The time was now come for a final and decisive blow; but how great a dread Marlborough still inspired in his enemies was shown by the shameful treachery with which they still thought it needful to bring about his fall. The intrigues of Harley paled before the subtler treason of Henry St. John. Young as he was, for he had hardly reached his thirty-second year, St. John had already shown his ability as Secretary of War under Marlborough himself, his brilliant rhetoric gave him a hold over the House of Commons which even the sense of his restlessness and recklessness failed to shake, while the vigour and eloquence of his writings infused a new colour and force into political literature. He was resolute for peace; but he pressed on the work of peace with an utter indifference to all but party ends. As Marlborough was his great obstacle, his aim was to drive him from his command; and earnestly as he admired the Duke's greatness, he hounded on a tribe of libellers who assailed even his personal courage. Meanwhile St. John was feeding Marlborough's hopes of reconciliation with the Tories, till he led him to acquiesce in his wife's dismissal, and to pledge himself to a co-operation with the Tory policy. It was the Duke's belief that a reconciliation with the Tories was effected that led him to sanction the despatch of troops which 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.]