Sir William Parkyns, a wealthy knight bred to the law, who had been conspicuous among the Tories in the days of the Exclusion Bill, was one of the most important members of the confederacy.  He bore a much fairer character than most of his accomplices; but in one respect he was more culpable than any of them.  For he had, in order to retain a lucrative office which he held in the Court of Chancery, sworn allegiance to the Prince against whose life he now conspired.

The design was imparted to Sir John Fenwick, celebrated on account of the cowardly insult which he had offered to the deceased Queen.  Fenwick, if his own assertion is to be trusted, was willing to join in an insurrection, but recoiled from the thought of assassination, and showed so much of what was in his mind as sufficed to make him an object of suspicion to his less scrupulous associates.  He kept their secret, however, as strictly as if he had wished them success.

It should seem that, at first, a natural feeling restrained the conspirators from calling their design by the proper name.  Even in their private consultations they did not as yet talk of killing the Prince of Orange.  They would try to seize him and to carry him alive into France.  If there were any resistance they might be forced to use their swords and pistols, and nobody could be answerable for what a thrust or a shot might do.  In the spring of 1695, the scheme of assassination, thus thinly veiled, was communicated to James, and his sanction was earnestly requested.  But week followed week; and no answer arrived from him.  He doubtless remained silent in the hope that his adherents would, after a short delay, venture to act on their own responsibility, and that he might thus have the advantage without the scandal of their crime.  They seem indeed to have so understood him.  He had not, they said, authorised the attempt; but he had not prohibited it; and, apprised as he was of their plan, the absence of prohibition was a sufficient warrant.  They therefore determined to strike; but before they could make the necessary arrangements William set out for Flanders; and the plot against his life was necessarily suspended till his return.

It was on the twelfth of May that the King left Kensington for Gravesend, where he proposed to embark for the Continent.  Three days before his departure the Parliament of Scotland had, after a recess of about two years, met again at Edinburgh.  Hamilton, who had, in the preceding session, sate on the throne and held the sceptre, was dead; and it was necessary to find a new Lord High Commissioner.  The person selected was John Hay, Marquess of Tweedale, Chancellor of the Realm, a man grown old in business, well informed, prudent, humane, blameless in private life, and, on the whole, as respectable as any Scottish lord who had been long and deeply concerned in the politics of those troubled times.