So late as the latter end of October, Buckingham was resolved either to stay in the island if supplies came,--or, if they did not arrive, to put himself and the army into La Rochelle, and “run their fortune.”[78] This was his last resolution. At one time he had fully determined on leaving, for some of his soldiers were barefooted: others were sick of the siege, and had neither bread, meat, nor beer; but the Duc de Soubise had re-assured him, and, promising eight hundred men from La Rochelle, had encouraged Buckingham to decide on scaling the Fort St. Martin.[79] Meantime, Lord Holland did not appear: he was still at Plymouth. Contrary to the advice of the mariners, he had forced the whole fleet out of the Catwaters into Plymouth Sound; but it was driven back by the “cruellest storms” of twenty hours’ duration that had ever been known. Great damage was done: it was now necessary to stay to repair the crazy ships--the wind, as Lord Wilmot expressed it, “did so overblow.” The violence of the elements, and the knavery or indifference of man, seemed combined to keep back aid from the hungry soldiers in the Island of Rhé, and to ruin their general. Footnote 78: Ibid., No. 17. Footnote 79: Ibid., No. 27. Perhaps the best, or, as many persons think, the only excuse for Buckingham in the step he eventually took, is contained in a touching letter from Sir Allen Apsley to “Honest Nicholas.” Apsley, described in one of the letters from the camp as “very sick and melancholy,” dates his letter “from his sick and lately senseless bed on board the Nonsuch.”[80] “No man,” he begins by saying, “has he more cause more faithfully and more affectionately to love than Nicholas.” “His soul melts with tears to think that a State should send so many men, and no provision at all for them. But for Nicholas’s provision, through merchants, they had been miserably starved long since.” He then goes on to relate that “there were about five thousand seamen and four thousand landsmen in great distress for meat and drink. The army had already lost four thousand men, and all their commanders.” Footnote 80: State Papers. The letter is dated Nov. 1, 1627. Vol. lxxxiv., No. 1. A sort of responsive testimony to the Duke’s sufferings, and to the cruel neglect of the authorities at home, is conveyed in a letter from William, Earl of Exeter, to Buckingham. “What cannot be obtained by your courage,” writes the descendant of the great Burleigh, “must in the end be submitted to your patience.” If the Duke “sowed onions, he would be sure of onions; if he sowed men, they are in danger, for the most part, to come up ingrates.” “The indolence,” he adds, “which his highness has cause to resent, is as great infidelity as is that of commission.” Then he cites examples of great generals, who, without loss of honour, abandoned enterprizes which could not be accomplished; what the Duke had already done was, he said, “miraculous.”[81] Footnote 81: