In the first years of the reign of Queen Anne the relations of Robert Harley, lord treasurer Godolphin, and Marlborough, the captain–general, were so intimate that contemporaries referred to them as a triumvirate. In retrospect Harley emphasised that until Anne's accession he had had ‘no habits’ with Marlborough, but he had been in prolonged contact with Godolphin for some time. In 1705 he was to write of the ‘seven years’ he had enjoyed the lord treasurer's ‘friendship’ and ‘protection’ dating back, presumably, to around 1698. Harley and Godolphin had cooperated over the act of settlement in particular. On William's death Godolphin consulted the speaker on the queen's first speech to parliament. He asked Harley ‘to make a draft of it yourself, and appoint us to come to your house tomorrow night to see it’. ‘I agree entirely’, he added, ‘the best way will be to go on… as if no occasion of interruption had happened’. The principal feeling is one of continuity from the country cabals of the last years of the reign of William III, and this has an important bearing on the development of ministerial press policy. The triumvirate did not suddenly spring to life on the accession of Queen Anne; it was inherited from the era of her predecessor.

From the outset, then, Harley was in a position to direct affairs relating to the press. On 28 March 1702 the queen issued a proclamation ‘for restraining the spreading [of] false news, and printing and publishing of irreligious and seditious papers and libels’.