The first step to realising this plan required the overthrow of Bestuzhev, "upon whom," Frederick II wrote to his minister Axel von Mardefeld, "the fate of Prussia and my own house depends." But Bestuzhev succeeded, at last, in convincing the empress of Chétardie's dangerous intrigues, and on 6 June 1744, Chétardie received orders to quit Russia within twenty-four hours. Five weeks later Bestuzhev became grand chancellor (15 July 1744). Before the end of the year Elizabeth of Holstein also was expelled from Russia, and Bestuzhev remained supreme. European diplomacy at this time focused on the king of Prussia, whose apparently insatiable acquisitiveness disturbed all his neighbours. Bestuzhev's offer, communicated to the British government at the end of 1745, to attack Prussia if Great Britain would guarantee subsidies to the amount of some £6,000,000, carried no weight now that Austria and Prussia had started coming to terms. Then Bestuzhev turned to Austria, and on 22 May 1746 concluded an offensive and defensive alliance between the two powers manifestly directed against Prussia. In 1747, he also signed alliances with Denmark and the Porte. At the same time Bestuzhev resisted any rapprochement with France, and severely rebuked the court of Saxony for its intrigues with the French court in Versailles. The hour of Bestuzhev's triumph coincided with the peace congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (April to October 1748), which altered the whole situation of European politics and introduced fresh combinations: the breaking away of Prussia from France and a "rapprochement" between England and Prussia, with the inevitable corollary of an alliance between France and the enemies of Prussia. Bestuzhev's strong political prejudices at first prevented him from properly recognising this change. Passion had always been too large an ingredient in his diplomacy. His Anglomania also misled him. His enemies, headed by his elder brother Mikhail and the vice-chancellor Vorontsov, powerless while his diplomacy seemed faultless, quickly took advantage of his mistakes. When the Anglo-Prussian and Franco-Austrian alliances were formed in the first half of 1756, Vorontsov advocated the accession of Russia to the latter league, whereas Bestuzhev insisted on a treaty with Great Britain. But his influence had started to wane.