While the schemes of which these traces are to be found were in the air, Oates was studying and being expelled from Valladolid and St. Omers. There were in Flanders twenty-seven English Roman Catholic seminaries; five belonged to the Jesuits, and of these the establishment at St. Omers was the largest. It contained some thirty professed fathers and a hundred and twenty scholars.[111] Probably the best education in Europe was provided for the boys, and life there was comfortable; but to the unwilling the seminary became a prison. Pressure was put upon them to become priests, and communication with the outside world was carefully restricted. In a letter preserved from this time a Welsh boy, placed in the college by a wicked uncle, wrote secretly to his father begging piteously to redeem him from his great captivity.[112] Here, unless he made a prodigious guess, the most fortunate in history, Oates must have acquired hints dropped on the subject of the movement in England. It is not very profitable to speculate on the question exactly how much truth his vivid imagination concealed. Possibly a demonstration of force was suggested, organised by the great Catholic nobles and relying on support for the Duke of York to be gained in the navy. The fleet was at the moment being strengthened by the addition of several capital ships, and in the spring of 1678 was at full strength in sea service, with complete stores for six months.[113] If this were the case, if Arundel, Bellasis, and Stafford were implicated in the affair, but nothing definitely arranged so soon as the autumn of 1678, Oates’ diffident denunciation of these peers and the evident falsehoods which he, Bedloe, and Dugdale afterwards told in their statements regarding the Popish army, would be sufficiently accounted for. Or again, it is possible that the design included help from France in money, and perhaps the use of the English regiments employed in the French service. Many of their officers were Irishmen, and most Catholics.[114] For this it would be necessary to wait until peace was definitely concluded in order that both men and money might be liberated from the calls on them. Such a supposition would go some way to explain the “dark, suspicious letter” seized at Coleman’s house after his arrest, and bearing the date September 18, 1678. The writer, posting from Paris, informed Coleman that the peace had broken all their plans, for the French pretended that since its conclusion they had no need of his party. Yet there was hope from another quarter. Let an agent known to him be sent over. “To put our traffic afoot,” continues the letter, “it’s absolutely necessary that my friend come speedily over to you, to converse with you and our other friends, because his measures are so well taken in Italy, that we can’t miss to establish this commodity better from those parts than from any here at present, tho’ hereafter we may find means and helps from hence too. But it’s most certain,