Again, however, and as before, at a moment when the seldom very bright sky of William's popularity threatened to become seriously overcast, the sympathies of his people were revived by his enemies. The most formidable of the conspiracies against the King's life, that known _par excellence_ as the Assassination Plot, was set on foot, or rather revived, as the renewal of a project which had been frustrated several months earlier by the departure of William for the Continent--in the autumn of 1695; and by the spring of the following year was ripe for execution. Its leading spirit was one Sir George Barclay, a Scotchman, who came over from St. Germains with a special commission from James, which if it did not actually contemplate, or at least expressly sanction assassination, was, to say the least, of a dangerously elastic character. Among those whom he enlisted in the conspiracy were one Charnock, an ex-fellow of Magdalen College, who had been a tool of James II. in his high-handed violation of the statutes and liberties of that society, Sir John Fenwick, a man of good family and connections and a noted Jacobite agitator, and Sir William Parkyns, a Tory. The plan of the conspirators was to lie in wait for William at a ferry on the Thames, which he was in the habit of crossing every Saturday on his way from Kensington to hunt in Richmond Park. To overpower the royal guards it was necessary to raise the number of the conspirators to forty, among whom it was tolerably certain that there would be at least one traitor. As a matter of fact there were three. The secret was communicated by one of these to Portland; the King, at first disposed to make light of it, consented at last to abandon his hunting expedition on the Saturday fixed for the assassination, and again on the same day in the following week; and the principal conspirators were arrested. Barclay escaped to France, and the Duke of Berwick, who had at the same time been vainly attempting to prepare the way for a French invasion by a Jacobite insurrection, also fled the country. William, in a speech from the throne, made a formal announcement to the two Houses of the detection of the conspiracy and his providential escape; and shortly afterwards several of the conspirators, including Charnock and Parkyns, were tried and executed.