Of this correspondence nearly two hundred letters have been preserved. The insight which they give into the minds and intentions of their writers is invaluable. They throw a strong light upon the undercurrent of political movement at a time when politics were perhaps more complicated and their undercurrents more potent than at any time before or after. From them might be detailed the tenor of the designs undertaken by a great religious party during a period of fierce struggle. Such reconstruction from a fragmentary correspondence must always be difficult. In the case of the Coleman correspondence the difficulty would be great. That the letters can be read at all is due to the fact that the key to the cipher in which they are written was found with them. Not only were they written in an arbitrary cipher, not to be elucidated without the key, but in such guarded and metaphorical language that the meaning can often be caught only by chance or conjecture.[54] Parables can easily be understood after the events to the arrangements for which they refer; but when no effect follows, the drift is more obscure. When before the Spanish Armada an English agent writes from Spain that bales of wool are being stored in large quantities, muniments of war may be read between the lines. When Jacobites give notice to their exiled king that Mr. Jackson need only appear in Westminster Hall to recover his estate, or that a cargo of the right sort, now in great demand, must be shipped at once, their meaning is transparent. But to the obscure terms used by Coleman and his friends after events afford a slighter clue. No notion discussed by them was ever tested as a practicable scheme in action. Neither success nor exposure sheds light whereby to read their letters. Whatever is in them must be painfully read as intention alone, and as intention abandoned. The general ideas however are plain, and an admirable exposition by Coleman himself saves the necessity of piecing them together from small fragments.