maria Theresa faced the demolition of the dynasty, yet she rose to the challenge with brisk acumen, frequent rages, romantic theatricality and a light touch. She was also pregnant, giving birth in March 1741 to a son, Joseph, a male Habsburg at last. But her ministers were craven antiques: ‘Each one of them at first wanted to wait and see how things would develop.’ Faced with the resignation of one of these relics, she replied, ‘You’d much better stay and try to do what good you can,’ adding, ‘I shall see to it you do no harm.’ To another, she snapped, ‘Dear me, what mutterings and ugly faces … Stop making the Queen wretched and help her instead!’ Dealing with a baby, a war, a failed monarchy, she had to boost her needy husband Franz: ‘Dear sweetheart … I was uneasy like a little dog about you. Love me and forgive me that I don’t write more … Adieu, Little Mouse … I am your happy bride.’ Yet she loved being pregnant. ‘I wish I was in the sixth month of a new pregnancy,’ she said just after giving birth to Joseph.

Frederick erupted into Silesia, unleashing twenty years of war. At his first battle Mollwitz, he fled from the battlefield only to find he had won. But, as the greatest general between Eugen and Napoleon, he quickly learned the art of command, routing Maria Theresa’s ponderous generals. The war swiftly expanded as Louis XV, keen to demolish his Habsburg rivals, joined in the carve-up of the Habsburg monarchy. The elector of Bavaria, chief of house Wittelsbach, rival of the Habsburgs, won election as emperor and seized Prague. Hungary toyed with independence.

Maria Theresa held her nerve. She rushed to Budapest, dressed in mourning black, to declare that ‘The very existence of the kingdom of Hungary, of our own person, of our children and our crown are now at stake. Betrayed by all, we place our sole resource in the loyalty, arms and ancient valour of the Hungarians.’ They promised 40,000 troops and more taxes, promises she rewarded theatrically by brandishing her baby, introducing them to their future king Joseph. Through it all, she ruled her massive court with its mixture of rigid bewigged Spanish ceremonial and family informality, deploying her characteristic gaiety, loving the ‘carousels’ in which she and her ladies, dressed to the nines, rode through Vienna side-saddle firing pistols in the air, before dancing all afternoon then holding a masque ball dressed as a peasant girl.

After eight years, she realized that Frederick could not be destroyed by war. While never giving up on the reconquest of Silesia, she negotiated peace and won the election of her husband as emperor, then focused on reforming the monarchy.

Her marriage to Little Mouse was happy except for her jealousy of his actresses. Their rows over mistresses and his other demands ended with ‘our usual refuge, caresses and tears … I got into another temper’, and Franz walked out. ‘If he really leaves,’ she wrote, ‘I’ll either follow him or shut myself in a convent.’ She was usually pregnant during the Silesian wars, raising her sixteen children, between the Hofburg and her new summer palace, Schönbrunn: ‘I had to write this in four instalments,’ she wrote to a minister, ‘six children in the room with me and the emperor too: it reads like it.’ She micromanaged the children, writing long orders to their tutors: ‘I insist on their eating everything with no fault-finding, no picking and choosing.’ She treated her daughters as dynastic assets, bred just for marriage: ‘They must not be allowed to talk to doorkeepers and stokers, or give orders; they are born to obey …’ The children’s virtues were witheringly analysed: ‘Joana is pig-headed though clever enough; Joseph a good child but not so capable.’ Her favourite was the pretty and intelligent Mimi – Maria Christina – who remembered how ‘mixed with love was always a dose of mistrust and palpable coldness’. Power is a cruel mother.