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THE
HISTORY
OF THE
POST OFFICE

FROM ITS ESTABLISHMENT DOWN TO
1836
By

HERBERT JOYCE, C.B.

OF THE POST OFFICE

LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1893

CONTENTS

ERRATA

Page 324, sixth line from bottom, for 1713 read 1703.
" 339, first line, for 1892 read 1802.

HISTORY OF THE POST OFFICE

CHAPTER I

EARLY POSTS
1533-1609

The early history of the posts is involved in some obscurity. What little is known on the subject is touched upon in the first Annual Report of the Post Office, the Report for 1854; but the historical summary there given is, as it purports to be, a summary only. The object of the following pages is nothing more than to fill up the gaps and to supply some particulars for which, though not perhaps without interest, an official report would be no fitting place. The origin and progress of an institution which has so interwoven itself with the social life of the people as to have become one of the most remarkable developments of modern civilisation can hardly, we think, be considered a subject unworthy of study.

It seems almost certain that until the reign of Henry the Eighth, or perhaps a little earlier, no regular system of posts existed in England, and that then and for some considerable time afterwards the few posts that were established were for the exclusive use of the Sovereign. "Sir," writes Sir Brian Tuke to Thomas Cromwell in 1533, "it may like you to understonde the Kinges Grace hathe no moo ordinary postes, ne of many days hathe had, but bitwene London and Calais ... and sens October last, the postes northewarde.... For, Sir, ye knowe well that, except the hakney horses bitwene Gravesende and Dovour, there is no suche usual conveyance in post for men in this realme as is in the accustumed places of France and other parties." Sir Brian Tuke held the appointment of Master of the Posts, and he had received the King's commands to set up posts "in al places most expedient."

Before Henry's reign the only letters of which any record exists, letters to or from the Court and on affairs of State, were sent by couriers employed for the particular occasion. These couriers, styled "Nuncii" and "Cursores," appear to have answered to the Queen's messengers of our own time, and, as is evident from records still extant and dating back to the reign of Henry the Third, must have formed an important branch of the royal establishment.

To establish posts and to control them when established was not all or nearly all that Brian Tuke had to do. He had also to see, even where no posts existed, that the royal couriers were not kept waiting for horses; and this probably was his original function. The horses were provided by the townships, and the townships were kept up to their duty by the Master of the Posts. In some cases, indeed, special provision appears to have been made. At Leicester,[1] for instance, the members of the Corporation bound themselves under penalty to keep four post-horses in constant readiness for their Sovereign's use; but this can hardly have been a common practice. Where horses were not provided voluntarily, the magistrates and constables had orders to seize them wherever they could be found.

The close connection between the posts and the Sovereign continued long after the reign of Henry the Eighth. In 1572 Thomas Randolph, Master of the posts to Queen Elizabeth, rendered an account of the charges to which he had been put in the execution of his trust during the preceding five years; and in this account, which is given in considerable detail, not a single post is mentioned without some qualification identifying it with the person of the Sovereign—a post daily serving Her Majesty, a post for Her Majesty's service and affairs, a post during the time of Her Majesty's progress, a post for the conveyance of Her Majesty's letters and those of her Council. As late as 1621 all the posts of the kingdom, which even then were only four in number, started from the Court. I. "The Courte to Barwicke," i.e. the post to Scotland. II. "The Courte to Beaumoris," i.e. the post to Ireland. III. "The Courte to Dover," i.e. the post to the Continent. IV. "The Courte to Plymouth," i.e. the post to the Royal Dockyard.

The setting up of a post for a particular purpose and letting it drop as soon as the purpose had been answered was another peculiarity of these early times. The post to Plymouth, ordained in 1621 to be one of the standing posts of the kingdom, had been dropped since 1611, having then been declared to be unnecessary except in time of war. Even the post to Ireland had at one time been dropped and was not revived until 1598. In the same year a second post to Ireland, Irish affairs being then considered to require "oftner dispatches and more expedition," was set up by way of Bristol, and this in its turn disappeared. Indeed, it would probably not be too much to say that at the beginning of the seventeenth century no post set up in England during a war had lasted longer than the war itself. This practice of dropping a post as soon as it had served its purpose, a practice which must almost necessarily have existed from the earliest times, would seem to explain Brian Tuke's meaning when, after stating that in 1533 except those he mentioned "the Kinges Grace hathe no moo ordinary postes," he adds, "ne of many days hathe had."

For the regulation of the posts the earliest instructions of which we have any record were issued by Queen Elizabeth. Every "post" was to keep and have constantly ready two horses at least, with suitable "furniture." He was to have at least two bags of leather well lined with baize or cotton, and a horn to blow "as oft as he meets company" or four times in every mile. He was, after receiving a packet, to start within fifteen minutes, and to run in summer at the rate of seven miles an hour and in winter at the rate of five. The address of the packet and the day and the hour at which he received it were to be carefully entered in a book to be kept for the purpose. But the packets which were thus to be treated were only such as should be on the Queen's affairs or the affairs of State. "All others" are dismissed in a word. These, the instructions state, are "to passe as by-letters." To pass as by-letters probably means that the letters were to go when and as best they might, but that the post was not to go for the purpose of taking them. This view is confirmed by an order of the subsequent reign, that "no pacquets or letters," except such as were on the King's affairs, should "binde any poste to ride therewith in post." But be the meaning what it may, the expression seems to shew that even in the reign of Elizabeth letters other than State letters had begun to be sent to the post-houses, and that such letters, if barely recognised, were yet not excluded.

But the conveyance of the Sovereign's letters was not the only purpose which the posts as originally established were designed to serve. Another and hardly less important purpose was that there should be stationed and in constant readiness, at given distances along the chief roads of the kingdom, a relay of horses by which persons travelling on their Sovereign's concerns, even though not the bearers of letters, might pass between one part of the country and another. Of this second purpose a few words implanted in the English language, such as post-horse, post-boy, and travelling-post, are all that we have now left to remind us. But long after the public had been admitted to the free use of the post, the two objects of providing for letters and providing for travellers continued to be treated as inseparable. Hence the history of the posts during the seventeenth century and far into the eighteenth becomes complicated with the history of travelling.[2]

Indeed, there can be little doubt that it was as a means of travelling and not as a means of correspondence that the post first came to be used by others than those employed on affairs of State. Writing, during the sixteenth century, was an accomplishment possessed by comparatively few, whereas any one might have occasion to travel; and the resources of travelling, so far as these partook of an organised system, were in the hands of the Sovereign. Wherever there were posts, it was at the Sovereign's charge and for the Sovereign's use that horses were maintained; and where there were no posts, it was only for the use of the Sovereign that the townships were under obligation to supply horses. The natural consequence followed. People pretended to be travelling on their Sovereign's affairs who were really travelling on affairs of their own, and so procured the use of horses which would otherwise have been denied them. The horses, moreover, were overridden and overloaded, and the persons by whom they were hired not rarely forgot to pay for them.[3]

No sooner had James the First come to the throne than he issued a proclamation having for its object to check these abuses. Only those were to be deemed to be travelling on public affairs who held a special commission signed by one or more of the principal officers of State. No horse was to be ridden, in summer, above seven miles an hour, and in winter above six; nor yet, without the knowledge and consent of the owner, beyond the next stage. The load, besides the rider, was not to exceed thirty pounds in weight. Persons riding with special commission were to pay for each horse 2-1/2d. a mile, besides the guide's groats, and "others riding poste with horse and guide about their private businesses" were to make their own terms. In all cases payment was to be made in advance. The proclamation contained another and most important provision, the effects of which were felt far into the next century. This was that, wherever posts existed, those who had the horsing of the posts were also to have the exclusive letting of horses to travellers. If the post-houses could not supply horses enough, the local constables with the assistance of the magistrates were to make good the deficiency.

The proclamation of 1603 was soon followed by another, prohibiting all persons not being duly authorised by the Master of the Posts from being concerned in the collecting, carrying, or delivering of letters. The effect, therefore, of the two proclamations together was that, except by private hand, no letter and, except along the bye-roads where posts did not exist, no traveller could pass between one part of the kingdom and another without coming under the observation of the Government. It has been suggested that the State monopoly of letters had its origin in a desire on the part of the Sovereign to reserve to himself the revenue which the letters brought; but in 1609, when the monopoly was created, the posts were maintained at a clear loss to the crown of £3400 a year, and this loss, as matters then stood, the erection of every fresh post would serve to increase. However it may have been in after years, the original object of the monopoly, the object avowed indeed and proclaimed, was that the State might possess the means of detecting and defeating conspiracies against itself. A system such as this object implies is absolutely abhorrent to our present notions; and yet it is a fact beyond all question that the posts in their infancy were regarded and largely employed as an instrument of police. It was not until the reign of William the Third that they began to assume their present shape of a mere channel for the transmission of letters.

But we are anticipating. In 1609 the cloud which obscures the earlier history of the posts begins to break, and from that year it is possible to present a tolerably connected narrative of their progress.

CHAPTER II

THE BATTLE OF THE PATENTS
1609-1635

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the established posts were only four in number,—the post to Scotland, the post to Ireland, the post to Plymouth, and the post to Dover; and of these the most important by far, because the most used, was the last, the post through the county of Kent. It was through this county that the high-road to the Continent lay, and, while commercial relations as between one town and another within the kingdom were yet a thing of the future, the foreign trade of the country had already reached very considerable proportions. The persecutions in France and the Low Countries had driven a large number of foreigners to London, and here the Flemings introduced the manufacture of wool into cloth. In this commodity alone the exports from England to the Netherlands in the time of Philip the Second amounted to five millions of crowns annually.[4] In education no less than manufactures the Flemings were far in advance of our own countrymen. There was scarcely a peasant among them that could not both read and write. While, therefore, the other three posts of the kingdom were still being little used except for letters on affairs of State, the post to the Continent had already become matter of public concern.

This post had long been jealously watched, the foreign merchants in London claiming to send their letters by their own agents, and the Crown insisting that they should be sent only through the established channel. It was an old feud, extending far back into the sixteenth century. In 1591 a proclamation on the subject had been issued. This, in respect to the post through the county of Kent, established that State monopoly of letters which was not made general until eighteen years afterwards. It was to the protection of the same post that the proclamation of 1603 had been directed, the proclamation reserving to those who horsed the posts the exclusive right of letting horses to travellers. But these measures had been of little avail. The foreign merchants still employed their own agents to carry their letters, and these agents, instead of resorting to the post-houses, still procured horses where and as best they could.

Once more recourse was had to a proclamation, which differed little from others that had gone before except in one important particular. This was the open avowal that among the chief cares of the State it had been and continued to be by no means the least "to meete with the dangerous and secret intelligences of ill-affected persons, both at home and abroad, by the overgreat liberty taken both in writing and riding in poste, specially in and through our countie of Kent." The magistrates were enjoined to take care that horses were procured at the post-houses alone. No letters were to be sent except through the post, and notice to this effect was to be served upon all the merchants of the city of London, "both strangers and others." Unauthorised persons suspected of having letters upon them were, before entering or leaving the kingdom, to be searched. And any packets or letters found to be illicitly conveyed were to be sent up to the Privy Council, and the bearers of them to be apprehended and kept in safe custody pending the Council's orders.

At this time the office of Master of the Posts was held by Lord Stanhope of Harrington, and under Lord Stanhope, to superintend the foreign post, was employed a foreigner of the name of De Quester. This man, with the assistance of his son, appears to have discharged his duties efficiently. He made communication with the Continent both cheaper and more expeditious. His promptitude in forwarding the public despatches had attracted the attention of his Sovereign. In 1619, in recognition of these services, the King created the control of the foreign post into a separate appointment, independent of Lord Stanhope, and conferred it upon De Quester and his son, under the title of "Postmaster of England for Foreign parts out of the King's Dominions."

It is possible that De Quester's appointment, though ostensibly a reward for good service, was dictated in part by policy. But if designed to appease the foreign merchants, it signally failed of its object. The truth seems to be that they were animated by feelings of profound distrust. Many years later, when De Quester had retired, the English merchants, in a petition to the King, protested against the choice of a successor being left to the "strangers." This, they said, would be to their own great prejudice. Even the letters patent by which that successor was appointed give as a reason for not letting the strangers have a post of their own that thus the secrets of the realm would be disclosed to foreign nations. Such being the feelings on one side, it would be strange indeed if they had not also existed on the other.

De Quester's appointment, while displeasing to the foreign merchants, gave dire offence to Lord Stanhope. The letters patent by which this peer held his office had expressly declared that not only the internal posts of the kingdom were to be under his direction, but also those "beyond the seas within the King's dominions." This expression, repeated from former patents, applied, no doubt, to Calais. And yet, could it in reason be contended that his rights were not being infringed if the post through which all letters between London and the Continent passed were transferred to other hands? Except for the practice of granting offices in remainder, Stanhope's death at this time would have settled the difficulty. As a matter of fact, however, the difficulty had only begun. By a deed granted thirteen years before, his son and successor in the title succeeded also to the office of Master of the Posts, and it soon became evident that the younger Stanhope had no intention, without a struggle, of letting the grant to himself be whittled away by a subsequent grant to another. The Council, not composed of laymen alone, but comprising among its members Coventry, soon to become Lord Keeper, and Heath, the Solicitor-General, advised the King that "both grants might well stand together, being of distinct places." Stanhope rejoined that his was "an ancient office tyme out of minde," and that by prescription it carried with it the control of letters passing between England and the Continent as well as others. Again the Council reported against his claim. In support of it, they said, no patent or proofs had been adduced before them more ancient than the time of Henry the Eighth.

Stanhope, who remained unconvinced, now proceeded to assert his rights, or what he conceived to be his rights, with remarkable vigour. He caused De Quester to be molested in the discharge of his duties; he placarded the city of London, cautioning all persons against sending letters except by his own agents; he instituted proceedings in the Court of King's Bench; and he even stirred up the foreign merchants to make common cause with himself against the intruder.

The probable explanation of Stanhope's conduct is that De Quester's appointment touched him in that most sensitive part, the pocket. His salary as Master of the Posts was £66:13:4 a year, and this he would of course receive in any case; but on letters to the Continent there were certain fees to be paid, a fee of 8d. on each letter to or from Amsterdam, and a like sum between London and Antwerp or London and Hamburgh, and these, as seems to have been admitted in the suit at law, were the motive cause.

In vain the King proclaimed against Stanhope's proceedings. The Privy Council met to consider the question as between him and De Quester, and separated without coming to a conclusion. Four more meetings were held, and with an equally unsatisfactory result. Clearly there was a conflict of opinion at the Council Board. Meanwhile the decisions as regards the merchants were marked by extraordinary vacillation. First, the Merchant Adventurers were "to have a post of their owne choice" to the city of Hamburgh and town of Delph, "where the staples of cloth are now fetched or to such other place or places whither the same shall happen to be removed"; then they were summoned before the Council to shew cause why they also should not send their letters by De Quester; then the concession was not only confirmed in the case of the Merchant Adventurers, but extended to all other "Companies of Merchants"; and then in the case of these other companies the concession was withdrawn, but only, in the course of a few weeks, to be restored. Only few restrictions were imposed. No one carrying the merchants' letters was to "keepe any publick office," to "hange up any Tables," or to "weare any Badge"; nor was he to be employed until his name had been submitted to the Secretary of State for approval. It was also provided that in times of war or danger the Secretary of State, if he required it, was to be "made acquainted" with the letters and despatches which the messenger carried.

The final decision of the Council, which left the merchants in possession of a post of their own, practically superseded De Quester's appointment, and this drew forth an indignant protest from Sir John Coke. The two Secretaries of State, of whom Coke was one, had been specially charged with the protection of De Quester's office, and the decision had been arrived at in their absence. Meanwhile a broker, of the name of Billingsley, was carrying the merchants' letters, and the same man was being employed by Stanhope. Coke's indignation knew no bounds. "I confess," he said, "it troubleth me to see the audacity of men in these times, and that Billingsley, a broker by trade, should dare to attempt thus often to question the King's service, and to derive that power of foreign letters unto merchants which in all states is a branch of regal authority." Can any place in Christendom be named where merchants are allowed to send their letters except through the authorised post? It is true that, as an act of grace, the Merchant Adventurers here have been suffered to send and receive their letters by private hand; but such letters have been only to and from their own mart towns and concerning their private business. That this man of theirs should be suffered to carry any letters he please—letters from merchants in general, and even from ambassadors, is a thing that has never been heard of nor durst any attempt it before. "Indeed the merchants' purse hath swayed very much in other matters in former times, but I never heard that it encroached upon the King's prerogative until now." A pretty account will those who are charged with the peace of the realm be able to give in their places "of that which passeth by letters in or out of the land if every man may convey letters, under the covers of merchants', to whom and what place he pleaseth." Coke went so far as to suggest that advantage had been taken of a small attendance at the Council Table to extort the concession from the King upon wrong or imperfect information. Surely His Majesty cannot have been informed "how unfit a time this is to give liberty to every man to write and send what he list."

Nor did Coke's indignation confine itself to words, for it is impossible not to conclude that he was at the bottom of the high-handed proceeding that followed. Stanhope had gained his suit at law; yet the Council, far from revoking De Quester's patent, granted him an order consigning Billingsley to prison. It was not until he had been there for three months that Parliament, which had recently passed a vote against arbitrary imprisonments, petitioned the King for his release.

Of the final issue of the contest nothing is known. But it seems probable that the foreign merchants were not deterred by the treatment which Billingsley had received from keeping up a post of their own. Other and more serious matters were beginning to occupy the attention of the Court, and it may well be believed that irregularities which had been challenged before might now be allowed to pass unnoticed. Be that as it may, in 1632 De Quester, who had lost his son, and had become old and infirm, associated with himself in the execution of his office two men named Frizell and Witherings, and to these persons he shortly afterwards assigned his patent. Frizell appears to have been little more than a sleeping partner; but Witherings soon established a high character for ability and powers of organisation. The foreign post had not been under his charge for more than three years before the King commissioned him to examine also into the inland posts, and to put them on another and better footing.

CHAPTER III

THOMAS WITHERINGS
1635—1644

Armed with the King's commission, Witherings lost no time in applying himself to his task. And, indeed, the state of things which he found existing afforded ample scope for his energies. Except to Plymouth and through the county of Kent, posts existed rather in name than in reality. Nominally there was a post to Scotland, and this post James had busied himself in improving, in anticipation of his progress to London; but since then it had languished and died, or nearly died, of inanition. Between the kingdoms of England and Scotland there had, up to the date of Witherings's commission, as expressed in the commission itself, been no certain or constant intercourse. The only remaining post, the post to Ireland, was in an equally forlorn condition.

This decadence can only be attributed to two causes, the paucity of travellers and the necessities of the King. Had travellers been numerous, the posts would have been kept up for the sake of the profit to be derived from the letting of horses. In the absence of travellers, the keepers of the post-houses were dependent upon their established wages, and these had long remained unpaid. As far back as 1628 a petition on the subject had been presented to the Council. The "99 poore men," as the petitioners styled themselves, had received no wages for nearly seven years; the arrears then due to them amounted to £22,626; some of them were already in prison, and many more were threatened with arrest. In 1635, as a consequence, doubtless, of their necessitous condition, they had ceased to keep horses, and letters were being carried on foot. In this manner a distance of only sixteen to eighteen miles was accomplished in a day, and to obtain from Scotland or from Ireland a reply to a letter written in London took "full two monthes."

Witherings was not long in producing his plan. Within the city of London was to be appointed an office or counting-house for the receipt and despatch of letters, and thence were to be established trunk lines of post to the principal towns of the kingdom, with corresponding branch posts, either foot posts or horse posts, according to distance, to the smaller towns. The branch posts were to be so fitted to the main posts that there was to be no waiting on the part of either; and these latter were to start and return at stated times, and to run night and day so as to cover 120 miles in twenty-four hours. From London to Edinburgh the course of post which had been full two months was to be only six days; and to Holyhead or Plymouth and back the distance was to be accomplished in the same time. Even Witherings himself appears to have been carried away by the brilliancy of the prospect. "Anie fight at sea," he says, "anie distress of His Majestie's ships (which God forbid), anie wrong offered by anie other nation to anie of ye coastes of England or anie of His Majestie's forts ... the newes will come sooner than thought."

An example has been left us of the process to be followed. The letters for Scotland were to be put into a "portmantle" directed to Edinburgh, into which were also to be put small bags containing letters for towns on the same line of road. At Cambridge, for instance, as soon as the Portmantle arrived, the bag for that town was to be taken out, and a foot-post, "with a known badge of His Majestie's arms," was upon the market days to go to all towns within six, eight or ten miles, and there deliver the letters, at the same time receiving any that might be handed to him. These he was to bring back to Cambridge in time for the return-post from Scotland. The return was to be on a particular day, and at a particular hour, and the letters were to be ready without fail, "upon the verie instant comeing back of the portmantle." The same process was to be adopted at Huntingdon and all other towns on the road.

It was an essential part of Witherings's plan that the posts should be not only regular and certain but also self-supporting. During the earlier part of the century they had been maintained at a cost to the Crown of £3400 a year, and this was a burden which the Crown was no longer in a position to bear. That they should be made to pay their own way was, therefore, an indispensable condition. But how was this to be accomplished? Witherings's sagacity left him at no loss for a reply. He discerned that to carry a letter is to perform a service for which a payment may fairly be demanded in return; and that the demand would meet with a ready response must have been plain to him from what he saw going on in the west of England. In 1633, or two years before he produced his plan, the Mayor and Aldermen of Barnstaple had set up a post between their town and Exeter. This post was to leave Barnstaple every Tuesday at 7 o'clock in the morning, and to be in Exeter early on the following day, in time to catch the King's post on its way from Plymouth to London. The King's post was maintained at the expense of the King; but for the local service, as a means of defraying the cost, the Corporation imposed a small charge, a charge of 6d. for a single letter and of 8d. for a double one. Other towns in Devonshire had adopted a similar course. That Witherings was aware of the existence of these posts is evident from the special allusion that is made to them in the Proclamation which he prevailed upon the King to issue;[5] and it was their success, probably, which suggested his own undertaking. Concluding that what private enterprise was effecting on a small scale the State would be able to effect on a large one, he proposed—and the proposal received the royal sanction—that for every letter sent by post a "port" or charge for carriage should be levied after the following rates:—

This was the introduction of postage. The object of the exceptional rate in the case of Ireland was to avoid interference with a Proclamation which had been recently issued by the Lord Deputy and Council there.

Henceforth the posts were to be equally open to all; all would be at liberty to use them; all would be welcome. Important as this provision was, it followed as a natural consequence from the imposition of postage. The carriage of the subjects' letters was now to be a matter of purchase, and, unless the purchasers were sufficiently numerous, the posts would not be self-supporting. The custom of the public, therefore, was a necessity of their very existence.

In other respects the regulations remained much as they had been, except that now there would be the means of enforcing them. Every postmaster was to have ready in his stable one or two horses, according as Witherings might direct, the charge to be for one horse 2-1/2d. a mile and for two horses 5d. This 5d., however, was to include the cost of a guide who was always to accompany the horses when two were taken. On the day the post was expected, the horses were not to be let out on any pretext whatever, this being the first indication on record of letters enjoying precedence over travellers. And finally, with certain specified exceptions, no letters were to be carried or delivered in any part where posts should be established except by such persons as Witherings might appoint. The letters excepted were those sent by a friend, by a particular messenger employed for the particular occasion, and by common known carrier. On the common carrier, however, restrictions were imposed. He was to confine himself to his ordinary known journey, and was not, for the sake of collecting or delivering letters, to lag behind or outstrip his cart or horse by more than eight hours.

The reason for this last exception is not far to seek. The established posts were few in number, and even where they existed in name they had fallen into disuse. The common carriers had thus become the chief carriers of letters, and Witherings, in the furtherance of his project, was anxious to disarm their opposition. This he had already attempted to effect by argument; and now, as a practical step in the same direction, he procured their exemption from the State monopoly. But what may have appeared and was probably intended to appear as a valuable concession was really no concession at all. The carrier took eight days to go 120 miles. By the posts the same distance was to be accomplished in a day and a night. The carrier's charge for a letter from Cambridge to London, a distance of about sixty miles, was 2d. A postage of 2d., according to Witherings's plan, was to a carry a letter for eighty miles. If the posts were to be both faster and cheaper than the common known carrier, it might safely be predicted that as a carrier of letters he could not long survive.

In October 1635 Witherings, having completed the necessary arrangements, proceeded to carry his plan into effect. The results he anticipated from it, as shewn in a memorandum which he delivered to the Secretary of State, were promotion of trade and intercourse and the cultivation of better relations with Scotland and Ireland. That the posts might one day be more than self-supporting, that they would become a source of revenue, does not appear to have entered into his calculations; or, if it did, his silence on the point would seem to shew that, as compared with the other advantages, he deemed it too insignificant to mention.

It was probably about this time that the practice of writing "Haste, post, haste" on the outside of letters began to be discontinued. The term "post," as here used, meant nothing more than the carrier or bearer of the letter; and an injunction to make the best speed he could, properly as it might be given to a messenger who had a particular letter to carry, would be altogether out of place if addressed to a general letter-carrier who was bound by his instructions not to exceed a given distance within a given time. "For thy life, for thy life" had sometimes been added, as in the case of Protector Somerset's letter to Lord Dacre. "To our very good Lord, the Lord Dacre, Warden of the West Marches, in haste; haste, post, haste, for thy life, for thy life, for thy life";[6] and it seems probable, if the barbarity of the punishments in those days is considered, that this was no empty threat. It was "on payn of lyfe" that, according to Sir Brian Tuke, all townships were to have horses ready for their Sovereign's service. Among the Ashburnham manuscripts is a letter from Sir Edward Nicholas to Sir John Hippisley, Lieutenant of Dover Castle, written in 1627 or eight years before the introduction of postage. This letter is endorsed by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and the cover is inscribed "for His Majesty's special affairs; hast, hast, hast, post, hast, hast, hast, hast, with all possible speede." The absence of any threat in this instance may of course have been due to the individual character of the writer, but it is more agreeable to think of it as a sign of the advance of civilisation.

In 1637, Lord Stanhope having surrendered his patent, Witherings was appointed in his room, and thus became centred in one person the offices of postmaster for inland and for foreign letters. In the same year a letter office, the erection of which had formed an important part of Witherings's plan, was opened in the city of London, and nothing remained to hinder him from carrying his project into full effect. But, fair as everything promised, hardly three years had elapsed before Witherings met with the fate which has overtaken so many of his distinguished successors. In 1640, on a charge of divers abuses and misdemeanours in the execution of his office, this eminent man was deprived of his appointment. Whether the charge was well or ill founded we have no means of judging. Only the fact has come down to us that after this miserable fashion ended the career of one who had the sagacity to project and the energy to carry out a system, the main features of which endure to the present day.

Among those who had lent money to the King was Philip Burlamachi, a naturalised British subject, and one of the principal merchants of the city of London. He had advanced, on the security of the sugar duties, no less than £52,000, an immense sum in those days; and it was probably this fact rather than any special qualification on his part that pointed him out as Witherings's successor. Be that as it may, into Burlamachi's hands the office of Master of the Posts was sequestered, subject to the condition that he was to discharge the duties under the control of the Secretary of State. The sequestration was announced to the public by means of placards fixed up on the old Exchange, and Witherings lost no time in fixing up counter-placards by way of protest.

And now began an unseemly contention which, arising ostensibly out of the rights of individuals, went far to bring the two Houses of Parliament into collision. In 1642, after struggling for the best part of two years to maintain his position, Witherings assigned his patent to the Earl of Warwick, and, under the influence of this peer, both Houses declared the sequestration to be illegal and void. Meanwhile Burlamachi had fallen into the power of one in whose hands he was the merest puppet. This was Edmund Prideaux, afterwards one of the Commissioners of the Great Seal and Attorney-General under the Commonwealth. At his instigation Burlamachi still kept possession of the letter office. In vain the Lords ordered him to give it up to Lord Warwick, and summoned him before them to explain his contumacy. It was true, he replied, that the office was still kept at his house, but this house and his servants had been hired by Mr. Prideaux, and it was he that disposed of the letters.

Incensed at such contempt of their orders, the Lords authorised Warwick to seize the mails. After one or two half-hearted attempts to carry this authority into effect, arrangements were made for a more strenuous effort. On the 19th of December two of Warwick's agents lay in wait at Barnet and there surprised the mail as it came from Chester. Seizing the letters and the man that carried them, they made the best of their way towards London, but had not proceeded further than the foot of the hill beyond Highgate when they were themselves surprised by five troopers "on great horses with pistols," who barred the road, and, in the name of the House of Commons, captured the captors.

Meanwhile a still more exciting scene was enacting before Warwick's office near the Royal Exchange. There two of his men kept watch for the mail from Plymouth, and, as it passed on its way to Burlamachi's house hard by, they dashed into the street and seized the letters. Their success was but for the moment. Before they could regain the office, Prideaux had swooped down upon them at the head of some half-dozen adherents, and with his own hands had torn the letters away. "An order of the House of Commons," cried one of the bystanders, "ought to be obeyed before an order of the House of Lords."

On these occurrences being reported to the Lords, Burlamachi and all others who had been concerned in them, Prideaux alone excepted, were ordered to prison. Among these was the man who had been captured at Barnet and afterwards rescued, one Hickes by name; and this fellow proved to be Prideaux's own servant. On the part of that wily politician one looks in vain for any effort to procure Burlamachi's release, or even for the slightest indication of concern that he had been arrested; but the arrest of his own servant, the servant of a member of the House of Commons, excited his keenest resentment. This, in Prideaux's view, was a clear breach of privilege, and the House was pleased to agree with him. No sooner, therefore, had Hickes been imprisoned by the Lords than he was released by the Commons, and no sooner had he been released by the Commons than the Lords ordered him to be imprisoned again.

Matters having come to this pass, the two Houses held a conference. The result might easily have been foreseen. The Lords yielded to the Commons, and Burlamachi, on rendering an account which had long been called for, was released from custody together with the others who had been imprisoned at the same time. Concerning the next two years little is known; but it seems probable that Burlamachi, who in his petition praying for release had pleaded old age and infirmities, did not long survive the indignity to which he had been exposed. At all events, in 1644, either by death or resignation, the office of Master of the Posts had become vacant, and, as Burlamachi's successor, the House of Commons appointed Prideaux.

Thus ended the battle of the patents, which had raged more or less fiercely for more than twenty years. It was long indeed before Lords Warwick and Stanhope ceased urging their claims, Warwick as Witherings's assignee, and Stanhope on the allegation that at the Council Table the Lord Keeper Coventry had cajoled him into surrendering his patent; but after Prideaux's appointment there was no farther appeal to force.

CHAPTER IV

EDMUND PRIDEAUX AND CLEMENT OXENBRIDGE
1644—1660

Hardly had Prideaux assumed the direction of the letter office before he gave public notice that there would be a weekly conveyance of letters into all parts of the kingdom. There is reason to doubt, however, whether under his rule as much or nearly as much as this was accomplished. Next to Norwich, Yarmouth was then, as it is now, the chief town in the eastern counties; and yet it is certain that a post to Yarmouth was not established until after Prideaux's rule had ceased; and more than fifty years later we find his successors lamenting that, while Lincolnshire generally was ill provided with posts, there were several towns in that county which had no post at all.

But to whatever extent Prideaux's professions exceeded his performance, it is beyond question that he spared no effort to extend the posts, and that he is justly entitled to the credit, not indeed of improving upon Witherings's scheme, but of carrying that scheme into more general effect. Despite his exertions, however, he failed to keep pace with the wants of the time. Indeed, what facilities for intercourse had been given already seem to have created a demand for more. In 1649 the Common Council of the city of London, not content with a post only once a week to Scotland, established a post of their own. Along the whole line of road between London and Edinburgh they appointed their own postmasters and settled their own postage, and the same plan they proceeded to adopt in other parts. Prideaux, who to his office of Master of the Posts had recently added that of Attorney-General, was highly incensed. Only a few years before, the State monopoly of letters, when the State was represented by the Crown, had been the object of his fiercest denunciation, and now this same monopoly was a cherished possession to be defended at all hazards. First he remonstrated. Then he threatened. And neither threats nor remonstrances having any effect upon the city authorities, he reported their proceedings to the Council of State, and the Council of State reported them to Parliament. Parliament was in no mood for concession. The city posts were promptly suppressed, and more than thirty years elapsed before private enterprise again embarked upon a similar venture.

The report which Prideaux made to the Council of State had another result, which probably he little contemplated. In that report he had taken credit to himself that, although the charges of management had risen to £7000 a year, or about twice the amount they had been in Witherings's time, he had relieved the State from the whole of this burden. In other words, the posts had become self-supporting, but, so far as appeared from the report, were nothing more. The House of Commons was not satisfied. Accordingly the Council was instructed to examine and report whether the terms on which the letter office was held were the best that could be obtained. The investigation was soon made. Heretofore, in consideration of his defraying the charges, Prideaux had been allowed to receive the postage and make what he could out of it. For the future, besides defraying the charges, he was to pay to the State a fixed rent of £5000 a year. This was the introduction of the system of farming, a system which, as regards the posts generally, continued to nearly the end of the seventeenth and, as regards the by-posts, beyond the middle of the eighteenth century.

In 1653 Prideaux ceased to be Master of the Posts. Two years before he had been elected a member of the Council of State, and shortly after his election, and probably as a consequence of it, the arrangements for communicating with the army had reached a high state of perfection. Between the Council and the forces in Scotland messengers, we are told, were passing almost every hour. But, useful as he may have made himself, Prideaux seems to have been altogether wanting in those qualities which are calculated to inspire confidence. At the Treaty of Uxbridge, where he was one of the commissioners, even his own colleagues had regarded him as a spy. This feeling of distrust may possibly explain how it happened that, after the expulsion of the Long Parliament, he was forced to content himself with his appointment as Attorney-General. The Council of State, as then reconstructed, did not include him among its members, and one of the first acts of the new Council was to relieve him from the responsibilities of the letter office. Grasping as he was, it is impossible to suppose that this can have been done by his own wish, for the appointment of Master of the Posts, though weighted with a rent of £5000 a year, was still a very lucrative one. His successor paid a rent of double that amount, and is reputed to have derived from his farm an enormous profit.

After Prideaux's death in August 1659, it transpired that his interest in the letter office had not ceased when he ceased to administer it. What was the interest he retained we do not know; but the matter seems to have been considered sufficiently serious to call for parliamentary inquiry. In the following February the House of Commons ordered "that the whole business concerning the Post Office, and what has been received by Mr. Prideaux, late Attorney-General, out of the same, and what account hath been made thereof he referred to a committee to examine, and to state matter of fact and report it to the Parliament and their opinion therein." To this order, however, no return appears to have been made. It is probable that at the Restoration the committee had not concluded its labours.

Oldmixon speaks of Prideaux as "a very fierce republican, who got a great estate by his zeal against the Church and Churchmen"; and it is certain that to that estate his zeal for the Post Office brought him no inconsiderable addition. Of the destination of a part of his wealth we are not left uninformed. Towards the close of the century a judge, before whose ferocity even Prideaux's pales, set out on a circuit, the infamy of which will endure to the end of time. Arrived in Somersetshire, he found residing at Ford Abbey, in the neighbourhood of Axminster, an inoffensive country squire, son of the former Master of the Posts, and named after him, Edmund Prideaux. From this gentleman, apparently because he was his father's son, and for no better reason, Jeffreys under threat of the gallows extorted £15,000, and he bought with the money an estate "to which," Lord Macaulay tells us, "the people gave the name of Aceldama, from that accursed field which was purchased with the price of innocent blood."

