dispute the payment. Besides, it would "soil the compliment" designed to His Majesty. "We must," he added, "take more care next time, for, had it been properly settled, the loss at most could not have exceeded £300." The actual arrangement for the coach had been made not through Palmer but through Bonnor, Palmer's lieutenant; and to him Walsingham now applied for further information. Bonnor's reply was a strange compound of candour and insolence. It was indeed not to be wondered at, he said, that his Lordship's indignation should be roused by the magnitude of the bill. Had the matter been left as originally settled under Mr. Palmer's orders, Wilson could never have made so monstrous a claim. By those orders he had been given to understand that, the coach being designed as a mere compliment to the King, not more than 1d. a mile would be allowed at the outside. And "so the undertaking stood 'till your Lordship ordered the circular letter to the horse-keepers respecting Sir George Baker's[63] being accommodated with the mail horses if he had occasion. Your Lordship will recollect that I remonstrated against it, and urged the impossibility of Wilson ever allowing his mail horses to be taken out of his stables for posting, and the regularity of the work destroyed, and the cattle drove along by people he knew nothing of; to which your Lordship was pleased to say that Wilson had no business to trouble his head about that; that, whatever his expenses were, he should be paid; and that no feelings of his about his horses or anything else should prevent the thing being done in the best possible style."... "Thinking as little in the delivery of the message as your Lordship did in sending it that such an advantage would be taken, I of course obeyed the directions, and it seems that this is the ground upon which the charge is made out as it is." [63] The King's physician.