The inward mails, as soon as they reached the port of arrival, were forwarded to London by express. From Harwich the letters for the Court, or State letters,[24] as they were now beginning to be called, were sent in advance of the ordinary mail, arrangements having been made at the Brill to put these letters into a special bag by themselves. From Falmouth, where no provision had been made for distinguishing one class of correspondence from another, the same express carried the whole. When, as was sometimes the case, packets of documents reached the port unenclosed with the rest of the letters, these were to be chained to the "grand mail"; and on the label was always to be inserted the number of passengers that had arrived by the boat, so that the postmasters along the line of road might know for how many persons they had to provide horses. Between Falmouth and London the mails when sent express travelled at the rate of about five miles an hour; and this speed appears to have been regularly maintained. Expresses to carry a single letter or a message, or to overtake the Lisbon mail, were continually passing to and fro, and these of course went faster. From Harwich the mails would sometimes reach London in eleven hours, being at the rate of six and a half miles an hour; but on this line of road there was so much irregularity that the time ordinarily occupied in the journey cannot be stated with certainty.[25]
[24] In 1706, Court or State letters, for at this time the terms were used indiscriminately, were defined to be letters directed to "the Queen, His Royal Highness the Prince, the Lord High Treasurer, and the two principal Secretarys of State and their clarks." Sometimes, but more rarely, they were called "Queen's letters."
[25] Here is one among many similar complaints addressed by the postmasters-general to the packet agent at Harwich: "We admire to find the two Bags with the States letters brought over by the Prince and Dispatch which arrived at Harwich June 21st at 7 in the morning should not be dispatcht till 10 the same day; as also at the comeing in of the Mayls, one of which being dispatcht at 12 arrived here at 11 at night, yet the other came not till 7 next morning."