In 1653 the posts were farmed to Captain Manley at a rent of £10,000 a year; and in 1655, Manley's contract having expired, Cromwell on the advice of his Council placed them in the hands of Mr. Secretary Thurloe, on his giving security to the same amount. The change of management was followed two years later by an important step in advance. This was the passing of an Act of Parliament intituled an Act for settling the postage of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Legislative sanction was now given to what had hitherto rested on no better authority than Proclamation or Order in Council. A general office, to be called the Post Office of England, was to be established for the receipt and despatch of letters; and under the title of Postmaster-General and Comptroller of the Post Office an officer was to be appointed who was to have the exclusive right of carrying letters and of furnishing post-horses. At the Restoration the Act of 1657, the "pretended" Act as it was now called, could not of course be recognised as possessing any legal validity, and so it was replaced by another; but the later Act was little more than a re-enactment of the earlier one. Virtually, it is to the Act of 1657 that the General Post Office owes its origin, although the Act of 1660, as being unimpeachable, has been commonly called its charter.

Similar as the two Acts are in the main, there is one important difference between them. The Act of 1657 gives as a reason for making the posts the subject of parliamentary enactment that they are and have been "the best means of discovering and preventing many dangerous and wicked designs which have been and are daily contrived against the peace and welfare of this Commonwealth, the intelligence whereof cannot well be communicated but by letter of escript." To the odious practice here implied no countenance is given in the Act of 1660. But, indeed, it needed not this evidence to prove that during the Commonwealth the Post Office was largely used as an instrument of police. Thurloe's "intercepted" letters are matter of history; and the journals of the two Houses of Parliament shew that the foreign mails, both inward and outward, were stopped for whole weeks together, and committees appointed to open and read the letters. On one occasion the Venetian ambassador, whose letters had shared the same fate as the rest, entered an indignant protest. "He could not persuade himself," he said, "that the Government of England, so noble and generous, should have so inferior a mind as to open the letters of an ambassador, and by this means to violate the laws, and to give an example to the world so damnable, and of so little respect towards the minister of the Serenissima Respublica." Nor was his indignation appeased until four peers had waited upon him in the name of the House of Lords, and tendered an ample apology.

The rates of postage prescribed by the Act of 1657 were only slightly varied by the Act of 1660. As finally adjusted, they were as follows:—

How these rates compare with those which had gone before we have no means of judging. We only know that during Prideaux's management the postage on a single letter was 6d.; that at some time between 1655 and 1657 it was reduced to 3d.; and that the credit of this reduction was due to Clement Oxenbridge. Oxenbridge, after acting as deputy first to Prideaux and then to Manley, appears to have taken a farm under Thurloe; and, rightly or wrongly, he affirmed that, as soon as he had improved the posts at a cost to himself of more than £5000, and had made his farm profitable, he was turned adrift by Cromwell.

If the comparison be carried forward instead of backward, and the rates of 1660 be contrasted with those of later years, there is an important consideration which cannot be too carefully borne in mind. It is this, that in 1660 cross posts did not exist. Between two towns not being on the same post road, however near the towns might be, letters could circulate only through London; and the moment London was reached an additional rate was imposed. Hence the apparent charges, the charges as deduced from the table of rates, might be very different from the actual charges. Bristol and Exeter, for instance, are less than eighty miles apart; but in 1660 and for nearly forty years afterwards letters from one to the other passed through London, and would be charged, if single, not 2d. but 6d., and if double, not 4d. but 1s. That is to say, the postage[7] or portage, as it was then called, would consist of two rates, and each of these rates would be for a distance in excess of eighty miles. David Hume, writing more than a hundred years later, observes that before 1657 letters paid only about half as much postage as they did in his own time. This, no doubt, is true if rate be compared with rate according to the distance; but the fact we have mentioned very materially qualifies the force of the remark.

On foreign letters the rates ranged from 4d., the lowest rate for a single letter, to 2s., the highest rate for a double letter, and from 1s. 6d. to 4s. an ounce for letters of greater bulk. No provision was made for any charge except on letters from Europe. Letters came indeed from other parts; but as the Post Office did not bring them and paid nothing for their carriage, no postage was demanded. From India, for instance, a letter brought to England and posted there would pay only the home postage.

For post-horses the charge was fixed at 3d. a mile for each horse, besides 4d. to the guide of every stage. Two concessions were made to the public. Horses were no longer to be seized without the consent of the owners; and a traveller if kept waiting half an hour without being supplied might hire a horse wherever he could. That the seizure of horses had been a source of intense annoyance seems beyond question. In a Proclamation of 1603, as a reason for helping the postmasters to keep horses in sufficient number for the service of the posts, the townships are reminded of "the ease and quiet they reape thereby"; and long after the immunity from seizure had been granted, the allusions to the former practice leave no room for doubt that, though the sore was healed, the recollection of it still rankled.

According to Lord Macaulay, a part of the Post Office revenue was derived from post-horses.[8] With all deference to that eminent authority, and with all modesty we venture to think that such was not the case. The Proclamation of 1603, which was the origin of the monopoly, while giving to those who horsed the posts "the benefit and preheminence of letting horses" to all comers, expressly provided that, except for the service of the posts or for the use of persons travelling on affairs of State, no postmaster need keep horses unless he pleased, and that, if he did so, he should be at liberty to make his own terms. On this last point the words are, "But of all others riding Poste with horne and guide about their private businesses, the hire and prices are left to the parties discretions to agree and compound within themselves." Again, an account is still extant, dated 1623, or twenty years after the monopoly had been established, and giving in minute detail the particulars of the expenses of the posts as they then were; records also exist extending in almost unbroken succession over more than eighty years of the period during which the monopoly lasted, and dealing with every variety of Post Office question; and neither in the records nor the account is there the remotest allusion to the receipt of any sums on account of post-horses. Yet one reason more for the opinion we hold. About the middle of the eighteenth century, as the result of legislation which then took place, the roads were measured, and the measured mile proved to be shorter than the computed mile. As a consequence of this discovery the charge for post-horses was raised. A distance which had hitherto been reckoned as eight miles proved to be ten miles, and a charge as for ten instead of eight miles was made. Travellers were up in arms, and complained that the Post Office had raised its charges. The answer was that the Post Office had nothing to do with the matter; that the postmasters were entitled by law to so much a mile; and that the whole of the charge went into their own pockets. For these reasons we think that no part of the Post Office revenue was derived from the letting of post-horses. Indirectly, no doubt, the monopoly was a source of profit because, except for it, those who horsed the posts would not have been content with the wages they received. These, according to the account of 1623, ranged from 3s. a day to 6d. a day. To supplement the postmasters' pay without expense to the Crown was, we make bold to suggest, the object with which the monopoly was granted. And, of course, the better the object was secured, the more carefully would the monopoly be guarded.

In May 1660 Clement Oxenbridge, to whose exertions the Act of 1657 would seem to have been largely due, petitioned the Council of State to reimburse him the expenses to which he had been put in improving the posts, and the Council of State, after investigating the claim, reported the particulars to the House of Commons for directions. It was not, however, until after William and Mary had ascended the throne that any further step was taken. Oxenbridge, whose necessities had become greater as his age advanced, was then by the King's direction given an appointment under the Post Office of the annual value of £100; and this salary he continued to draw, although too old to discharge the duties for which it was paid, until his death in 1696.

CHAPTER V

WILLIAM DOCKWRA
1660-1685

At the Restoration the Post Office was leased to Henry Bishopp of Henfield in Sussex, for the term of seven years at a rent of £21,500 a year, or more than double the amount which had been paid by the previous farmer. Before three years had elapsed, however, Bishopp surrendered his lease, and was succeeded for the remainder of his term and at the same rent by Daniel O'Neile, Groom of the King's Bedchamber. O'Neile had loyally adhered to Charles during his exile, had attended his Sovereign on his visit to Scotland, had been banished that kingdom, and in connection with his banishment had achieved a singular distinction. He had given a written undertaking consenting to his own death if he ever returned.

Even at a rent of £21,500, as the Court had doubtless by this time learned, the Post Office was not a bad investment. O'Neile, like Bishopp, was to enjoy a monopoly of the carrying of letters, and to make what he could out of it; but he was rigidly to adhere to the rates of postage prescribed by the Act, charging neither more nor less. Old posts were not to be altered nor new posts erected, without the sanction of the Secretary of State; and the Secretary of State was to possess a veto on appointments and, as occasion might require, to "have the survey and inspection of all letters." To these conditions was afterwards added another. This was that no postmaster or other officer was to remain in the service who should not within six months obtain and forward to the postmaster-general a certificate, under the hand and seal of the Bishop of the diocese, to the effect that he was "conformable to the discipline of the Church of England."

In 1667, O'Neile's lease having expired, Lord Arlington, Secretary of State in the Cabinet known as the Cabal, was appointed postmaster-general; and, after a while, the office was again let out to farm, this time at a rent of £43,000 a year. Rapidly as the rent had grown, the public demands had grown more rapidly still, and little, if any, effort had been made to satisfy them. How inadequate the posts were, about this time, to meet the public requirements may be judged from a circumstance connected with Bishopp's appointment. The letters patent appointing him were to take effect from the 25th of June 1660, but their validity was to depend on an Act of Parliament, the Act reconstituting the General Post Office, which did not pass until some months afterwards. Meanwhile a whole crop of posts had sprung up between London and the country, which could not be suppressed until the Act was passed. As compensation for the loss he sustained by this encroachment on his monopoly between the 25th of June and the 29th of September Bishopp claimed and received no less than £500.

There is preserved in the Guildhall Library a letter from the Duke of Buckingham, to which the following note is appended:—"The great fire of London broke out on the 2nd of September 1666. It is seen by the date of this letter that the Duke of Buckingham, at that time in the highest position at Court and in the zenith of his power, was at Worthing, and did not receive intelligence of the awful calamity until after the city had been burning for five days." We do not know by what means the Duke was informed of the calamity, nor is it material to our present purpose that we should do so. All we desire now to observe is that if, as is not improbable, he was informed of it by letter, the letter—as we proceed to shew—reached him in due course of post. The fire broke out at midnight on the 2nd of September, and the 2nd of September was a Saturday, after which, except to the Downs and to places abroad, there was no post out of London until Tuesday the 5th, or rather, as the mails started after midnight, until early in the morning of Wednesday the 6th. Arundel was then the post-town for Worthing, and for the first part of the distance the course of post was, as it continued to be until the day of railways, through Tooting, Ewell, Epsom or Ebbesham as it was still called, Leatherhead, and Dorking. Continuing thence, not, as in later times, through Horsham, but through the hamlet of Coldharbour, the post-road skirted the foot of Leith Hill and passed through Stone Street, Billinghurst, and Amberley to Arundel, which would be reached late in the afternoon of Wednesday. Between Arundel and Worthing the distance is ten miles, and the postmaster would not, at the earliest, take out the letter for delivery until the morning of Thursday the 7th, or five days after the fire had broken out. Indeed, it may be permitted to us to doubt whether the letter, if letter there was, would have been delivered as early as the 7th, had it been for a less important personage.

Meagre as the means of communication were in those days, even such means as existed were not matter of common knowledge. The Post Office did not advertise its wares; and no newspapers then existed to do for the Post Office what the Post Office omitted to do for itself. What towns possessed post-houses of their own, and how these towns stood in relation to other towns which did not enjoy the same advantage, might well be considered essential information; yet even of this no public announcement was given. Blome, in his Britannia, printed in 1671, remarks upon this defect, and for the benefit of his readers proceeds to supply it. After commenting upon the convenience which the Post Office affords, and lamenting that this convenience is not more generally known, he gives a list of the post towns which each county possesses, and supplements it with a series of county maps, so that, as he explains, persons desirous of writing to any particular place may be able to find out for themselves where the nearest post-house stands. As late as the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries separate maps appear to have been published with the same object, as a matter of private enterprise. In these maps the post towns are indicated by a castle surmounted by the royal standard.

But it was within the metropolis itself that the public need was greatest. Between London and the country posts went at unequal intervals indeed, and at intervals in some cases unduly long, and yet with regularity. To Kent and the Downs there was a post daily; to other parts of England and to Scotland a post every other day; and to Wales and to Ireland a post twice a week. But between one part of London and another there was no post at all. A resident in London having a letter for delivery within the metropolitan area had only one choice, to take the letter himself or to send it by another. And let the bearer of a letter be who he might, there was an inconvenience to which he was constantly exposed. The houses were not numbered, and were mainly to be recognised by the signs they bore. Later on, men who delivered letters over the same ground day after day complained that it was not always easy to find the address. Without local knowledge it must have been sometimes impossible.

Happily, in England the spirit of enterprise is such that an acknowledged want affecting any considerable section of the public is seldom suffered to endure very long. And so it proved in the present instance. The man who now undertook to relieve the capital from the intolerable inconvenience under which it laboured was William Dockwra, a merchant of the city of London. Dockwra had been a sub-searcher in the Custom House, and through some little interest he possessed at Court had been allowed to dispose of his place. The idea of the penny post is said indeed to have originated with Robert Murray, an upholsterer in Paternoster Row; but, be that as it may, to Dockwra belongs the credit of giving it practical shape. A man of less resolution or less convinced of the inherent merits of his undertaking might well have been daunted by the difficulties he had to encounter. The undertaking had been conceived in so bold a spirit that to carry it out would involve an expense which Dockwra's unaided resources were altogether unable to bear. A difficulty still greater than the want of funds was the determined opposition of the Duke of York. In 1663 the profits of the Post Office had been settled on the Duke for his support and maintenance, and, with an eye ever intent on his own interests, he discerned or thought he discerned in the new project an infringement of his rights.

Undeterred by these difficulties, Dockwra persevered in the task he had taken in hand. At length the appointed day arrived. On the 1st of April 1680,[9] London, which had hitherto had no post at all, suddenly found itself in possession of one in comparison with which even the post of our own time is cast into the shade. For the purposes of the undertaking London and its suburbs were divided into seven districts with a sorting office in each. From Hackney in the north to Lambeth in the south, from Blackwall in the east to Westminster in the west, there was not a point within the bills of mortality which the new post did not reach. Between four and five hundred receiving offices were opened in a single morning. Placards were distributed and advertisements inserted in the public intelligences announcing where these offices were. Messengers called there for letters every hour. These, if for the country, were carried to the General Post Office, and if for the town, to the respective sorting offices. From the sorting offices, after being sorted and entered in books kept for the purpose, they were sent out for delivery, to the Inns of Court or places of business ten or twelve times a day, and to other places according to distance from four to eight times. Nor was the service confined to letters. It extended also to parcels, the only condition being that neither parcel nor letter should exceed one pound in weight,[10] or ten pounds in value. Subject to these limitations the charge between one part of London and another was one penny. An exception indeed was made in the case of Hackney, Islington, Newington Butts, and Lambeth, which were then separate towns. There one penny carried only to the receiving office, and for delivery at a private house the charge was one penny more. Delivery in the street was not allowed.

But it was not only in the matter of weight and frequency of delivery that the new undertaking was conceived in the most liberal spirit. Provided a letter or parcel was securely tied and sealed and its contents endorsed on the outside, the charge of one penny covered not only cost of conveyance but insurance as well, up to a limit of ten pounds. That is to say, subject to this limit, if a parcel or a letter or its contents were lost, Dockwra would, the conditions being observed, make the value good.

There is yet another novelty which Dockwra introduced. As a check upon his messengers he supplied the seven sorting offices with stamps bearing their own initial letters and denoting the several hours of the day. With one of these stamps all letters and parcels were impressed as they passed through the post, and if in the busy parts of the capital they were not delivered within little more than an hour from the time denoted by the impression, the public were encouraged to complain. The following are specimens of the stamps which Dockwra used:—

This was the introduction of postmarks. In the first and last impressions Mor. 8 signifies of course 8 o'clock in the morning, and Af. 4, 4 o'clock in the afternoon. In the second or middle impression the initial letter L signifies Lyme Street, where the principal office of the penny post was held at Dockwra's private dwelling-house, formerly the dwelling-house of Sir Robert Abdy.

The General Post Office, until lately in Bishopsgate Street, stood at this time in Lombard Street, where it occupied a site on part of which the branch office now stands. There the persons employed, all told, numbered 77. In the country and dependent on the chief office were 227 postmasters, viz. 182 in England and Scotland and 45 in Ireland. Twelve persons were also employed in the office in Dublin. Altogether and throughout the whole of the kingdom the General Post Office, in 1680, gave employment to 316 persons, a number very much less than that which Dockwra employed in London alone.

On Saturday nights the penny post closed, in winter at six, and in summer at seven. On other nights of the week, Sundays excepted, it must have remained open to at least 9 o'clock, for at that hour the country letters were collected from the receiving offices and carried to the General Post Office. Besides Sundays, there were eight days in the year on which the post did not go, viz. three days at Christmas, two days at Easter, two days at Whitsuntide, and also the 30th of January, the anniversary of the death of King Charles the First.

In spite of the enormous advantages it conferred, the penny post was not at first received with unqualified satisfaction. Some fanatics denounced it as a Popish contrivance; and Lord Macaulay tells us how the porters complained that their interests were attacked, and tore down the placards on which the scheme was announced to the public. Even unprejudiced persons and persons who had no interests to protect complained that a large number of things were posted and not delivered. This Dockwra himself admitted, explaining that it was due to the illegible writing of the address or to the omission of some important particular by which the persons addressed might be identified, the omission of their trade, or of the signs which their houses bore, or of some well-known place or object in their vicinity. The manifest utility of the enterprise, however, soon bore down all opposition; and in little more than a year from its introduction the penny post, though weighted with a scheme of insurance, was very nearly paying its own expenses.

The establishment of the penny post had one effect which had probably not been contemplated. It increased largely the number of letters for the country. Every man had now a post office at his own door. It is true that Dockwra's four or five hundred receiving offices were intended primarily for town letters; but country letters might be posted there, and, as we have seen, were collected at a stated hour every evening. Hitherto the case had been very different. Up to the 1st of April 1680, incredible as it may appear, the General Post Office in Lombard Street was the only receptacle for letters in the whole of London. There and nowhere else could letters be posted. Little wonder if, before 1680, persons whom the cost of postage might not deter from writing were yet deterred by their distance from the Post Office.

