1792 Imperial election 21 at Varennes-en-Argonne. On August 27, Leopold and Frederick William II of Prussia, king of Prussia, issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, calling for the release of Louis and Marie Antoinette and promising that, if his safety was threatened, and with the support of the other monarchs of Europe, they would go to war to restore him. The National Assembly interpreted the declaration as a declaration of war against the revolutionary government. On April 20, 1792, it declared war on Leopold's son Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, his successor as king of Hungary, king of Croatia and king of Bohemia. The
Archduke Maximilian Francis of Austria Frankfurt first his brother Leopold II in 1790, and in 1792 his nephew Francis II. At the same time as he became Elector of Cologne, Maximilian Francis was elected to the related Bishopric of Münster and held court in Bonn, as the Archbishop-Electors of Cologne had been forced to do since the late Middle Ages. A keen patron of music, Maximilian Francis maintained a court musical establishment in which Beethoven's father was a tenor, thus playing an important role in the son's early career as a member of the same musical body of which his grandfather, also named Ludwig van