The Man Behind the Iron Mask by John Noone Page A

established, and a plan was formed. From the very outset, it seems, the aim of the operation was not to kidnap William but to kill him.
    William went hunting in Richmond Park every Saturday. He left his palace in Kensington in the early morning and travelled by coach, with an escort of twenty-five guards, through Turnham Green to Chiswick. There he left his coach and took a boat across the Thames. His escort waited with the coach at the landing-stage and brought him back to Kensington by the same route when he returned in the late afternoon. The road between the landing-stage and Turnham Green was narrow and winding, with one section so deep in mud that the coach had difficulty getting through. Here, it was decided, the assault should be made. The commandos were to turn up individually at Turnham Green in the early afternoon and when William was seen to be on his way back across the river, they were to take up their positions on the road in four groups, ready to rush out simultaneously while the coach and guards were labouring through the quagmire. Any guards who survived the opening hail of bullets would be so encumbered by the morass of mud and fallen bodies that they could be despatched without difficulty at close quarters and so, as well as pistols and eight-ball muskets, the commandos were issued with stabbing swords. By February, everything was decided including the date of the operation.
    James, meanwhile, was camped at Calais with a French army ready to put to sea. There would be no insurrection, Berwick had told him, unless he was first prepared to invade England for its throne. England would be invaded, he had decided, but first that throne had to be vacated. Barclay had prepared fuel for bonfires on the cliffs of Kent and would light them when his mission was accomplished. It was for that signal that James was waiting.
    Among Barclay’s forty men, however, three were traitors, and unknown to the rest of the group or to each other they gave warning of the plan to the Earl of Portland, William’s friend and confidant. Portland was not prepared to take the first of the informers seriously, but when a second arrived and repeated what the first had said, he thought it wise to play safe. That day was Friday and the ambuscade was fixed for the next day. At Portland’s insistence, William cancelled his trip to Richmond and since the weather was cold and stormy gave that as his excuse. Barclay had no reason to suspect treachery and so simply postponed his plan to the following Saturday.
    In the course of the week that followed the third informer gave his warning and when Friday came around again, the second informer returned to reiterate his. This time he met William as well as Portland and was persuaded to give more details of the plan, including the names of the ringleaders. The following day William again cancelled his trip to Richmond. This time the reason was that he had some slight illness, but Barclay’s suspicions were aroused. When he discovered that the guards at the palace had been doubled and the troops in London put on the alert, he called off the plan and made his escape. Three of the leading conspirators were arrested before dawn and seventeen others before noon the next day. The gates of London were by that time closed and road-blocks had been set up. Within a few days all the conspirators except Barclay had been caught, and the local militia had been called to arms for fear of a French invasion.
    The failure of Barclay’s mission had far-reaching consequences for James, and they were all bad. William’s position was strengthened by a renewed wave of anti-Jacobite, anti-Catholic, anti-French feeling, and this at a time when his handling of affairs at home and abroad was beginning to prove effective. With the prospect of genuine political and economic stability ahead, even Jacobite sympathizers saw James as a divisive rather than an alternative force, too unpredictable and reactionary