It must have been peculiarly aggravating, amidst the anxieties of the Duchess and Lady Denbigh, to find that all the Duke’s perplexities, privations, and sufferings had not in the slightest degree mitigated his unpopularity at home. It must have been still more irritating to know that, whilst the troops before St. Martin’s Fort were in a state of starvation, there was the greatest disorder and carelessness in sending the supplies. “There is,” Lord Wilmot wrote to Conway, “neither commissary of victuals, nor any one to give account of arms. They find one thousand muskets, but no pikes nor armour.” Meantime the Duke’s army were in want of clothes, and mostly went barefoot.[75] Then Lord Holland, when at last on board the fleet, complained that there was no one officer or creature who could tell what there was aboard the provision ships, five of which were Dutch, and might steal away at any moment. There seems to have been neither patriotism at home, in regard to this expedition, nor honour in allies, nor even common honesty in the commanders of hired vessels. Footnote 75: Letter from Lord Wilmot to Secretary Conway, State Papers, No. 45. For several days the wind continued contrary to Lord Holland’s departure from Plymouth. The twenty-sixth of October had arrived, and the Duke, as it appeared from private letters, had "stayed it out till the last bit of bread:"--such is the expression of John Ashburnham, a devoted partisan of Buckingham’s: fears were even entertained that the fleet and army were lost; then “such a rotten, miserable fleet set out to sea as no man ever saw;” “our enemies,” Ashburnham adds, “seeing it, may scoff at our nation.” Lord Holland, who had been expected by the Duke on the fifteenth, was still waiting for a fair wind at Plymouth on the twenty-seventh,[76] employing himself there in trying to expedite recruits, and to send out a Scottish regiment. “In his responsibility” (as he wrote to the King) "he had provided two or three hundred live sheep, to go out for the sick men, who die for want of fresh meat;"--“three thousand pairs of stockings for the men in the trenches; physic also, and an apothecary.” Despair, however, possessed all minds; and a report now began to disquiet even the sanguine, stating that the French were landing an army on the Island of Rhé. The report was true; one fatal mistake had been made by Buckingham--he had left the fort of St. Pré unmolested. Footnote 76: State Papers, No. 3 and 8.