Dockwra might reasonably now expect to reap some of the rewards of success. A small band of citizens who had joined in the original venture had afterwards deserted him, and for six months he had carried it on at his sole charge. Others had then come to his aid, and a fresh partnership had been formed. The undertaking prospered, became self-supporting, and at length gave promise of large returns. This very promise excited the greed of the Duke of York. So long as the outgoings exceeded the receipts Dockwra remained unmolested; but no sooner had the balance turned than the Duke complained of his monopoly being infringed, and the Courts of Law decided in his favour. Not only was Dockwra cast in damages, but the undertaking which he had impoverished himself to establish was wrested out of his hands, and the penny post, in less than five years from its introduction, was incorporated into the General Post Office.[11]

Generosity formed no part of James's character, and, so long as he sat on the throne, Dockwra's services remained without the slightest recognition. In 1690, however, upon an address from the House of Commons, William and Mary granted him a pension of £500 for seven years, and in 1697 the grant was renewed for three years longer. In the same year as the renewal of the grant, but a little earlier, he was appointed comptroller of the penny post at a salary of £200, and this appointment he retained until 1700. Then, both appointment and grant came to an abrupt termination together, for, on charges brought against him by his own subordinates, Dockwra, like Witherings, was dismissed. Such was the tribute paid to the man who had conferred on his country benefits which he never tired of predicting would endure to all posterity.

Of the charges against Dockwra two deserve special notice, as shewing that the penny post, after its acquisition by the State, continued to be conducted on the same principles as before. These two charges were—1st, that, contrary to his duty, he "forbids the taking in any band-boxes (except very small) and all parcels above a pound"; and 2nd, that he takes money out of letters and "makes the office pay for it," thereby clearly indicating that at that time the State carried on a parcel post and continued the practice of making losses good. A third charge, the truth of which it is more easy to credit, imputed to Dockwra that he spoke and acted as if his object were to get the penny post into his own hands again. It is worthy of remark, as characteristic of the times in which he lived, and may perhaps be regarded as affording some presumption of his innocence, that Dockwra appears to have been at less pains to refute the charges than to prove that he had taken the oath of supremacy, or the oath which had been recently substituted for it, and that he had received the Holy Sacrament.

We have said that to us who live at the end of the nineteenth century it may appear incredible that up to April 1680 the General Post Office in Lombard Street was the only receptacle for letters in the whole of London. But it is by no means certain that our descendants may not think it more incredible still that London, with all its boasted progress, has only now recovered a post which, in point of convenience and cheapness, at all approaches that which an enterprising citizen established more than two hundred years ago. When and under what circumstances this post lost its original features will have to be considered hereafter.

CHAPTER VI

COTTON AND FRANKLAND
Inland Service
1685-1705

In 1685, on the death of Charles the Second, the revenue of the Post Office was settled on James, his heirs and successors. Rochester, the High Treasurer, became postmaster-general; and for the actual discharge of the duties a deputy was appointed under the title of Governor.

Two years before, the panic caused by the discovery of the Rye-House Plot had led to the issue of a Proclamation which, if differing little from others that had gone before, acquires importance from the circumstances under which it appeared. Unauthorised posts had again sprung up in all directions, simply, no doubt, because there was a demand for the accommodation they afforded; but the Government, no less than the persons who denounced Dockwra's undertaking as a Popish contrivance, seem to have been possessed with the idea that these posts were mere vehicles for the propagation of treason. To prevent treasonable correspondence was the avowed object of the present Proclamation, and the means by which the object was sought to be attained was the suppression of private and irregular posts, for by these, the Proclamation went on to declare, the conspirators had been materially assisted in their designs. Mayors, sheriffs, justices of the peace, constables and others were enjoined to make diligent search for letters passing otherwise than through the regular post. Special officers were to be appointed for the same purpose. All such letters, wherever discovered, were to be deemed to be "of dangerous consequence"; and not only were they to be seized and carried to the Secretary of State or the Privy Council for the purpose of being opened and inspected, but both the bearers and senders of them were to be proceeded against at law.

On James's accession to the throne the Proclamation of 1683 was succeeded by another in almost identical terms; and it is certain that during his reign the liberties taken with post letters were hardly less than they had been in the worst days of the Commonwealth. Only a few months before Rochester's dismissal, for no better reason than to gratify curiosity, orders were given that the bags from Scotland should be transmitted to Whitehall, and during a whole week not a single private letter from beyond the Tweed was delivered in London. Happily, however, this state of things was soon to cease. After the Revolution the appointment of postmaster-general was conferred upon persons who were otherwise unconnected with affairs of State, and the effect of this change was, as William no doubt intended, at once to lift the Post Office out of the region of politics. In the eyes of the Rochesters, the Arlingtons, and the Thurloes, busied as they were in the detection of conspiracies against the State, the Post Office had been little else than an instrument which might be usefully employed as a means to that end. With plain citizens unversed in the ways of government, the only consideration was how best they could accomplish the object for which they had been appointed; and this object was so to manage and improve the posts of the country as to secure to their Sovereign the highest possible revenue.

But, before William could give effect to his views, there was an adherent to be provided for. This was Colonel John Wildman, who was appointed postmaster-general in July 1689. Of Wildman's career at the Post Office little is known, except that he was profuse in making promises which he never performed. He might, perhaps, himself have pleaded that he was not given time to perform them, for after eight months' tenure of the appointment he was dismissed for some reason which is, and will probably continue to be, a mystery. Far different is the record left behind them by Wildman's immediate successors. These were Sir Robert Cotton and Mr.—afterwards Sir Thomas—Frankland, who became joint postmasters-general in March 1690, and served in that capacity for nearly twenty years. They had sat in James's Parliament, the one for Cambridgeshire, and the other for the borough of Thirsk, and these seats they retained under William. From the writings they have left behind them we are able to see these two men not as a biographer might dress them up, but as they really were. Everything about them, their virtues, their foibles, their habits, their ailments, their devotion to duty, their unwillingness to believe evil of any one, their hatred of injustice or oppression, their unbounded credulity, their anxiety about their re-election, their gratitude for any little scrap of news which they might carry to Court, their fondness for a glass of port wine, their attacks of gout, their habit of taking snuff, even the hour of their going to bed—all this and more is there revealed, and makes up a record of simplicity and benevolence which it is a delight to read.

The establishment over which these two simple gentlemen were called upon to preside had recently received a considerable addition. Out of London, the Post Office servants remained much as they had been ten years before, at about 239 in number, of whom all but twelve were postmasters; but in London the force employed at the General Post Office had been raised from 77 to 185. The Penny Post Office, which had now been wrested out of Dockwra's hands, accounts for the greater part of the difference. This gave employment, exclusive of receivers, to 74 persons—a comptroller, an accomptant, and a collector, 14 sorters and 57 messengers—at a total charge for salaries of £2000 a year. Another part of the establishment, and by no means the least important or the least difficult to manage, consisted of the packet boats. These, in 1690, were eleven in number, viz.—two for France, two for Flanders, two for Holland, two for the Downs, and three for Ireland. Owing to the war, however, the boat-service to France was now in abeyance.

Little more than half a century had elapsed since the introduction of postage, and meanwhile the revenue had risen by strides which were for those times prodigious. In 1635 the posts were maintained at a cost to the Crown of £3400 a year. Within fifteen years not only had they become self-supporting, but a rent was paid for the privilege of farming them. This rent was, in 1650, £5000 a year; in 1653, £10,000; in 1660, £21,500; and some time before 1680, £43,000. In 1690 the net revenue was probably about £55,000. In 1694, according to a return made to the House of Commons two years later, it was £59,972.

The headquarters of the Post Office were at this time in Lombard Street. Here the postmasters-general resided; and here, far from shutting themselves up, they were to be found at all hours by any one who might wish to consult them on business connected with their office. Freedom of communication with those among whom they lived, and not inaccessibility, appears indeed to have been a part of their policy. With the foreign merchants especially they maintained the most friendly intercourse, and were wont to defer to their wishes and suggestions in the arrangement of the packets. Besides giving constant attendance during the day, the postmasters-general sat as a Board every morning and night. To these Board-meetings they attached the highest importance, especially on the nights of Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, when mails were despatched into all parts of the country. These were known as the "Grand Post Nights," and the others as "Bye-Nights."

The Post Office building appears to have been not ill adapted to its purpose. A massive gate opened into a court of oblong shape. This court was paved from end to end for the merchants to walk in while waiting to receive their letters. On the right was the Board-room with the residence of the postmasters-general attached; on the left the office for foreign letters; and in front, immediately facing the entrance, was the sorting office. The office for the letter-carriers was in the basement. The rest of the building was devoted to the use of the Post Office servants, who, owing to their unseasonable hours of attendance, were required to live in the office itself or else in its immediate vicinity.

The machinery for the dispersion of letters was very simple. For Post Office purposes the kingdom was divided into six roads—the North Road, the Chester or Holyhead Road, the Western Road, the Kent Road, and the Roads to Bristol and to Yarmouth; and these roads were presided over by a corresponding number of clerks in London whose duty it was to sort the letters and to tax them with the proper amount of postage. At the present time, when, owing to the system of prepayment, there is comparatively little taxing to be done, no less than 2800 clerks and sorters are engaged every evening in despatching the letters into the country. Two hundred years ago the whole operation was performed, both sorting and taxing together, by the six clerks of the roads, and they had not even a sorter to assist them until 1697.

The letters, as soon as they had been sorted, were despatched into the country, the usual hour of despatch being shortly after midnight; but, of course, with a force to prepare them of only six persons, a rigid punctuality such as that which now distinguishes the operations of the Post Office could hardly be observed. An instance remains on record of the disturbance caused by any unusual pressure. The 25th of February 1696, we are told, was a foreign post night, and it happened that the letters for the country as well as abroad were more than ordinarily numerous. On this occasion the mails which should have gone out before three o'clock in the morning could not be despatched until between six and seven.

Once clear of London, the letters passed into the hands of the postmasters, who were alone concerned in their transmission and distribution. At the present time, multifarious as the duties of a postmaster are, it is not one of them to transport the mails from town to town. But such was not the case in 1690. The post roads were then divided into sections or, as they were commonly called, stages; and these stages were presided over by a corresponding number of postmasters, whose duty it was to carry the mails each over his own stage. This had been the original object of their appointment, the object for which they had been granted the monopoly of letting post-horses, and it still remained their primary duty, to which every other was subordinate. And yet traces of this original function were already beginning to disappear. The posts settled on the six main roads of the kingdom had not been long in extending themselves to other roads; and on these branch roads one postmaster would be charged with the carrying of the mails over two or more stages, leaving another without any transport duty at all. Kendal, for instance, lay on a branch road leaving the Holyhead Road at Chester; and from Wigan the letters for Kendal were fetched by the postmaster of Preston, who passed not only his own town but the town of Lancaster on his way.

In 1690 no provincial town had a letter-carrier of its own, as that term is now understood. Even at Bristol and at Norwich, which ranked next to the capital in size and importance, there was for all Post Office purposes one single agent, and that was the postmaster. Upon him and him alone devolved all the duties which now, at all but the smallest towns, a body of sorters and letter-carriers is maintained to perform. Whether out of London there was any settled mode of delivery is uncertain; but there seems little doubt that, soon after the establishment of the Post Office, to deliver letters in his own town had come to be a part, though a secondary part, of a postmaster's duty. At Maidstone, indeed, the delivery appears to have reached a high state of perfection. The postmaster there fetched the mails from Rochester and carried them to Ashford, dropping the letters for his own town as he passed through. These were at once taken out by two men of his own and delivered, so that, as he took pride in relating, a letter from London arriving by the morning post at noon could he answered by the return post, which left Maidstone at six o'clock in the evening.

But this must have been an exceptional case. Except perhaps at the largest towns, letters were yet too few to make such an arrangement necessary; and it seems probable that the hour at which the delivery was made and the area over which it extended were very much in the postmaster's discretion. One check there was, and, so far as appears, one only. This was the letter bill which accompanied the letters, and in which was inserted the postage which a postmaster had to collect and bring to account; but it frequently happened that he advanced the amount himself, and of course, where this was so, there was nothing to shew that any particular letter had been delivered, still less that it had been delivered within a particular time. Far more effective, it may well be believed, than any official check was the desire, the natural desire, to stand well with his neighbours; and the substantial marks of kindness which they seldom failed to bestow upon him whenever he was so unfortunate as to get into trouble, preclude the idea that, in the matter of delivery or otherwise, remissness or inattention can have been at all general.

In London, owing to recent malpractices there, attention had been directed to the salaries, and these had been improved. The six clerks of the roads received four of them £60 a year, one £50, and one as much as £100. The sorters received £40 a year, and the general post letter-carriers 11s. a week. The wages of the penny post letter-carriers or messengers, as for distinction's sake they were called, were 8s. In addition to their salaries the clerks of the roads enjoyed the privilege of franking newspapers or, as they were then called, gazettes. This privilege, which dated from the first establishment of the Post Office, had arrested the attention of James when Duke of York, and he had desired to take it away; but, on learning that compensation would have to be given, he decided to let it continue. By post the gazettes would have cost from 4d. to 6d. apiece. The clerks of the roads supplied them for 2d. The emoluments from this source kept steadily growing during William's reign. At first the longer and more frequent sessions of Parliament, and, later on, the war in which England was engaged, excited an appetite for news to which the two previous reigns afford no parallel. A statement which the postmasters-general made to the Treasury about this time, while evincing perhaps some little credulity, evinces also how keen, in the judgment of two shrewd and intelligent men, was the hunger after early intelligence. "In England," they say, "there are many postmasters, who some of them serve without salary, others for less than they would otherwise do, in consideration of their being allowed gazets by the office ffrank."

Another curious custom prevailed in 1690, and continued indeed for nearly a century afterwards. This was the distribution among the Post Office servants in London of a certain sum annually as "drink and feast money." The sum so distributed in 1685 had been no less than £60; and this was in addition to two "feasts" which were given them at the expense of the Crown, one at midsummer and the other at Christmas.

In the country, where there was no one to watch over the postmasters' interests, the salaries were merely nominal. The postmaster of Sudbury in Suffolk received a salary of £26 a year; and for this he had, three times a week, to carry the letters to Braintree and back, a distance of thirty-two miles, over a road that was barely passable. At Maidstone, in order to keep the delivery up to his own standard of excellence, the postmaster expended 2s. a day in what he called "horse-meate and man's-meate," yet his salary was only £5. Many postmasters received no salary at all. Even at Bristol, which stood next to London in population and wealth, the salary was only £60, having been recently raised to that amount from £50.

Nor was it only in the matter of salary that the postmasters were objects of compassion. The disturbed state of the country during the last few years had brought back old abuses. Officers of the army and others who had not the officers' excuse of urgency would override the post-horses, and when, as frequently happened, these were lamed or killed, no compensation appears to have been given. Another class of persons infested the roads, persons who, taking advantage of the general confusion, would hire post-horses and not return them. During the last twelve or thirteen years of the seventeenth century many postmasters were languishing in prison through inability to pay what they owed for postage; and among these there were few who did not trace their misfortunes to the fact that immediately before and after William's accession to the throne their horses had been killed or spoiled through reckless riding or else run away with.

But neither the loss of their horses nor the inadequacy of their remuneration was so galling to the postmasters as the liability to which they now became subject, of having soldiers quartered upon them. A standing army had been recently authorised, and there was little or no barrack accommodation. Hence a liability, which in our own time might be little more than nominal, was, in 1690, tantamount to a heavy tax. Under Charles and James[12] the postmasters had been exempt from this annoyance; but the exemption had been granted by virtue of the royal prerogative, and William could not be induced to continue it. In vain it was urged that, if a burden were cast upon them as novel as it was oppressive, justice demanded that their salaries should be increased. The King resolutely refused to make a distinction which the law did not recognise, and, except in a few isolated cases, the salaries remained unchanged.

Despite these drawbacks, there is no reason to think that the appointment of postmaster was not eagerly sought for, or that when obtained there was any general disposition to throw it up. The explanation is obvious. In the first place the appointment carried with it the exclusive right of letting post-horses. This monopoly, at all events on the more frequented roads, must have been remunerative; and it must have been especially remunerative where, as appears to have been generally the case, the postmaster was also innkeeper. Travellers were drawn to his house, for it was only there that they could procure horses to pursue their journey. He was, in a word, assured of custom. Other sources of emolument were—1st, gratuities, varying according to distance, from 1d. to 3d., on every letter he collected or delivered; and 2nd, what were technically called "Bye-letters." This term, whatever may have been the case a century before, had now a distinctive meaning. It meant letters which stopped short of London,[13] letters upon which at that time there was no check. In 1690 the postage on these letters was probably not large; but, large or small, the whole or all but the whole of it found its way into the pockets of the postmasters, and it was one of the first cares of the new postmasters-general to consider how the diversion might be stopped.

Such, in England, was the condition of the Post Office when Cotton and Frankland assumed the direction of it in the month of March 1690. In Scotland the posts were under separate direction, the direction of the Secretary of State for that part of the kingdom, and subject to the control of the Scotch Parliament. For purposes of convenience, however, an arrangement had been made between the two Post Offices. On letters between London and Edinburgh in both directions the English Post Office took not only its own share of the postage but the whole; and, in return, it paid the salaries of all the postmasters and defrayed the cost of all expresses between the Border town of Berwick-on-Tweed and Edinburgh. The correspondence at this time passing between the two capitals was of the slightest. It is true that for the three years ending March 1693 the amount due to the London office for postage on letters to Edinburgh was £1500, or at the rate of £500 a year; but the correspondence of the Secretary of State for Scotland, or "Black-box" as it was called, from the colour of the box in which it was carried, would probably account for nearly the whole. In 1707, which no doubt was a busy year in consequence of the Act of Union, the cost of carrying this box to and fro averaged £66 a month.

