The capture of Bouchain was the last service the Duke of Marlborough was allowed to render to his country. Political intrigues had long been directed against him, and when he returned to England in the autumn he was coldly received by Queen Anne, insulted in the House of Lords, prosecuted for peculation by the House of Commons, and deprived of all his offices. Nay, more, to such a height did party pamphleteers rouse popular indignation against him, that the General “who never fought a battle that he did not gain nor sat down before a fortress he did not take” was forced to go to the Continent to escape from the jeers of the London mob. Even before his fall, the Ministers in power had begun secret negotiations with Louis, by which England was to desert her Allies and make a separate peace with France; and when the Duke of Ormond, his successor in command of the British forces in Flanders, joined the army in the spring of 1712, he understood that he was on no account to cross swords with de Villars. During several months the British troops were in a very miserable position; for being still, at least in name, part of the allied army, to the supreme command of which Eugene had now succeeded, they followed its operations, but in a novel and humiliating capacity: they were no longer chief actors, but spectators--soldiers whom their Government would not allow to fight; and when Ormond announced to them that the suspension of hostilities between England and France was signed, the news filled them with profound grief. In July they turned their backs upon their former comrades and returned to Ghent and Bruges, after a gloomy march past Douai, Tournai, Bouchain, Lille, and Oudenarde, places which they had helped to take, but to which the Dutch garrisons now contemptuously refused them admittance. After twenty years of almost uninterrupted fighting, every army requires careful handling at the beginning of peace, but more especially one sore at the ill-treatment of its beloved Chief, sorer still at the loss of its honour by its desertion of its comrades in the time of need. Ormond did not manage his men well, and neglected their commissariat; the garrison of Ghent lost their discipline, listened to the words of agitators, and formed a mad scheme to rise; loot and burn the town, and then disperse over the Netherlands. The plot was discovered, but two or three thousand men seized part of the town, where they barricaded themselves, holding out until field-guns were brought against them. Soon after this mutiny was put down the troops were withdrawn to England, but the Royal Irish and another regiment were left to garrison the town until political questions regarding it had been settled. Their detention at Ghent gave them the opportunity to see Marlborough once more, for when he passed through the town at the end of 1712 the whole garrison was on foot to do him honour.