By October 19 the Duke of York was flattered with hopes of sailing at the head of a large French force. The force hung about Dunkirk for six months, doing nothing, and then came Culloden. The Duke was prejudiced against Sempil and his friend Balhaldie, and already there was a split in the party, Sempil on one side, the Earl Marischal on the other. George Kelly returned from Scotland, as an envoy to France, but Sempil would not trust him even with the names of the leading English Jacobites. The secrecy insisted on by Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, Lord Barrymore, the Duke of Beaufort, and the others was kept up by Sempil even against Prince Charles himself. This naturally irritated the Earl, and, what with Jacobite divisions in France, and French irresolution, Marischal had to play a tedious and ungrateful part. James expected him to join the Prince, but he, for his part, gave James very little hope of the success of the adventure.[21] James himself, with surprising mental detachment, admitted that the best plan for the English Jacobites was ‘to lie still,’ and make no attempt without the assistance from France which never came. The Earl disappears from the diplomatic scene, on which he had done no good, in the end of 1745. He obviously attempted to settle quietly in Russia with his brother. But the Empress ‘would not so much as allow Lord Marischal to stay in her country,’ wrote James to Charles, in April 1747. Ejected from the North, he sought ‘his old friend, the sun,’ in the South, at Treviso, and at Venice. The Prince, in August 1747, wrote from Paris imploring the Earl to join him, for the need of a trustworthy adviser was bitterly felt. The Earl replied with respect, but with Republican brevity, pleading his ‘broken health,’ and adding, ‘I did not retire from all affairs without a certainty how useless I was, and always must be.’ At Venice the Earl entertained a moody young exile, who tells a story illustrating at once his host’s knowledge of life, the strictness of his morality, and his freedom from a tendency to censure the young and enterprising.[22]