the
hour and the place of the slaughter. Forty or fifty men, it was thought,
would be sufficient. Those troopers of James's guard who had already
followed Barclay across the Channel made up nearly half that number.
James had himself seen some of these men before their departure from
Saint Germains, had given them money for their journey, had told them by
what name each of them was to pass in England, had commanded them to
act as they should be directed by Barclay, and had informed them where
Barclay was to be found and by what tokens he was to be known. [658]
They were ordered to depart in small parties, and to assign different
reasons for going. Some were ill; some were weary of the service;
Cassels, one of the most noisy and profane among them, announced that,
since he could not get military promotion, he should enter at the Scotch
college and study for a learned profession. Under such pretexts about
twenty picked men left the palace of James, made their way by Romney
Marsh to London, and found their captain walking in the dim lamplight of
the Piazza with the handkerchief hanging from his pocket. One of these
men was Ambrose Rockwood, who held the rank of Brigadier, and who had a
high reputation for courage and honour; another was Major John Bernardi,
an adventurer of Genoese extraction, whose name has derived a melancholy
celebrity from a punishment so strangely prolonged that it at length
shocked a generation which could not remember his crime. [659]

It was in these adventurers from France that Barclay placed his chief
trust. In a moment of elation he once called them his Janissaries, and
expressed a hope that they would get him the George and Garter. But
twenty more assassins at least were wanted. The conspirators probably
expected valuable help from Sir John Friend, who had received a
Colonel's commission signed by James, and had been most active in
enlisting men and providing arms against the day when the French should
appear on the coast of Kent. The design was imparted to him; but he
thought it so rash, and so likely to bring reproach and disaster on the
good cause, that he would lend no assistance to his friends, though he
kept their secret religiously. [660] Charnock undertook to find eight
brave and trusty fellows. He communicated the design to Porter, not with
Barclay's entire approbation; for Barclay appears to have thought that
a tavern brawler, who had recently been in prison for swaggering drunk
about