In Ireland the Post Office was managed by a deputy-postmaster, who was directly responsible to the postmasters-general in London. The method of business was the same as in England. Instead, however, of six "roads," there were only three—the Munster Road, the Ulster Road, and the Connaught Road. The Dublin establishment, clerks and letter-carriers included, consisted of twelve persons, of whom five received £20 a year, and no one, the deputy-postmaster excepted, more than £80. The deputy-postmaster himself received £400. Such at least was the normal establishment; but all was now confusion. The battle of the Boyne had not yet been fought, and Tyrconnel was still Lord Deputy. By his direction the Post Office servants in Dublin, down to the youngest letter-carrier, had been turned out of their appointments; and the mails from England, instead of being opened at the Post Office, were being carried to the castle and opened there.

The new postmasters-general had not long taken up their quarters in Lombard Street before they began to feel serious alarm for the revenue committed to their charge. It was in the matter of bye-letters that their apprehensions were first aroused. London, as the metropolis, sent and received more letters than any other town, more probably than all the other towns of the kingdom put together. Through London, too, as the centre of the Post Office system, many letters passed in those days which would not so pass now, because there were no cross-posts. Still there was a residue, a residue considerable in the aggregate, consisting of letters which did not touch London in any part of their course; and of these comparatively few were accounted for. Some thirty years later, after a check had been established, the revenue derived from bye-letters was only a little over £3000 a year. At the end of the seventeenth century it probably did not amount to as many hundreds.

It was, however, not the letters that fell into the post, but those that were kept out of it, the illicit traffic in fact, that caused the greatest concern. This traffic was assuming larger proportions every day. Under Charles and James searchers had been appointed, men who searched for letters as baggage is searched at the Custom House. No suspected person, no suspected vehicle, was safe from inspection. But there was no legal sanction for the practice, and it had ceased on William's accession. Early in the present reign it had been mooted whether a prosecution should not be undertaken, at all events against the principal offenders; but the King refused to consent to a step which he regarded as impolitic and calculated to excite discontent. License waxed bolder with impunity. Along the road from Bristol to Worcester and from Worcester to Shrewsbury men might be seen openly collecting and delivering letters in defiance of the law. Openly or clandestinely the same thing was being done in other parts. "Wherever," wrote the postmasters-general, "there are any townes which have commerce one with another so as to occasion a constant intercourse by carryer or tradesman, there we do find it a general practice to convey at the same time a considerable number of letters."

But the illicit traffic between one part of the country and another, large as were the dimensions it had assumed, was insignificant as compared with that which was taking place between the country and London. This was the natural result of the establishment of the penny post. At the first introduction of postage care had been taken so to fix the rates that for single letters the post should be cheaper than the common carrier. But the common carrier, in competition with the State, had one enormous advantage. He could reduce his terms at will. So long, therefore, as there was a profit to be made, the relative cheapness of the post had proved only an imperfect check.

A far more efficient check, in the case of the metropolis at least, had been the difficulty of dispersion. It was one thing to bring letters to London and another to deliver them. In a maze of streets consisting of houses which bore no numbers, a comparative stranger to the town attempting anything in the shape of a general delivery would have been simply bewildered. But all this was now altered. The penny post supplied the very machinery, the want of which had hitherto kept the illicit traffic within bounds. Once within the orbit of that post, a letter consigned to any one of Dockwra's four or five hundred receiving offices would be delivered in any part of what was then known as London for 1d., and in the suburbs for 2d. And these charges would carry up to one pound in weight; whereas a quarter of one pound by the general post, even from places no further distant from London than Croydon or Kingston, would be charged 2s. 8d.

Of course, under such conditions, to carry letters across the border-line, the line which separated the general post from the penny post, had soon become a regular traffic; and this traffic, in consequence of the impunity it enjoyed, was now being carried on with little concealment. No stage-coach entered London without the driver's pockets being stuffed with letters and packets, and he was moderate indeed if he had not a bagful besides. The waggoner outstripped his waggon and the carrier his pack-horse; and each brought his contribution. The higgler's wares were the merest pretext. It was to the letters and packets he carried that he looked for profit. So notorious had the abuse become that two private persons, unconnected with the Post Office, offered their services with a view to its correction. These persons were gentlemen by birth, and yet it is difficult to conceive an office more odious than the one which they were prepared to assume. They proposed to erect stands or barriers in Westminster, Southwark, and other places in the outskirts of London, and there to demand of suspected persons as they passed any letters they might have about them which did not concern their private business. They further proposed to deliver these letters by messengers of their own, and to collect the postage, and to proceed against the bearers of them for the recovery of the penalties. It is significant of the extent to which the traffic had grown, that in return for their services they asked no more than two-thirds of the postage they should collect, and even pleaded the heavy expenses to which they would be put as an apology for asking so much. The remaining third they would undertake to make over to the postmasters-general. They did not explain, however, how it was proposed to distinguish letters which concerned the private business of the bearers from those which did not, or how, while checking others, they were to be checked themselves. Nor indeed was any such explanation needed, for the postmasters-general very clearly discerned that the proposed remedy would be worse, far worse, than the disease.

Cotton and Frankland were sorely perplexed. They knew perfectly well that the true policy was to supplant and not to suppress; and experience had taught them that to facilitate correspondence was to increase it. These views they never ceased to inculcate; but their power of giving effect to them was extremely limited. They could not lower the rates of postage, for these were fixed by Act of Parliament. They could not set up a new post nor alter an old one without the King's permission. Neither was this permission so easy to obtain as it had been. The Post Office revenue was settled upon William just as it had been settled upon James; but while James kept the control in his own hands William left it to his ministers.[14] Constitutionally sound as the change of practice was, it had its drawback. James might care little for the convenience of trade and commerce; but self-interest would prompt him not to withhold facilities where these might be given at small cost and with the prospect of comparatively large returns. Ministers, on the contrary, even the most enlightened, concerned themselves mainly with the balance-sheet of the year, and no promise of future and remote profit would easily reconcile them to a diminution of present receipts. That the Post Office must sow before it can reap is a truism which those who hold the purse-strings have, at all times, found it hard to accept.

The ministers charged with the control of the Post Office were the Lords of the Treasury. How little the postmasters-general were left to act on their own responsibility will best be shewn by examples. Warwick, according to the computation of those days, was sixty-seven miles from London; but letters for that town passed through Coventry, thus traversing a distance of eighty miles. And not only was the route a circuitous one but it involved an additional charge for postage, the rates for a single letter being, for eighty miles, 3d., and for less than eighty, 2d. The postmasters-general desired to send the letters direct; but even so simple a matter as this they were not competent to decide for themselves. A change of route involved a reduction of charge; and a reduction of charge might affect the King's receipts. Before, therefore, the route could be altered, the King's assent had to be signified through his appointed ministers. In 1696 a post was established between Exeter and Bristol. This was the first cross-post set up by authority in the British Isles. It ran twice a week, leaving Exeter on Wednesdays and Saturdays at four in the afternoon, and arriving at Bristol at the same hour on the following days. From Bristol the return post, which went on Mondays and Fridays, started at ten in the morning. But in this case as in the other, the postmasters-general had not the power to act of their own motion. Hitherto letters between the two towns had passed through London, and so had been liable to a double rate of postage, to one rate of 3d. from Exeter to London, and to another rate of equal amount from London to Bristol, or 6d. altogether. For the future, the towns being less than eighty miles apart, the charge would be 2d. Large as this reduction was, the postmasters-general strongly advocated it. The existing post, they said, was both tedious and costly, and had been little used in consequence. A direct post, it was true, would require a small outlay to start it; but, this outlay notwithstanding, the post was certain to prove remunerative. Increase facilities for correspondence, and correspondence would assuredly follow. Besides, it would promote trade and be an inestimable boon to the public generally. To these representations the Treasury yielded; and before three years were over, the postmasters-general had the satisfaction of reporting that the new post was producing a clear profit of more than £250 a year. But complaisant as the Treasury had been on this occasion, their co-operation was fitful and uncertain. The Post Office could not advance a step without incurring some trifling expense; and the Treasury only too often acted as if to save expense, however trifling, were the highest proof of statesmanship.

The postmasters-general were indeed heavily handicapped. Even with a free hand their position would have been one of great embarrassment. But bound hand and foot as they were, what could they do? They did what was perhaps the very best thing that could have been done in the circumstances. They grouped large numbers of post offices together and let them out to farm. These groups, or branches as they were called, spread over a wide area. The Buckingham branch, for instance, not only included the county of Bucks but extended as far as Warwick. The Hungerford branch comprised sixteen post offices in the counties of Berks, Wilts, and Somerset. The Chichester branch covered a large part of Surrey as well as Sussex; and the six remaining branches, for eventually there were nine altogether, were equally extensive.

This, though by no means a perfect remedy for the existing evils, went far to mitigate them. The farmer, of course, could not alter the rates of postage; but with this single exception he was free from the restraints which hampered the postmasters-general. Within the area over which his farm extended he had only to consult his own interests; and, happily, his own interests and the interests of the public were identical. He improved and extended the posts, because to improve and extend the posts added to the number of letters and made his farm more profitable. He stopped the practice of levying gratuities on the delivery of letters, because this practice, by adding to the cost of the post, and so deterring persons from using it, diminished his own receipts. For the same reason he took good care that no agent of his own should omit to account for bye-letters, and, if other than his own agents continued to send letters by irregular means, that it should not be for want of facilities which he could himself supply.

To this community of interest as between himself and the public may be ascribed the exceptional feelings with which, at the close of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, the Post Office farmer was regarded. The very name of farmer in connection with other branches of the revenue had become a by-word for all that was rapacious and extortionate. Only recently the farmer of the customs and the farmer of the hearth money had been stamped out as moral pests. The Post Office farmer, on the contrary, was welcomed wherever he came as a public benefactor. In his case outrages and exactions such as had disgraced the others were impossible. Before he could collect a single penny he had a service to perform; and according as this service was performed well or ill, he repelled or attracted custom.

The real secret of his welcome, however, was that he supplied an urgent demand; and how urgent this demand was may best be judged by the conditions on which he was glad to accept his farm. These conditions were a lease of no more than three years, and a rent equivalent to the highest amount which the post offices included in his farm had in any one year produced. For his profits he had nothing to look to but the increase of revenue resulting from his own management; and even of this he received the whole only in the first year, when he would, presumably, be establishing his plant. In subsequent years he received two-thirds, the remaining third going to the Post Office. If under such conditions as these it were possible to toil and grow rich, great indeed must have been the field of operation.

Among those who were commissioned to supply the accommodation which the postmasters-general were precluded from supplying themselves was one who deserves to be specially mentioned. This was Stephen Bigg of Winslow, in Buckinghamshire. Bigg farmed the Buckingham branch. He appears to have possessed and to have deserved the confidence of the postmasters-general. Of ample means, and endowed with no ordinary powers of organisation, he had probably embarked on his undertaking less with a view to profit than from a desire to improve the posts. Be that as it may, the same means which conduced to the one end conduced also to the other; and when the time arrived for him to render an account of his proceedings, he not only made over to the Post Office a handsome sum as one-third share of the profits, but had earned for himself the gratitude of the large district over which his farm extended.

His success in his own county encouraged him to enlarge the sphere of his operations. Passing through Lancashire in the last year of the century, he was struck with the wretched accommodation which the posts afforded. As compared with those under his own control, they were slow, irregular, and, owing to the system of gratuities, costly. On his return to London he offered to take in farm the post offices of the whole county. The offer was accepted, and a lease was signed fixing the rent, as ascertained in the usual manner, at £2826. The history of this farm is curious. Bigg had not long been engaged in his new undertaking before the cross-post which had some few years before been set up between Exeter and Bristol was extended to Chester. It is not very clear how this interfered with Bigg's proceedings; but, as a matter of fact, it appears to have tapped an important source of supply. On this being pointed out to the postmasters-general, they at once, with that high sense of justice which distinguished all their proceedings, released him from his engagement and cancelled the lease.

The next county to which Bigg turned his attention was Lincolnshire. If Lancashire had bad posts, Lincolnshire had next to none. Five post towns were all of which Lincolnshire could boast—Stamford and Witham and Grantham, Lincoln and Boston; and of these only two were off the great north road which ran through the extreme west of the county. It is true that other towns received letters; but they received them only by virtue of a private arrangement, and heavily had they to pay for the luxury. From Lincoln, for instance, the postmaster went twice a week to Gainsborough and to Brigg, to Horncastle, Louth, and Grimsby, charging as his own perquisite on each letter he collected or delivered the sum of 3d. over and above the postage; but, so far as depended on any official post, these and all the intervening towns were absolutely cut off from the rest of the world.[15] Bigg procured a farm of the district in favour of his son, and the lease was signed on the 4th of August 1705. On the 1st of October in the same year posts began to run, and gratuities on the delivery of letters had become a thing of the past. One penny on each letter collected was the only charge that remained over and above the postage.

It would be less than justice not to recognise the important part which about this period the farmer played in the history of the Post Office; nor is it possible not to admire the sagacity of those who, when they found the posts to be slipping through their fingers, summoned this extraneous agency to their aid. It was no mere venture which by a happy accident happened to turn out well. The postmasters-general had foreseen and foretold exactly what would be the result—that under a system of farming the public would be better served, letters would become more numerous, and the revenue, when it should revert to the Crown at the termination of the lease, would be higher than when the lease began.

Next to Lincolnshire in poverty of the means of correspondence stood Cornwall. Until 1704 the post to Falmouth, after leaving Exeter, ran through Ashburton to Plymouth and thence along the south coast. Of the towns in Mid Cornwall Launceston alone possessed a post office. At others, indeed, letters were delivered, but only by virtue of a private arrangement and on payment of a gratuity of 2d. apiece. No farmer, unfortunately, offered his services here. But, what was perhaps the next best thing, the gentry of the county, headed by Lord Granville, took the matter up. Thus supported, the postmasters-general proceeded to concert their arrangements. They desired the postmasters of Exeter, Plymouth, and Launceston to meet together and prepare some scheme for facilitating the correspondence of the midland towns. Such a scheme was soon submitted, and, although it involved a cost of £260 a year, authority for its adoption was not withheld. Henceforth the post for the extreme west of England was to go, not by way of Plymouth, but direct from Exeter to St. Columb, and thence through Truro to Falmouth. A single post through a wide extent of country might ill accord with our present views of what the public convenience requires; and yet at the beginning of the eighteenth century Mid Cornwall, by the mere alteration of the route for the Falmouth mails, obtained facilities for correspondence not inferior to those enjoyed by other parts of the country.

The speed at which the post travelled at the end of the seventeenth century only slightly exceeded four miles an hour. This slow rate of progress, added to the fact that, except to the Downs, the post left London only on alternate days, gave occasion for the not infrequent use of expresses. These were mounted messengers sent specially for the occasion. Whether for expresses there was any prescribed rate of speed is not known; but it seems probable that their instructions were to go as fast as they could. The charge for an express was 3d. a mile and 6d. a stage, a stage being on the average about twelve miles. The total sum which the Post Office received on this account during the half-year which ended the 29th of September 1685 was £337.

Occasionally several expresses would be required at one time. In 1696, on the discovery of Barclay's plot to assassinate the King, orders were given to close the ports; and these orders the postmasters-general sent, as they were instructed to do, by express. Some twenty years afterwards similar orders were given, and an account is still extant shewing how on the later, and probably the earlier, occasion they were carried into effect. The English ports were sixty-two in number; and to only ten of these were expresses sent direct from Lombard Street, the others being either taken by the way or reached by branch expresses furnished by the towns through which the expresses from London passed. Altogether the distance traversed was 2526 miles, the number of stages 202, and the sum which the Post Office received for the service from the Commissioners of Customs £36:12:6.

From expresses it seems almost natural to pass to flying packets, although between the two there is, so far as we are aware, no necessary connection. What was a flying packet? The term "flying," at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, was, no doubt, used in the sense of running. For this season, writes Lord Compton's private tutor to Lady Northampton, under date September 1734, "the coach has done flying." In like manner "flying post," a term as old as the Post Office itself,[16] meant nothing more than what in Scotland was called a runner. Possibly because the idea of expedition was conveyed by the term "flying," flying packet came to be regarded as synonymous with express. "I despatch this by a flying pacquett," writes Lord Townshend to the Duke of Argyll in 1715; and again, "My lord, after writing what is above, a flying packet brings letters from Edinburgh of the 12th." "By the flying pacquett which arrived last night," writes Secretary Stanhope about the same date, "I received the honour of your Grace's of the 21st inst." Here, by flying packet is obviously meant express. And yet, curiously enough, this is a sense in which the postmasters-general never employed the term. By them it was always designed to signify the thing transmitted, and not the means of transmission. What they called a flying packet might be sent by ordinary post no less than by express; and when sending one by express they never failed to state that it was being so sent. "You are therefore," they write in 1706, "on the receipt of the bag so delivered to your care [i.e. a small bag containing letters for the Court], to dispatch the same imediately by a flying packet from Harwich to this office, and to send a labil therewith expressing the precise time of the arrival and your having dispatched the same per express." On receipt of the Holland mail, they write again in the following year, "You are to take out the Court letters, and to forward the same express by a flying packet directed to Mr. Frankland at the Post Office at Newmarket." "The inclosed box being recommended to our care by His Grace the Duke of Queensberry, one of Her Majesty's principall Secretarys of State, we do send the same by a flying pacquet.... You are to send us advice by the first post of the safe comeing of this pacquet to your hands." In short, flying packet, in its original sense, appears to have meant simply a packet of which the enclosures were designed for some other person than the one whose address the packet bore. Within the Post Office it is occasionally necessary to employ technical terms which would not be intelligible to persons without; but this, so far as we are aware, is the only instance of the same term being used within and without in two totally different senses.

Of the state of the roads about this period the Highway Act 1691 affords, perhaps, not the least trustworthy evidence. To incidents which have resulted in nothing more than temporary inconvenience travellers are apt to give a touch of humorous exaggeration. An Act of Parliament, on the contrary, deals with facts as they are, and concerns itself not with imaginary ills. What, then, is to be thought of the condition of the roads when provisions such as these were necessary?—No causeway for horses was to be less than three feet in breadth, nor was the breadth of any cartway leading to a market town to be less than eight feet. In highways of less breadth than twenty feet no tree was to be permitted to grow, or stone, timber, or manure to be heaped up so as to obstruct progress; and hedges were to be kept trimmed, and boughs to be lopped off, so as to allow a free passage to travellers, and not to intercept the action of the sun and wind. Of any breach of these and other provisions the road-surveyor was, on the Sunday next after it became known to him, to give public notice in the parish church immediately after the conclusion of the sermon.

