On the 20th of September 1707 the Queen, attended by her Court, set out for Newmarket. In this visit there was nothing unusual, but it will serve as well as any other to demonstrate that the close connection which had once subsisted between the posts and the Crown was not yet completely severed. In attendance upon his royal mistress was Court-post. This office, to which appointment was made by patent, had until lately been held by Sir Thomas Dereham. Court-post's duty was to carry letters between the Court and the nearest stage or post-town, a duty deemed so arduous that his stipend had been recently doubled, and now stood at £365 a year. At Newmarket and at Windsor, indeed, he had no long distance to traverse, these towns being post-towns; but when the Court was in London or at Hampton his journey was longer. In London he had to carry the letters between Kensington or Whitehall and Lombard Street; and when at Hampton, Hampton not being a post-town, he had to carry them to and from Kingston. Besides Court-post there was now in the royal train the comptroller of the London sorting office, William Frankland, son of one of the postmasters-general. What Frankland's precise functions were we are not informed, but he was, in the language of the time, "in attendance on Her Majesty in the care of her letters." At Harwich, as soon as the mail arrived from Holland, the seals of the bags were to be broken, and the letters for the Court to be picked out and sent to Newmarket by express. This was, in effect, to establish a cross-post at a time when cross-posts did not exist. Moments, which would now be judged precious, appear to have been then of little account. Of the letters before they left Harwich the addresses were to be copied; and on arrival at Newmarket the express was to take them, not to the Palace, but to the Post Office, whither they were to be addressed under cover to Frankland. The Post Office once reached, how Frankland and Court-post were to adjust their respective duties is a point as obscure as it is, perhaps, unimportant. At the present day, when the palace possesses no postal facilities which are not enjoyed by the cottage, a single provision in the Statute-book is all that is left to remind us that at one time the posts were centred in the Sovereign. This provision, in exception to the practice which jealously excludes the Sovereign's name from all parts of an Act of Parliament except, indeed, the preamble, prescribes that the posts shall be settled, not as the Secretary of State or the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury may direct, but according to the directions of Her Majesty. To Her Majesty alone the law still leaves the supreme control over the posts, although it may well be believed that the ministers would claim to act on her behalf.[30]