After 1575 Scottish Catholics provided educational facilities abroad for their sons. The initial impetus and finance had come from Mary Queen of Scots (1542–87) while she was imprisoned in England. Over the course of fifty years colleges were established in Douai, Rome, Paris and Madrid. In addition Scots had taken possession of three Benedictine monasteries – known as Schottenklöster (Scottish cloisters) – in southern Germany, which by the end of the seventeenth century housed an additional college. Their objectives were to give the highest level of education possible to the Scottish Catholic elite and to ordain young men to the priesthood for service in Scotland. They managed to overcome enormous difficulties to achieve a degree of success in both these aims. In the first century of their existence the colleges enrolled more than a thousand students, of whom a quarter were ordained. Of the others, a majority returned home but a significant number remained on the continent often taking up military service with foreign states. As a result the colleges built up extensive networks of supporters at home and abroad consisting mainly of alumni and their families. The longest lasting of the networks developed around the three great families of Gordon, Maxwell and Douglas. The application of the Penal Laws against Catholics in Scotland gave the networks an additional cohesion which strengthened mutual support in the overall aim of the promotion of Catholicism.