Long after the passing of the Act of 1691, and perhaps in consequence of it, the causeway formed an important feature of the roads. This causeway, or bridle-track, ran down the middle; while the margin on either side was little better than a ditch, and being lower than the adjoining soil, and at the same time soft and unmade, received and retained the sludge. But, in truth, the state of the roads concerned the Post Office far less at the close of the seventeenth century than it did at the close of the eighteenth. The mails were carried on horseback; and, even so, they were carried mainly over the six great roads of the kingdom. These roads, as compared with others, were good; and execrably bad as we might now think them, they were probably not altogether ill adapted to riding. The disasters which history refers to this period, as illustrating the difficulties of travelling, occurred generally on the cross-roads, and always with wheel traffic. For both wheel traffic and horse traffic the six great roads had, probably from the earliest times, been kept in some sort of repair. On the great Kent Road, nearly a hundred years before, a young Dane, with his attendants, had on horseback accomplished the distance between Dover and London in a single day.[17] In 1642 couriers had ridden from London to York and back, a distance of about 400 miles, in thirty-four hours,[18] a feat barely possible except on the assumption that the road was in tolerable order. Now and again, indeed, some postmaster, pleading for the remission of his debt to the Crown, would urge the losses he had sustained in horse-flesh by reason of the badness of the roads; but these roads were always cross-roads—roads along which, if he had delivered letters, he had delivered them on his own account. Of the six great roads as a means of transit for the mails there were no complaints.

It was when the Post Office required something to be done which involved transmission from place to place otherwise than on horseback that its troubles began. Such an event occurred in 1696. Sir Isaac Newton was then busy at the mint, devoting to the coinage those powers of intellect which were soon to astonish the world. The clipping of the coin had gone to such lengths that within the space of one year no less than four Acts of Parliament were passed with a view to abate the evil. Milled money was to take the place of hammered money. The clipped pieces had already been withdrawn from circulation, and now a date was fixed after which no broad pieces were to be received in payment of taxes except by weight. This date was the 18th of November, and collectors of the public revenue were allowed until the 18th of the following month to pay them over to the Exchequer. If not paid over by the 18th of December they were to be taken by weight and not by tale, and the collectors were to lose the difference.

Here was a clear month's grace, and the postmasters were under a strong inducement to see that the period was not exceeded. From Oxford the hammered money was sent by barge. No sooner had it started than a severe frost set in, and lasted for six weeks, the consequence being to delay the arrival in London until the 7th of January. To take the money by weight and not by tale would have been equivalent to a fine of about £23. From this, however, the postmaster was excused on the ground that the barge was the safest means of conveyance he could have employed. As a "flying coach"—a coach which travelled at the speed of about four miles an hour—had for many years been running between Oxford and London, it must be assumed either that it had stopped for the winter or else that for some cause or other, possibly on account of highwaymen, it was not considered safe. From Sandwich, in Kent, the hammered money was sent by hoy, which did not reach the Thames until the 20th of January. Again the postmasters-general urged that the delay might be overlooked on the ground that no earlier means of conveyance would have been safe. Altogether, when the 18th of December arrived, more than £1000 of hammered money was still outstanding in the postmasters' hands; and in every case the want of conveyance or the badness of the roads was assigned as the cause.

The penny post office, since it had passed into the hands of the Government, had undergone but little change. Its headquarters had been removed from Dockwra's house to seven rooms prepared for the purpose, not, indeed, at the Post Office in Lombard Street, where want of space was already beginning to be felt, but probably in the immediate neighbourhood. It had also, in the language of the time, been eased from a multitude of desperate debts. But the conditions on which it was conducted remained as they had been,—the same limit of weight, the same frequency of delivery, and the same rule as to compensation in case of loss. Dockwra, with the view, no doubt, of propitiating the authorities, had provided for the conveyance to Lombard Street of all general post letters left at his receiving offices; and this duty, when he was dispossessed, passed to the persons by whom those offices were kept. The result was not satisfactory. The receivers, in their desire to get the work done as cheaply as possible, employed to do it the most needy and most worthless persons, persons who could not get employment elsewhere. At length the miscarriages and losses became so frequent that the Post Office appointed its own messengers to go round and collect the letters. Nor is it by any means certain that the character of the receivers themselves was above suspicion. The plain truth is that they were, with few exceptions, keepers of public-houses. The collector who called there periodically to adjust accounts complained that often four and even five visits were necessary before he could obtain payment, and that the opportunity was taken to pass upon him bad money.

Times have changed indeed. With public-houses for receiving offices, with inn-keepers for postmasters, and with a considerable sum expended annually on drink and feast money, it can hardly be denied that the Post Office at the end of the seventeenth century was a good friend to the licensed victualler. At the present time no postmaster may keep an inn; no receiving office may be at a public-house; and not many years ago, when a hotel with its stock-in-trade was purchased with a view to the extension of the Post Office buildings in St. Martin's-le-Grand, some excellent persons were shocked because, under the sanction of the postmaster-general, were exposed for sale by auction some few dozen bottles of port.

Of the extent to which the penny post was used at this period we are not, so far as the suburbs are concerned, without some means of judging. According to the original plan, which had been adhered to in its integrity, one penny was to carry a letter within such parts of London as lay within the bills of mortality. Beyond these limits one penny more was charged; and this penny, which was technically called the second or deliver penny, constituted the messengers' remuneration. As this soon proved to be more than enough for its purpose, the messengers were put on fixed wages, and the second pennies were carried to the credit of the Post Office. Of the amounts derived from this source during the sixteen years from 1686 to 1702 a record is still extant. The lowest amount for any one year was £310, and the highest £377, the average being £336. It would hence appear that for such parts of London as lay outside the bills of mortality, for what in fact were at that time the suburbs, the number of letters at the end of the seventeenth century was about 80,640 a year, or, counting 306 working days to the year, about 263 a day.

On one point the postmasters-general were determined, that the penny post office should not be let out to farm. All overtures to this effect they resolutely declined. The penny post and the general post had become so interwoven, and, outside London, so short a distance separated the limits within which the one ceased and the other began to operate, that it was considered of the highest importance, both on the score of convenience and as a protection against fraud, that the two posts should not be under different management. The same considerations were not held to apply to Dublin. In Dublin, rapidly as that city was now growing in size[19] and population, a penny post, it was thought, could not possibly answer. Yet in 1703 a spirited lady sought permission to set one up. This was Elizabeth, Countess-Dowager of Thanet. A desire to supplement a jointure, originally slender and now reduced by the taxation consequent on the war, was the simple reason assigned for the enterprise, and yet with the highest professions of public spirit it might have been difficult to render to the community a more signal service. The Duke of Ormonde, who was then Lord Lieutenant, approved the proposal, and the postmasters-general had made preparations for carrying it into effect. The new post was to extend for ten or twelve miles in and around Dublin; no receiving office was to be within two miles of the first stage of the general post; the lease was to be for fourteen years; and one-tenth part of the clear profits was to go to the Crown. At the last moment, however, the Treasury withheld their assent, and for no less than seventy years from this time Dublin remained without a penny post.

Of the internal affairs of the Post Office during the first fifteen years of Cotton and Frankland's administration of it little need be said. At first their only assistant was a clerk at £40 a year to copy their letters. In 1694 they procured a new appointment to be created, the appointment of Secretary to the Post Office. The Secretary to the Post Office at the present time has duties to discharge, of the variety and importance of which his mere title gives a very inadequate idea. In 1694 he was little more than a private secretary. One thing indeed he had to do, to which a private secretary of our own time might perhaps demur. During the night, if an express were wanted, he had to rise from his bed and prepare the necessary instructions. The salary of the appointment, originally £100, was raised to £200 in 1703. In this year a solicitor was appointed, also at a salary of £200.

Two years later a transaction was completed on which the postmasters-general had long set their hearts. This was the purchase of a part of the Post Office premises in Lombard Street. As far back as 1688 Sir Robert Viner, the owner, had offered the freehold for sale, but the Revolution had put a stop to further proceedings. In 1694, after Sir Robert's death, his nephew and executor again proposed to sell, and Sir Christopher Wren, on behalf of the Crown, surveyed the property with a view to its purchase. On examination, however, the title proved to be defective, and it was not until 1705, after the defect had been remedied by Act of Parliament, that the Crown secured the freehold for the sum of £6500. At the present time it matters not where Post Office servants reside, so long as they attend punctually. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it was considered important on account of the unseasonable hours of attendance that they should reside "in and about" the Post Office. The Post Office was, in effect, a barrack, and, except the premises in Lombard Street, there were none in the immediate neighbourhood that would well answer the purpose. Hence the anxiety to purchase the freehold; and the anxiety was all the greater because it had been threatened that if not purchased by the Crown the property would be sold to the speculative builder or, as he was then called, the projector.

CHAPTER VII

COTTON AND FRANKLAND
Packet Service
1686-1713

Of the packet service prior to 1686 we have no particulars; but that some such service had long existed, though probably on a very limited scale, hardly admits of a doubt. To Ireland, as to other parts of the kingdom, a regular post had been established in 1635; and it is difficult to suppose that a mail on arriving at Holyhead would be left to a chance vessel to carry it across the Channel. The probability of some organised means of transport is still stronger in the case of Dover. Dover was the town through which all letters for the Continent passed; and our trade with the Continent had for a century and more been considerable. Hence it was that the post through the county of Kent had been carefully nursed while as yet no other part of the country had any post at all. But if, as seems certain, both Dover and Holyhead were packet stations long prior to 1686, it is almost equally certain that these were the only two in the kingdom.

In that year the arrangements, whatever they were, for carrying the mails between England and France came to an end, and a new service was established between Dover and Calais and between Dover and Ostend or Nieuport. This was succeeded in the following year by a similar service between England and Holland. Both services were to be carried on by contract. In the one case the contractor was to receive £1170 a year, and also to have the management of the letter office at Dover. In the other the payment was to be £900 a year, for which sum three hoys were to be maintained, two of sixty and one of forty tons, and carrying six men each. For the service to Holland the packet stations were, on this side of the water, Harwich, and, on the other, the Brill.

To the letters which came to this country by regular packet must be added those that were technically termed ship letters—letters which were brought by ships arriving at uncertain times from any part of the world. These letters, according to the provisions of the Act of 1660, were to be given up to the postmaster at the port of arrival, so that they might be forwarded to London, and thence despatched to their destination after being charged with the proper amount of postage. In this particular, however, the Act proved of little effect. Masters of ships were offered no inducement to deliver the letters to the postmaster, and incurred no penalty for omitting to do so. The Post Office was then in farm; and desirous as the farmers were to make what they could out of their undertaking, they soon found that it would be well worth their while to incur some expense which should secure obedience to the law. Accordingly they undertook that for every letter which a shipmaster should bring to this country, and deliver to the postmaster at the port of arrival, he should receive the sum of one penny. This was the origin of ship letter money—a form of payment which has since received legal sanction, and exists at the present day.

It was into the port of London that ship letters chiefly came, and here the number which found their way to the Post Office in Lombard Street was seriously affected by the establishment of the penny post. That this was only natural will appear from a simple illustration. From Marseilles to London the postage was 1s. for a single letter. On one hundred such letters, therefore, the charge would be £5. But if, instead of taking these hundred letters to the General Post Office, a shipmaster on his arrival in the Pool dropped them into the penny post, they would all be delivered for 8s. 4d. It is true that he would thus lose his gratuity of one penny a letter; but the difference between the two rates of postage was such as to leave an ample margin of profit, even after making him full—and more than full—compensation for his loss. Indeed, if he had been bent on cheating his employer as well as the Post Office, he might with very little risk of detection have put the whole of the difference into his own pocket. In 1686 the number of ship letters accounted for to the Post Office was 60,447,[20] a number which, forming as it did the basis of a payment, may be taken as absolutely correct, because the Post Office would take good care not to pay more, and shipmasters not to receive less, than was absolutely due. It is to be regretted that no similar account is forthcoming for previous years, so that it might be seen what was the extent of the influence which the penny post exercised; but that this influence was considerable is certain from the continual references made to it by successive postmasters-general during a long series of years. It is to be observed, however, that they always speak of it as a thing that was past and gone, a thing baneful enough while it lasted, but as having been of only short duration. The explanation is no doubt to be found in the fact that in 1696 two officers were appointed, whose duty it was to collect letters from all vessels arriving in the port of London. The boat employed in this service had assigned to it special colours of its own, on which was depicted a man on horseback blowing a post horn.[21]

In 1689, on the breaking out of the war with France, the Dover boats ceased to run, and, in order to provide for the letters to Spain which had hitherto passed through that country, a service was established between Falmouth and the Groyne. On this service two boats were employed of two or three hundred tons each. They carried from eighty to ninety men besides twenty guns, and ran once a fortnight.

The Harwich boats were at the same time increased both in number and in strength. The three hoys were replaced by four boats—boats of force as they were called, carrying fifty men each. It may well be believed that, with so large a crew under his command, the captain of a well-armed vessel was loth to confine himself to the monotonous task of carrying the mails to and fro, and went in quest of adventure. But be that as it may, William, who since his accession to the throne had taken an extraordinary interest in the Harwich service, was not satisfied with the performances of these boats. It was his opinion that the first requisite in a mail packet was speed and not strength. Strength might indeed enable it to engage an enemy, but speed would enable it to avoid one. Accordingly, by the King's direction, the Post Office with the assistance of Edmund Dummer, the Surveyor of the Navy, built four small boats of its own—boats "of no force," but remarkable for their speed. The change was not carried out without much grumbling. The boats were low built, and, except in the calmest weather, shipped a good deal of water. The sailors complained that they seldom, from one end of the voyage to the other, had a dry coat to their backs. The absence of any armament was still more unpalatable to them. They dared not leave the harbour, at least so they said, when the enemy was to windward; and, as though to confirm their words, they sometimes after leaving returned. We shall probably do them no wrong if we distrust these excuses. No British sailor, or soldier either, cares to turn his back on the foe, and that this was expected of them, that they were required to run and not to fight, we suspect to have been the real grievance. Eventually, but not until some had refused to serve and others had deserted, matters quieted down. An increase of wages was given all round, raising the pay above that given in the Royal Navy, and, in order to compensate for the additional cost, the complement of the crew was reduced from thirty to twenty-one. It is a striking confirmation of the soundness of William's view that during the next twenty-four years, although no less than nineteen of them were years of war, only two of these boats were taken.

Until 1689 the Harwich packets had been self-supporting, the receipts from freight and passengers being enough to cover the cost. In that year, as a consequence of the war, the fares were raised. Passengers to Holland who had hitherto paid 12s. were now to pay 20s., and those who had paid 6s. were to pay 10s. Recruits and indigent persons passed free. In 1695 the carriage of goods and merchandise was prohibited. This prohibition afterwards became common in times of war, but in the present instance it was imposed in the vain hope of stopping the exportation of silver. In exchange for silver, gold had long been pouring into the country, as much as 200 ounces coming by a single packet; and advices had been received from Amsterdam and Rotterdam that future consignments would not be restricted even to that quantity. The reform of the currency, which alone could check this movement of the precious metals, was expeditiously accomplished; but the prohibition against the carriage of merchandise remained.

On the conclusion of peace in 1697 the service between Dover and Calais and between Dover and Ostend recommenced, but only to be discontinued again on the resumption of hostilities in 1702. During these five years the relations between the English and French Post Offices had at no time been friendly, and latterly had become very highly strained. Under the terms of a Treaty concluded with France in 1698, the mails, as soon as they arrived on this side at Dover and on the other at Calais, were to be forwarded to the respective capitals by express. England faithfully fulfilled her part of the engagement. By France the engagement was treated as a dead letter. The mails from England, on their arrival at Calais, instead of being forwarded to Paris by express, were kept back for the ordinary post; and this post went only once a day, leaving at three in the afternoon. If, therefore, the packet arrived at four or five o'clock, the letters were detained for the best part of twenty-four hours. At Lyons the letters between England and Italy were being treated after much the same fashion. On arrival in that town—such at least was the complaint in the city—instead of being forwarded with all despatch, they were forwarded seldom in due course and sometimes not at all.

M. Pajot was then director of the French posts; and in this capacity he had signed the Treaty. In vain Cotton and Frankland called his attention to the breach of its provisions. Their letter was not even acknowledged. For the transit of British mails across French territory England had agreed to pay to France the sum of 36,000 livres[22] a year, and a remittance in payment of the instalment due was sent to Paris; but not even of this could an acknowledgment be obtained. Let the nature of the communication to him be what it would, Pajot maintained an obstinate silence. When war broke out afresh, all intercourse between the two Post Offices had ceased for nearly three years, and the debt due to France had accumulated to the amount of 105,600 livres.

The cessation of the Dover packets in 1702 was soon followed by that of the packets between Falmouth and the Groyne, but the want of any regular means of communication with the Peninsular proved so inconvenient that, before many months had passed, the service was re-established in a slightly altered form. The boats, instead of stopping short at the Groyne, were to run on to Lisbon; and two years later their number was increased from two to five. This increase was due to political rather than commercial reasons. It is true that an important commercial treaty was about this time concluded with Portugal; but, what was considered of far greater moment, the Archduke Charles after passing through London had recently proceeded to that country in furtherance of his pretensions to the throne of Spain. It was at once resolved that communication with Lisbon should henceforth be weekly instead of only once a fortnight, and for this purpose less than five boats were deemed insufficient.

But of all the packet services in existence at the beginning of the eighteenth century none perhaps possesses more features of interest than the service to the West Indies. In James the Second's reign a Post Office had been established in Jamaica, and rates of postage had been settled not only within the island itself but between the island and the mother country. This was a new departure. In the original scheme of postage as propounded by Witherings no charge had been imposed except in return for some service. The same principle had been scrupulously adhered to in the Acts of 1657 and 1660. Under these Acts, except where a service was rendered or where payment for a service was made to another country, no charge was provided for. Yet between England and Jamaica, although the Crown was not at the cost of maintaining means of transport, postage rates were fixed of 6d. a single letter, 1s. a double letter, and 2s. an ounce. This was a pure tax, and the precedent, bad as it was and of questionable legality, was soon extended to the case of letters to America.

