Lord John Drummond suggested to James’s secretary, Edgar, that the Earl should supersede Balhaldie, ‘who had been obliged to fly the country in danger of being taken up for a Fifty pound note.’ Lord John’s advice was excellent. The Earl, and he alone, was the right man to deal with the party in Scotland, who could trust his sense, zeal, and honour. But James, far away in Rome, could never settle these distant and embroiled affairs. He went on trusting Balhaldie, who was also accepted by the party in England. Had James cashiered Balhaldie and instated the Earl, matters would have been managed with discretion and confidence. The Earl was determined not to beguile France into an endeavour based on the phantom hosts of Balhaldie’s imagination. Had he been minister, it is highly probable that nothing would have been done at all, and that Prince Charles would never have left Italy. For Balhaldie continued to represent James in France, and Balhaldie it was, with Sempil, who induced Louis XV. to adopt the Jacobite cause, and brought the Prince to France in 1744. While his father lived, Charles never returned to Rome. On December 23, 1743, James sent to the Duke of Ormonde, an elderly amorist at Avignon,[15] his commissions as General of an expedition to England and as Regent till the Prince should join. The Earl received a similar commission as General of a diversion, ‘with some small assistance,’ to be made in Scotland. The Earl was at Dunkirk, eager to sail for Scotland, by March 7, 1744, and Charles was somewhere, _incognito_, in the neighbourhood. But the Earl, as he wrote to d’Argenson, had neither definite orders nor money enough; in short, as usual, everything was rendered futile by French shilly-shallying and by the accustomed tempest. D’Alembert and others assert that Charles asked the Earl to set forth with him alone in a sailing-boat, to which the Earl replied that, if he went, it would be to dissuade the Scottish from joining a Prince so brave but so ill-supported. It is certain that d’Argenson told Marshal Saxe that the Prince ought to retire to a villa of the Bishop of Soissons, with the Earl for his _chaperon_. The Earl was still anxious for an expedition in force, but d’Argenson distrusted his information on all points. Charles declined to go and skulk at the Bishop’s, and wrote that ‘if he knew his presence unaided would be useful in England he would cross in an open boat.’[16]