In order to meet the demand for milled and unclipped coin to be given in exchange for the clipped coin to be brought in, premiums were offered of five per cent. on good milled money, and of threepence per pound on all plate that should be brought in to be melted into the new coins. The 4th of May, 1696, was fixed as the last day for receiving the clipped money in payment of taxes; and early in February furnaces were at work melting down the old coin into ingots, which were sent to the Tower in readiness, and the coining began. Ten of these furnaces were erected in a garden behind the Treasury; yet, in spite of every endeavour to prevent inconvenience, the Jacobites managed to excite great alarm in the minds of the people. There was a widespread panic that there would be grave personal losses and wrongs, and that all receipts of money would be stopped, and that there would be general distress. The malcontents attacked Montague and the other ministers in the House; the merchants demanded indemnification for the rise which guineas had taken, namely, from twenty shillings and sixpence to thirty shillings, in consequence of the scarcity of the silver coinage; for a guinea now, instead of purchasing twenty shillings' worth of their goods, would purchase one-third more; so that their stocks were reduced one-third in value till the silver coinage was again plentiful. Parliament, to remove this cause of complaint, inserted a clause in the Bill, offering a premium on plate, fixing the price of a guinea at two-and-twenty shillings. Still, however, people imagined that guineas would be scarce, and so gold would rise, and hoarded them up, which made them scarce. But Government worked manfully at the recoining. Mints were set up at York, Bristol, Exeter, and Chester as well as in London, and in less than twelve months the coinage was produced with such success that the English currency, which had been the worst, was now the best in Europe.

The Bill for regulating the trials for high treason was again brought in, and, being still steadily refused by the Lords unless with their clause for granting them the privilege of trying any of their order by the whole House of Peers instead of by the Court of the Lord High Steward, the Commons now gave way, allowed the clause, and the Bill passed. It was ordered to come into force on the 25th of March next, 1696.

The year 1696 opened with a great Jacobite plot. James had tried the effect of declarations proposing to protect the liberties of the subject and the rights of the Established Church, and nobody believed him, and with good reason. Seeing, therefore, that empty pretences availed nothing, he thought seriously of invasion, and of something worse—of preparing his way by the assassination of William. During the winter of 1695-6 Louis fell into his schemes. In 1694 two emissaries, Crosley and Parker, had been sent over from St. Germains to London to excite the Jacobites to insurrection; but they had been discovered and imprisoned. Parker contrived to escape out of the Tower, but Crosley was examined; but, nothing being positively proved against him, he was liberated on bail. It was now resolved to send over fresh and more important agents—one of these no less a person than the Duke of Berwick, James's son, and Sir George Barclay, a Scottish refugee.

The fact was that there were two parts of the scheme. As in the conspiracy of Grey and Raleigh in the time of James I., there was "the main plot" and "the bye plot," so there was here a general scheme for an invasion, and a particular scheme for the assassination of the king. This assassination was to come off first, and an army and transports were to be ready on the French coast, to take advantage of the consternation occasioned by the murder. The management of the general plot was confided to Berwick, and of the murder plot to Barclay. Berwick must be supposed to have been well aware of the assassination scheme from the first, for both James and Louis were, and the whole movements of the army and navy were dependent on it. But if Berwick did not know of it at first, he was made acquainted with it in London, as we shall see; but it was the policy of both Louis, James, and Berwick, to avoid all appearance of a knowledge which would have covered them with infamy;—this was to fall on the lesser tools of their diabolical scheme, and they were to reap the benefit of it.

A mode of communication between the Court of St. Germains and the Jacobites in England had long been established through a man named Hunt, who was a noted smuggler. This man had a house about half a mile from the Sussex coast, on Romney Marsh. The whole country round was a boggy and dreary waste, and therefore, having scarcely an inhabitant, was admirably adapted to the smuggling in of French goods and French plots. There Barclay landed in January and proceeded to London. He was followed in a few days by the Duke of Berwick, and very soon by about twenty coadjutors, some of whom were troopers of James's guard, amongst them one named Cassels, another brigadier Ambrose Rookwood, one of a family which had been in almost every plot since the Gunpowder Plot, and a Major John Bernardi, a man of Italian origin.

CONSPIRATORS LANDING AT ROMNEY MARSH. (See p. [484].)

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James saw and instructed many of these men himself before they left St. Germains, and furnished them with funds. He had given Barclay eight hundred pounds to pay expenses and engage assistants, which Barclay complained of as a miserable and insufficient sum. These men were now informed that they must put themselves under the orders of Barclay, and they would easily discover him at evening walking in the piazza of Covent Garden, and might recognise him by his white handkerchief hanging from his pocket. Meanwhile, Barclay had begun to open communication with the most determined Jacobites. The first of these were Charnock—who had originally been a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, but had apostatised, become a violent papistical agitator, and finally an officer in James's army—and Sir William Parkyns, a lawyer and officer of the Court of Chancery, for whilst plotting against the king, he had sworn fidelity to him, and was receiving his pay. These men most gladly united with Barclay, for they had been engaged in the very same design for some time. They assured him that there was no chance of effecting an invasion without preceding it by dispatching William. But to do this they wanted first an authority from James, and to be assured that it would be followed up. Hereupon Barclay showed them his commission from James.

As Barclay's myrmidons arrived from France his hopes grew high; he called them his Janissaries, and said he trusted they would win a Star and Garter for him. He wanted forty for his purposes, and these men made up at once half the number. Fresh desperadoes rapidly joined the band, until it was evident that the number of conspirators was getting far too numerous, and far too indiscriminate in character for safety. It was necessary to use haste, and Barclay tells us he was constantly studying how and where best to accomplish their object. He set two of his gang to haunt the neighbourhood of the Palace, and to learn what they could of the king's movements. They went to Kensington and to every place which William frequented, to find out the most suitable spot and opportunity.