The war of 1702, while deranging other services, called the service to the West Indies into being. The West India merchants, a designation even then in vogue, were a large and important body, and, as opportunities of intercourse by private ship became rare and uncertain, a demand arose for some established means of communication. With the assistance of Dummer, Surveyor of the Navy, sloops were provided to carry mails to the Plantation Islands, and by way of helping to defray the cost, the postage rates were increased by about one-half. The vessels sailed at uncertain intervals, but otherwise the service was performed with regularity, the voyage out and home occupying from 90 to 116 days.

Dummer was so well satisfied with the result of his management that, rather than continue as mere agent for the postmasters-general, he desired to perform the service on his own account. For the sum of £12,500 a year he undertook to provide a monthly communication, and for this purpose to build and equip five boats of 140 tons each, and carrying twenty-six men and ten guns. These boats were to have two decks, and any of them that should be lost or taken by the enemy were to be replaced at his own cost. Of the £12,500 no more than £4500 was to be paid down. Freight, which was limited to five tons out and ten tons home, passenger fares, and postage were to go in part payment, and from these Dummer expected to make up the difference. Postage alone he set down at £6000; and that it might produce this sum he made it an express stipulation that the rates to the West Indies should be raised to the same level as those to Portugal, namely 1s. 3d. a single letter, 2s. 6d. a double letter, and 6s. an ounce. To double the postage, he took for granted, was to double the returns. Abler men than he and men living nearer to our own times have fallen into the same error; but seldom, probably, has it been sooner or more strikingly exposed.

The new rates came into operation in England in March, and in the West Indies in April. The effect of the alteration, as would now be predicted with confidence, was only slightly to increase the amount of postage and largely to reduce the number of letters. It is so seldom that in matters of this kind cause and effect are brought into such close approximation, that we offer no apology for giving the postage which the correspondence produced immediately before and immediately after the change:—

To the West Indies.

From the West Indies.

Of course, the mails immediately after the change would carry what may be called surprised letters, letters which had been posted before the issue of the new regulations or before these regulations had become generally known; and the mail arriving in August would bring also the letters which had accumulated since the preceding April.

What at the present time is calculated to excite surprise is not that the aggregate amounts of postage should not have increased in proportion to the rates, but that these amounts should have been as high as they were. Trade with the West Indies was, no doubt, considerable. And yet, after making ample allowance on that score, of what sort can the correspondence have been to produce postage of between £300 and £400 by a single mail; and why should the amount in one direction have been nearly five times as heavy as the amount in the other? The answer, we think, is to be found in a letter which the postmasters-general wrote about this time. A small box for the Commissioners for the Sick and Wounded had come from Lisbon charged with postage of £26:2s. From this charge the Commissioners sought to be relieved on the ground that the box contained nothing but office accounts, which, besides being of no intrinsic value, were on Her Majesty's business. To such arguments, however, the postmasters-general turned a deaf ear. With the contents of the box they were not concerned. All they knew or cared to know was that it weighed eighty-seven ounces, and this weight, at the rate of 6s. an ounce, gave £26:2s. Forego the charge in the present instance, and how, they asked, could charges be any longer maintained on other packets not less on Her Majesty's business than this box, packets from the Prize Office, the Salt Office, the Customs and the Navy, and also, they added, on the large bundles of muster-rolls from the regiments stationed in the West Indies? In short, we entertain little doubt that the postage by the homeward mails was largely derived from official correspondence, correspondence which at the present time bears no postage at all.

The good fortune which had attended Dummer while acting as manager for the postmasters-general entirely deserted him as soon as the service came into his own hands. During the first twelve months the postage fell short of his expectations by about one-third; and freight and passengers, which he had estimated to produce £2000, produced little more than one-sixth of that amount. Nor was this the worst. The very first packet that sailed under his contract was taken by the enemy. Another, not many months later, was cast away on the rocks off the Island of Inagua; and a third fell into the hands of a privateer in the Channel. A series of disasters which would have daunted most men seems only to have inspired Dummer with fresh energy. Of the ultimate success of his undertaking he entertained no doubt. He held as strongly as we can hold at the present day, that trade and correspondence act and react upon each other; and that these should thrive he considered nothing more to be necessary than speed and regularity of communication.[23] With good heart, therefore, he applied himself to replace the boats which had been lost, fully determined that on his part no efforts should be wanting to supply the conditions on which alone he conceived success to depend.

The packet stations at this time were four in number. Dover was closed. Harwich and Falmouth were in full activity. Holyhead was a mere home station for the transmission of the Irish correspondence; and, the service being under contract, suffice it to say that the mails to Dublin went twice a week and were transported with marked regularity. Of the Harwich and Falmouth stations, managed as they were by the postmasters-general, we propose to give some account.

Each station was presided over by an agent, whose province it was to see that the packets were properly equipped and victualled, to arrange the order of sailing, to keep the captains to their duty, and generally to maintain order and regularity among the unruly spirits of which the establishment was composed. The outward mails, on their arrival from London, were to be despatched, if for Holland or for Portugal, immediately, and if for the West Indies, within two days; and, as soon as they were put on board, weights were to be attached to them so that they might be sunk at once if in danger of being taken by the enemy. So important was this precaution held to be that, although enjoined in the general instructions, it was continually insisted upon in particular cases. "Be sure," write the postmasters-general to one of their agents, "that before the captain sails, he prepares everything to sink the mail in case he shall be attacked by the enemy that he can't avoid being taken"; and to another, "We would have you take care to affix a sufficient weight to the mail so soon as 'tis on board"; and to a third, "We do not doubt but the mails will be ready slung with weights sufficient to sink them in case of danger of falling into the enemy's hands." Another rule to which the postmasters-general attached great importance was that more than two mails were not to go by the same boat. This rule, however, could not always be observed, for the boats had an awkward habit of finding themselves on the wrong side, and, by the time one had arrived, there was an accumulation of mails to be disposed of.

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]

The seamen on board the packets were paid in no case more than 30s. a month and generally less; but the employment carried with it one great advantage. This was exemption from impressment. Even the carpenters hired to do odd jobs when the boats were in harbour were furnished with protection orders.[26] Partly on this ground, and partly, no doubt, on account of the gains to be derived from contraband traffic, admission to the packet service appears to have been eagerly sought. At one time, indeed, it threatened to become a matter of patronage; but the consequences of a first step in that direction effectually prevented another. The Godolphin packet had been taken and carried by the enemy into St. Malo. Her captain, a brave and experienced officer, did not hesitate to attribute the loss of his vessel to sheer cowardice on the part of the crew. One, at the first shot that was fired, had run down to the doctor and declared that he was wounded, whereas no sign of a wound was to be found upon him; another had taken shelter behind the mainmast; a third had been heard to declare that he would not hazard the loss of his little finger to save the packet. This conduct, as unprecedented as it was scandalous, led to a searching investigation, when it transpired that the so-called sailors were, many of them, no sailors at all, but mere landlubbers who had been taken on out of complaisance to the local gentry.

Each packet boat carried its own surgeon. A surgeon was also provided for the care of the sick on shore. This medical supervision was remunerated by means of a capitation allowance, an allowance of so much per head; but whereas it would now be in respect to all persons under the surgeon's charge, whether well or ill, it was then only in respect to those that were ill—1s. a day for each sick person and 6s. 8d. for each cure—a mode of payment which did not perhaps conduce to a speedy recovery. To provide for casualties, a fund was established, towards the support of which each seaman contributed 10d. a month out of his pay. If he were killed in action, provision was made for his widow, and, if he were wounded, he received a small annuity or, as it was called, Smart and Bounty money, the amount of which was nicely apportioned to the nature of his injury. Thus—

It is a ghastly bill of fare; and yet the sailors laid great store by it. On one occasion, indeed, until assured that the transfer of a boat to Dummer's management would not affect their claim to these annuities, they absolutely refused to go to sea.

With few exceptions, no passenger was allowed on board a packet boat without a pass from the Secretary of State. The exceptions were shipwrecked seamen, recruits, and officers in charge of recruits. Shipwrecked seamen went free, free from any charge for passage-money or for maintenance. Recruits and officers in charge of recruits not being above the rank of lieutenant were charged for maintenance but not for passage-money. All others, though furnished with a passport, paid or were expected to pay for both.

Of these rules, however, there would seem to have been no public announcement, and this led to constant dispute and bickerings. An interesting event was expected in one of the many English families which at this time flocked to the Court of Portugal, and Dr. Crichton was despatched to Lisbon with a cow. Furnished with a pass by the Secretary of State he stoutly maintained his right to a free passage; and this right the postmaster-general as stoutly disputed. Nor, assuming the right to exist, could they conceal their surprise that under the circumstances it should have been claimed. To demur to a paltry charge of £4 indeed! Was it not notorious that for his mission to Portugal he was to receive £1000? Lord Charlemont with a number of attendants had crossed from Lisbon to Falmouth. The passage-money had been paid, and, pleased with his entertainment, he desired to gratify the captain. The captain's answer was to present a bill shewing what the entertainment had cost, and, on payment being refused, he detained some valuable silks which Lord Charlemont had consigned to his care. Lord Charlemont, on his arrival in London, at once proceeded to Lombard Street and complained of this treatment, when he learned for the first time that the passage-money, which he had supposed to cover everything, was simply the Queen's due, and that his entertainment had been provided at the captain's own cost.

Even the packet agents themselves appear to have been insufficiently instructed. On one occasion the Queen's domestic servants on their return from Lisbon, whither they had been despatched in attendance on the Archduke Charles, were allowed to pass free. On another, passage-money was omitted to be collected from some workmen who had been sent to Portugal by the Board of Ordnance. In both cases the act of their subordinate was repudiated by the postmasters-general. Proper as it might be that the Queen's domestic servants should have their passage provided—was this to be done at the expense of the Post Office? Forego payment in this instance, and where were they to stop? They must press their demand; and the demand was eventually satisfied. From the Board of Ordnance they did not even attempt to recover, aware probably of the futility of any such step; but the act of their agent in letting the workmen pass free evoked an earnest remonstrance. Does not the Board of Ordnance, they asked, charge us for the very powder we use; and yet, forsooth, you take upon yourself to give to their workmen a free passage. "Every office," they added—and the maxim might still, perhaps, be observed with advantage—"ought to keep its own accompt distinct."

But it was with officers of the army who were continually passing to and fro that the most frequent disputes arose. They apparently did not understand, and possibly the Post Office might have had some difficulty in explaining, why lieutenants in charge of recruits should be exempt from payment of fare and not officers of higher rank when employed on similar business; or why indeed officers engaged in fighting their country's battles should not have a free passage on board Her Majesty's packets. It had been the custom not to collect the fares until the end of the voyage; but it was found that, the voyage once accomplished, payment of the fares was not uncommonly refused. Accordingly it was determined that they should be collected beforehand, and that no officer not being a recruiting officer and producing a certificate to that effect should be received on board on trust. Recourse was thereupon had to every sort of artifice in order to evade payment. Officers above the rank of lieutenant would represent themselves as being of that rank, and they would even enrol their own servants as recruits to make it appear that they were engaged in recruiting business.

Through Harwich, now that Dover was closed, lay the only route to the Continent; and among the passengers frequenting this route were some to whom, for one reason or another, special attention was given. Baron Hompesch and Brigadier-General Cadogan are on their way to Holland. The packet is to be detained "till Thursday noon, at which time they think to reach Harwich." M. Rosenerantz, the Danish envoy, is returning to his own country. No passengers are to be admitted on board until he and his suite have been accommodated. A Queen's messenger is coming with "one Castello," who is in custody. This person is to be made over to the captain of the packet that sails next, and on arrival at the Brill is to be set on shore. Dirick Wolters is expected from Holland, if indeed he be not already arrived and secreted in Harwich. No pains are to be spared to discover and apprehend him, and to secure the sealed box he carries "directed to a person of note in London."

Goods, like passengers, were not allowed to be carried by the packets without the express permission of the Secretary of State; and this permission was seldom given except in the case of presents to royal personages and of articles for the use of persons of note residing abroad. Hence, such things as the following were being continually consigned to the care of the postmasters-general, with a request that they might be forwarded by the next boat:—

Fifteen couple of dogs for the King of the Romans.

Necessaries for Her Majesty the Queen-Dowager's service at Lisbon.

Three pounds of tea from Lady Arlington for the use of Her Majesty the Queen-Dowager of England.

Two cases of trimming for the King of Spain's liveries.

Two bales of stockings for the use of the Portuguese Ambassador.

Three suits of clothes for some nobleman's ladies at the Court of Portugal.

A box of medicines for the use of the Earl of Galway.

As the packets and everything on board of them were exempt from examination by the Customs authorities, there are no means of knowing how far a pass, where a pass had been obtained, was confined to its ostensible object. But it is impossible not to entertain suspicions on the subject. On one occasion the Portuguese envoy obtained permission to send by the packet six cases, which he certified to contain arms for the use of his Sovereign. The lightness of the packages when brought to the scale excited suspicion, and on examination they were found to contain not arms but dutiable goods. To a tradesman at Truro, in exception to rule, a pass had been granted which authorised him to send by the Lisbon packet ten tons of hats. Ten tons weight of hats, or what purported to be hats, had long been exported, and yet more and more hats were being regularly despatched by every packet.

But although without passes goods and passengers were prohibited on board the packets, it is certain that the prohibition was habitually infringed. The packet agents' instructions were to keep a record of the names and quality of all passengers, and to transmit a copy to London. Even if this were a complete and faithful record, the postmasters-general could not know that each passenger had produced his pass. The Secretaries of State, however, appear to have possessed some means of information unknown to the Post Office, and, in the matter of passengers, they were continually complaining of the regulations being broken. At one time it is Mr. Joseph Percival, a merchant of Lisbon, who comes over without a passport—which, from the tenor of Lord Sunderland's letter, the postmasters-general apprehend to be "an affair of moment." At another it is a Mr. Jackson who, also without a passport, crosses from Harwich to Holland. In this case Mr. Secretary Boyle affirms that the packet agent received a bribe of two guineas. To let passengers come by the Harwich packets without passports, he declares later on, has become a common practice.

In the matter of goods the evidence of irregularity is still stronger. Captain Culverden of the Queen packet boat brings into Falmouth thirty-six bags and seven baskets of salt, and there lands it clandestinely. Captain Rogers smuggles over twenty bags and one cask of the same material. Captain Urin from the West Indies makes Plymouth instead of Falmouth. Stress of weather is pleaded in excuse; but the postmasters-general feel sure that he might have made Falmouth, had he not "had private instructions otherwise." "We are uneasie," they say, "thus to find the West India boats for the most part driven to Plymouth, or to Liverpool or some port contrary to what is prescribed by our instructions."

But of all the captains there was none who in the audacity of his proceedings equalled Francis Clies. Clies had recently succeeded his father in the command of the Expedition packet boat. On his very first voyage home from Lisbon he was much behind time, having according to his own account been driven upon the coast of Ireland. On his second voyage he was later still. The time of his arrival at Falmouth had long passed, and serious apprehensions began to be entertained for his safety. At length a letter came from him dated at Kinsale, explaining that want of provisions had obliged him to put in there. "We have," wrote the postmasters-general, "very impatiently expected the arrival of the Expedition, which has been very long wanting, and are much concerned to find the second voyage even more tedious than the first; but are glad to find her at last safe arrived." "We would know," they added, "for how many days provisions had been put on board, and whether the Expedition sails not as well as formerly." Before a reply could be received to this pertinent inquiry, the Commissioners of Customs had lodged at the Post Office a formal complaint, in which Captain Clies was charged with bringing over from Ireland several bales of friezes and other woollen manufactures. The postmasters-general were deeply shocked. Not only was this a breach of the packet boat regulations, but to transport goods from what would now be one part of the United Kingdom to another was at that time prohibited by law under heavy penalties. If this charge be proved, they wrote to their packet agent at Falmouth, "we shall not be much to seek why the captain should be two succeeding voyages forced upon the coast of Ireland, when we have not had above one instance of that kind besides himself during this war." Narrow as was Clies's escape on this occasion, not four months elapsed before the postmasters-general were again condoling with him on another "very tedious voyage."

It may here be mentioned, as an instance of the inconsistency of human nature, that, although the packets were not provided with chaplains, there were two boats on board of which prayers were regularly said every morning and evening, and that of these two boats the Expedition was one.

Outwards as well as inwards the packet boats were, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, carrying goods in defiance of regulation and of law. Sir Paul Methuen, the author of the famous Commercial Treaty which bears his name, was at that time our ambassador to Portugal. His attention had been arrested by the large quantities of merchandise which the packet boats were continually bringing over from England, and in 1705 he made to the postmasters-general a formal representation on the subject. "In Lisbon," he stated, "there is a public market for English goods as often as the boats come in." Nor was the allegation denied by the persons implicated. They must, they said, live somehow. And this plea, generally the refuge of the idle and worthless, had in it in the present instance more force than might at first be supposed. The crews of the packets were paid only once in six months, and, as a check upon their conduct, six months' pay was always kept in arrear. Thus, before receiving any pay at all they had to work twelve months, and even at the expiration of twelve months there was not always money at hand with which to pay them.

