At the same time other adversaries of the church were not neglected. Already in the spring of 1676 report was rife of papists laying in supplies of arms, and a gentleman of Hereford was charged by a number of witnesses with having declared that, had a recent account of the king’s sickness or death continued but one day longer, the Duke of York would have been proclaimed, and rather than allow the duke to want men he would have raised a troop of horse at his own expense. Orders were sent to the deputy lieutenant of the county to keep stricter watch over the Roman Catholics of whom such tales were told.[320] Repeated proclamations against the bold and open repair to the chapels of foreign ambassadors for the purpose of hearing mass and of the maintenance by them of English priests were doubtless caused by political need, but the same reason cannot account for private directions given by the king to Secretary Coventry to obtain information as to the extent and nature of the correspondence carried on with foreign parts by Edward Coleman. Instructions were issued for his letters to be intercepted, and some dozen were seized, but among them, unfortunately for all concerned, none of high importance. Although no find was made, the fact that search should have been thought necessary denotes in the government a real sense of the working underground.[321] Shortly before, Danby had caused the bishops to make returns of the proportion of Roman Catholics and other dissenters to conformists in their several dioceses, and that from the Bishop of Winchester is preserved. Dr. Morley had been advised that the motive was a fear of the result should the laws against conventicles be fully executed, as it was suspected that the number of those to be suppressed exceeded that of the suppressors. He was delighted to reply that the fear was groundless. Out of nearly 160,000 inhabitants in the diocese of Winchester 140,000 conformed to the Church of England, and of the remainder only 968 were classed as popish recusants; while the bishop’s pious belief that the odds in favour of his side would be equally great elsewhere was confirmed by an abstract of the returns for the whole province of Canterbury setting down the complete number of papists at 11,870. Other accounts gave the number of Catholics in London alone as 30,000, and their real strength in England remains unknown; but Danby had to admit to the French ambassador, when he spoke of the alarm caused by the Duke of York’s conduct, that they did not muster in all more than twelve thousand.[322] Though he did not lose sight of Catholic movements and provided himself with detailed accounts of their less known leaders in London,[323] the Lord Treasurer clearly entertained keener fears of danger from the other side.