should have strengthened his army in Flanders
on a fruitless expedition against Canada, though this left him too weak
to carry out a masterly plan which he had formed for a march into the
heart of France in the opening of 1711. He was unable even to risk a
battle or to do more than to pick up a few seaboard towns, and St. John
at once turned the small results of the campaign into an argument for
the conclusion of peace. Peace was indeed all but concluded. In defiance
of an article of the Grand Alliance which pledged its members not to
carry on separate negotiations with France, St. John, who now became
Lord Bolingbroke, pushed forward through the summer of 1711 a secret
accommodation between England and France. It was for this negotiation
that he had crippled Marlborough's campaign; and it was the discovery of
his perfidy which revealed to the Duke how utterly he had been betrayed,
and forced him at last to break with the Tory Minister.

[Sidenote: Treaty of Utrecht.]

He returned to England; and his efforts induced the House of Lords to
denounce the contemplated peace; but the support of the Commons and the
Queen, and the general hatred of the war among the people, enabled
Harley to ride down all resistance. At the opening of 1712 the Whig
majority in the House of Lords was swamped by the creation of twelve
Tory peers. Marlborough was dismissed from his command, charged with
peculation, and condemned as guilty by a vote of the House of Commons.
The Duke at once withdrew from England, and with his withdrawal all
opposition to the peace was at an end. His flight was in fact followed
by the conclusion of a Treaty at Utrecht between France, England, and
the Dutch; and the desertion of his allies forced even the Emperor at
last to make peace at Rastadt. By these treaties the original aim of the
war, that of preventing the possession of France and Spain at once by
the House of Bourbon, was silently abandoned. No precaution was in fact
taken against the dangers it involved to the balance of power, save by a
provision that the two crowns should never be united on a single head,
and by Philip's renunciation of all right of succession to the throne
of France. The principle on which the Treaties were based was in fact
that of the earlier Treaties of Partition. Spain was stripped of even
more than William had proposed to take from her. Philip retained Spain
and the Indies: but he ceded his possessions in Italy and the
Netherlands