At Harwich, there can be no doubt, the same malpractices were going on as at Falmouth; but, owing to the almost unequalled facilities which the east coast affords for clandestine traffic, detection less speedily followed. In the movements of the packet boats there was much that was mysterious. Their frequent disappearance for long periods together when the wind was blowing from the quarter most favourable to their return, and their occasional punctuality when the wind was contrary and they were least expected, involved a contradiction which the postmasters-general found it hard to reconcile. "In our whole experience," they wrote to the packet agent on the 3rd of October 1704, "the passage of the mails was never so unconstant as it has been this last year." "You must be very sensible what reproach we have been brought under" in consequence. The ink was hardly dry on their pen before information reached them that on the 2nd of the month two packet boats had returned to Harwich, of which one had been gone since the 10th and the other since the 19th of September. Meanwhile the winds had been fair, and had carried out the men-of-war and transports from Spithead. "We have writ you so often," wrote the postmasters-general to the laggard captains, "upon these neglects of yours," and you have paid so little regard to our admonitions, that "you may expect to find when too late that we are not to be trifled with." The effect of this caution, if effect it had, was of short duration. "We are," they wrote only a few months later, "under a perpetual uneasiness and distrust," on account of the irregularity of the Harwich boats. "Our reputation has very much suffered in consequence, and we are looked upon at Court as remiss in our duty." Hitherto we have ever been ready to "take any appearance of reason or probability to excuse the commanders, but do now, having had these frequent provocations so often repeated, resolve to do justice to ourselves, and to have no other regard than the merit of the service." "Pray make inquiries," they say on another occasion, when no less than three boats are unaccountably behind time. It is of no use writing to Mr. Vanderpoel, "for he always favours the captains' pretences." Mr. Vanderpoel was packet agent at the Brill. He had stood high in William's favour, and was still drawing an allowance of £100 a year which, as an act of grace, that King had bestowed upon him in addition to his salary. "When we last waited on the Lord High Treasurer and Secretary of State," wrote the postmasters-general again on the 14th of June 1705, "we found them in their former opinion that there must be some secret more than ordinary that the boats should so frequently when least expected make their passage, and when the winds have in all appearance been most favourable, the mails then most delayed." A secret no doubt there was; but, profoundly dissatisfied as the postmasters-general were, no suspicion appears to have crossed their minds that the packet boats were engaged in other and more exciting pursuits than the transport of mails.

The captains of the packet boats were strictly forbidden to give chase. Their instructions were to fight, if fight they must, to avoid fighting wherever possible, and in no case to go in quest of adventure. In the case of the Falmouth boats, carrying as they did a considerable number of men and of guns, there can be little doubt that the prohibition was habitually infringed. Even Cotton and Frankland, with all their credulity, would seem to have entertained suspicions on the point; and yet when notice was given them that a fat prize had been captured, their instincts as Englishmen prevailed, and with a chuckle of satisfaction they would accept the result of their servants' prowess without too minutely inquiring into the circumstances under which that result had been achieved. "Well done," they would say in effect. "We heartily congratulate you. It has indeed been a tedious voyage; but of course you did not pursue. This, as you are aware, would be contrary to our instructions, which are to do nothing that might retard or endanger Her Majesty's mails. We shall make known your gallantry to the Lord High Treasurer, and move His Royal Highness the Prince to bestow on you some signal mark of favour." The Prince was at this time Lord High Admiral, and the captains of the packet boats having only sailing commissions, were not, like the captains in the Royal Navy and the commanders of letters of marque, entitled as of right to the prizes they took. These were the perquisites of the Lord High Admiral, and were by him resigned to the Queen.

When a prize was captured, it was seldom taken in tow. This would have retarded the progress of the mails. The practice was for the two captains, the victor and the vanquished, to agree upon the amount of ransom, and to give and receive bills for the amount, one or more hostages being taken as security for payment. The agreement was reduced to writing and made out in duplicate, so that each captain might have a copy, and it set forth where and to whom the money was to be paid. As a rule, the conditions appear to have been honourably observed. Some few exceptions, no doubt, there were. In 1708 the James packet was captured, and, after the amount of ransom had been inserted in the agreement, the French captain fraudulently altered the figures. A still worse case occurred on the English side. The Prince packet boat captured a vessel which was ransomed for 2500 pieces of eight.[27] This vessel, as it afterwards transpired, was plundered both before and after the ransom was agreed upon; and, more than this, the English captain refused or neglected to give her a protection order, the consequence being that, subsequently falling in with some merchant ships, she was taken and plundered again. But these were exceptions, and it is some satisfaction to know that the last-mentioned captain was soon driven out of the service.[28]

Pending payment of the ransom, the hostages were kept in prison. Ordinarily, their confinement was not of long duration; and if we cite an instance to the contrary, it is because it aptly illustrates the rough-and-ready sort of justice which was administered in those days. Clies, the captain of the Expedition, after many desperate engagements in which he had come off victorious, had been forced at last to strike his colours. Four French men-of-war had surrounded him, and having lost his masts, he had no choice but to yield. The ransom agreed upon was £550, and as security for payment of this amount the master of the Expedition and Clies's son, who was a midshipman on board the same vessel, were taken as hostages. This was in February, and they did not return to England until November. Meanwhile they had been imprisoned at Cadiz, where they endured the severest privations. Cold and damp and the want of the common necessaries of life, while affecting the health of both, had permanently disabled the master and brought him to the point of death. This appeared to the postmasters-general to be a case for compensation. And yet whence was compensation to come? They were not long in solving the question. It was a mere accident, they argued, that these particular hostages had been selected. The selection might have fallen upon any others of the ship's company. Yet these others had been receiving their pay and enjoying their liberty. Surely it was for them to compensate those at whose cost they had themselves escaped captivity and its attendant horrors. Accordingly the ship's company were mulcted in a whole month's pay, amounting to £118, of which sum the midshipman received £20 and the master £98; and the decision appears to have evoked neither murmur nor remonstrance.

In one respect the two packet stations were conducted on different principles. At Falmouth the agent was also victualler. At Harwich victuals and all other necessaries were provided by the Post Office. Neither plan was entirely free from objection. Where the agent was victualler, he naturally desired to make what he could out of his contract; and hence arose frequent complaints from the seamen as to both the quantity and quality of their food. Nor were such undertakings well adapted to those days of violent fluctuations of prices. The years 1709 and 1710 were years of scarcity, during which the cost of all provisions was nearly doubled. Fortunately, when the first of these years arrived, the packet agent's contract to victual for a daily allowance of 7d. a head had just expired, or the consequences to him or to the seamen must have been disastrous. But, from a public point of view, the chief drawback to the union of the offices of agent and victualler was that the victualling arrangements were apt to interfere with the movements of the boats. The Prince packet boat was due to start on a particular day, and to an inquiry whether she would not be ready, the answer which the postmasters-general received was, "No; our beer is not yet brewed."

At Harwich the inconvenience of a contrary system, a system under which the Post Office undertook its own victualling, was illustrated in a striking manner. There no bill for provisions represented what the provisions had really cost. To the actual cost was habitually added a further sum, which, under the name of percentages, went into the pockets of those by whom the order had been given. Of the extent to which these overcharges were carried we are not informed in the particular case of victuals; but other cases in which information is given will perhaps serve as a guide. Holland-duck for the use of the packet boats was brought over from Holland freight-free. Yet in Harwich the Post Office was charged for it 2s. 2d. a yard. In London a yard of the same material, freight included, cost 2s. In London the price of 1 cwt. of cordage was 30s.; in Harwich it was 40s. For piloting a packet boat from Harwich to the Downs the Post Office was charged £7. Inquiry at the Admiralty elicited that for ships of the same size belonging to the Royal Navy the charge never exceeded £3:15s. The plain truth seems to be that both at Harwich and at Falmouth the packet agents were in the power of the captains, and the captains in the power of the packet agents, and that they all combined to impose upon the postmasters-general.

Of the number of letters which the Harwich and Falmouth packets carried we know little or nothing. In the one case we have absolutely no information. In the other there remains on record a single letter-bill applicable to a particular voyage. Of this letter-bill we will only observe that, for reasons immaterial to the present purpose, it became the subject of a good deal of correspondence, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that, had the number of letters entered in it been much above or much below the average, the point could hardly have escaped remark. The document is as follows:—

28 April 1705.

Received on board the Prince Packet Boat the following Packets and letters.

Zech: Rogers ... Commander.

From my Lord Ambassador ... a Bag of Letters directed to Mr.
Jones.[29]
Sixteen Packetts and letters for Her Majestie's Service.
From the King of Spain ... a very large Packett.
For London and Holland ... Double and Single letters ... Two
hundred and ninety six.
Thirteen Packetts Do.
Devonshire letters ... Double and Single ... Twenty nine ... and
three Packetts.
For Falmouth ... Double and Single letters ... six.
Two mails for London.

Outward-bound.
No Passengers.
Homeward-bound.
One English Merchant.
Three Dutch Gentlemen.

Four poor sailors discharged from Her Majestie's Ship Antelope
being incapable for the Service.

There were persons who thought that the packet boats might well be employed to do something more than carry to and fro a mere handful of letters. Among those who held this opinion was Colonel Stanwix. He contended that the Lisbon packets should be required to carry not only the mails, but recruits for the English forces in Portugal. By transport the fixed charge for each recruit was £4. This expense would be saved to the public, and the regiments would receive additions to their strength not fitfully, but at regular intervals. Subject to certain conditions, the postmasters-general resolved to give the plan a trial. The conditions were that not more than fifty recruits should go in one boat, and that, instead of passing free, as Colonel Stanwix had proposed, they should be charged £1 apiece—that is, 10s. for victualling, and 10s. for freight. The experiment was attended with deplorable results. It was midwinter. The recruits had been huddled together in Pendennis Castle, under a strong guard, to prevent desertion. Half-naked and only half-fed they were led or driven to the boat, and hardly were they on board before the distemper broke out among them. Many fell victims to it; many others, on arrival at Lisbon, were carried to the hospital, and even the strongest among them were barely able to stagger ashore. The return voyage was hardly less disastrous. The crew now took the disease, and as they lay dying and dead upon the deck, a vessel of French build was to be seen bearing down upon them. Resistance in the circumstances was out of the question, and nothing remained but to save the guns. These, ten in number, were with difficulty thrown overboard, and no sooner was the task accomplished than the vessel, which had by this time come within speaking distance, proved to be Her Majesty's ship Assurance.

The liberty allowed to the Royal Navy to employ for its own purposes prizes taken at sea did not extend to the packet service. The Post Office was forbidden, under severe penalties, to use foreign bottoms. Often had convenience and economy to yield to the stern dictates of the law. Now it is a French shallop, admirably adapted for a packet boat, which has to be discarded simply because it is French; and now an express to Lisbon is on the point of being delayed because the regular packets are on the wrong side, and the only boat to be hired in Falmouth is not English built.

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]

After the battle of Ramillies, which put the Confederates in possession of Ostend, the packet service between England and Flanders, which had been suspended four years before, was re-established. The result disappointed expectations. The Government appear to have thought that it was only necessary to revive the service and the correspondence would at once resume its old proportions. But meanwhile the letters from Flanders to England had found a new channel. No sooner had Ostend been closed than they were diverted through Holland. To reverse this arrangement, involving as it would a readjustment of the internal posts, must, in any case, have been a work of time; and it was a work on which the Flemish authorities were little likely to embark so long as the neighbourhood of Ostend or any considerable portion of it remained in the enemy's hands. Of all this the postmasters-general were perfectly well aware, and they can have felt no disappointment that, on the first reopening of the Ostend route, the letters passing that way were extremely few; but the ministers, who had not the postmaster-generals' experience to guide them, grew impatient with a service which was maintained at heavy cost, and produced little or no return. Accordingly, having restored the service in June, they discontinued it in August; and no sooner were the boats dispersed than orders were given to restore it again.

This sudden change of purpose, we think there can be little doubt, was due to the influence of the Duke of Marlborough, who began about this time to take a lively interest in the postal communication with Flanders. Though not surprised at the meagreness of the correspondence, the postmasters-general were little prepared to find that, after the Confederates became masters of Ostend, the passage between that port and Dover would be even less safe than it had been before. Yet such was the case. The Flemish seamen, no longer able to obtain employment at home, flocked across the French border and joined with their foes of yesterday in preying upon the English shipping. As a consequence the Channel now swarmed with privateers. On the 25th of January a Dover packet, named Ostend after the port to which she ran, was taken by a Nieuport privateer of ten guns and eighty men. The captain who brought this intelligence had himself had a narrow escape. Five privateers had extended themselves from Nieuport to Ostend in order to intercept him, and, after a sharp engagement, in which he was nearly captured, had forced him to make Harwich.

In this conjuncture the postmasters-general acted with remarkable energy, but with little regard to what would now be considered official propriety. Not content with making representations to the Secretary of State, they wrote direct to the English ambassador at the Hague, desiring him to urge upon the States of Flanders and Brabant the necessity of at once fitting out three or four ships of the Ostend squadron, with the twofold object of recalling the seamen to their duty and of clearing the coast. They at the same time waited upon M. Van Vrybergh, the envoy extraordinary from the States-General to the Court of St. James', and exacted from him a promise that he would exercise his influence in the same direction. But relief was soon to come, and from an unexpected quarter. Lewis the Fourteenth, by way of creating a diversion in the Netherlands, resolved to assist the Pretender in making a descent upon Scotland, and with this view he assembled a squadron before Dunkirk. England had no choice but to follow suit. Within an incredibly short space of time she equipped a fleet, and this fleet, under the command of Sir George Byng, left Deal for Dunkirk in the spring of 1708. How the Pretender evaded Byng, and how Byng pursued the Pretender and frustrated his object, are matters of history; but what concerns us at the present moment is that, before starting in pursuit, Byng detached a squadron for the purpose of bringing over some of the English troops which were about to be embarked at Ostend. It is probable that this squadron, after its immediate object had been accomplished, remained in or about the Channel, for after this time we hear no more of depredations on the Post Office packets.

Experience shews that there is a class, and not an inconsiderable class, of persons who, in time of war, find it hard to reconcile themselves to the pursuits of peace. John Macky, the packet agent at Dover, was one of these. The proximity of the battle-field, its easy access from Dover, and the stirring accounts arriving by every packet fired his imagination and filled him with martial ardour. Under the influence of this excitement he addressed a memorial to the postmasters-general, praying that he might be commissioned to go over to Flanders and settle posts for the army. This application he appears to have supported by the most unfortunate arguments. He urged not that it was a thing in itself reasonable and proper that the army should have posts of its own, and that his experience might be useful in establishing them, but that at Dover, though his salary was comparatively high, he had little or nothing to do, and that the commission for which he asked would give him employment more congenial to his tastes. The postmasters-general could not conceal their astonishment at the audacity of the proposal and the grounds on which it was based. "We were never before made sensible," they wrote, "that the business of the agent to the packet boats at Dover was so very inconsiderable as you have represented it to be, nor do we think that for so inconsiderable a business so high a salary can be needed." "We can only say," they added, "that if the present allowance be too much for the work, or if the employ be too mean for your expectations, we doubt not but that we shall be able to find those who will thankfully accept the post with an allowance that is much less."

But Macky's restlessness was not to be subdued by a mere admonition. As he could not prevail on the postmasters-general to send him to Flanders on official business, he asked to be allowed to go on his own account. This permission they readily gave, accompanying it, however, with a remarkable caution. "We must expect," they said, "that you do not intermeddle in any ways upon the business of the Flanders correspondence, or enter into any sort of treaty for the port of letters or jobbing of places which may bring us under any inconveniencys or our authority under any disreputation. We expect you take particular caution of these matters and wish you a good journey."

Within four months from the date of this caution Macky's relations to the Post Office had greatly altered. To the position of packet agent he now added that of contractor, having undertaken himself to provide for the Dover and Ostend service. For the sum of £2000 a year he was to supply four boats between twenty and thirty tons each, and to be at all risks from sea and enemy. One effect of this arrangement, by which Macky the contractor was to be controlled by Macky the packet agent, was to prolong his visit to Flanders. Under the pretext of keeping the captains to their duty he remained there until March or April 1708, when he returned to England, after an absence of eight or nine months. Meanwhile the packets to Ostend, like those to Holland and to Portugal, had been engaged in illicit practices. According to a complaint received from the Commissioners of Customs immediately before Macky's return, clandestine traffic was being systematically carried on, and the very last boat that had arrived had brought parcels of lace concealed in the flap of the mail. The postmasters-general were deeply annoyed. "Let this go on," they exclaimed, "and the mails themselves will be searched, to the great scandal of the office and of our management."

We have been thus particular in recording Macky's movements, because in connection with the service under his control an incident now occurred which brought the Post Office into serious discredit. The postmasters-general, in virtue of their office, which gave them control over the communications of the country, were in the habit of receiving priority of intelligence; and this at a time when intelligence travelled slowly and the means of disseminating it did not exist or existed only in the rudest form. Hence they acquired an importance which the mere office of postmaster-general, as that office is now understood, would not have conferred. An interest attached to them as to men who were reputed to possess exclusive information. They were welcome at Court, and not only welcome but often anxiously expected. Indeed, to act as purveyor of news to the Court had come to be regarded as one and by no means the least important of their duties; and with a view to its more effectual discharge their agents throughout the country had standing orders to send to headquarters the earliest intimation of any remarkable event that might happen in their locality. When any one of these persons was venturesome enough to send to his chiefs a present, the thanks he received were of the coldest,—"We thank you for the snuff," or, "We thank you for the port wine," and then was pretty sure to follow a sharp rebuke for some trifling irregularity, which, except for the present, would probably have passed unnoticed. But when a piece of news was sent, the thanks were warm and hearty; and woe betide the unfortunate agent who had news to send and omitted to send it. "We observe you give us no advice of the fleet under Sir George Byng being seen off Falmouth the 28th, tho' we saw letters from Falmouth which advised thereof. We are desirous to have the first advice of any remarkable news." "We received two Flanders mails on Sunday morning, and therewith your letter of the 5th advising of the Duke of Marlborough's being arrived at Flushing, for which account we thank you." "We do heartily congratulate your safe return, and do thank you for being so full and particular in the advices you have given us of what occurrences have come to your knowledge." "We are obliged to you for the news of the Nassau and Burford's prizes of which we had received advice before by some galleys from Gibraltar, and for your kind promise of communicating to us any considerable occurrences that may happen in your parts." "We thank you for sending us an account of all news and remarkable occurrences in your letters which we desire may be sent in the mails or annext to the labels." "We cannot but take very ill the captain's conduct on this occasion, for Mr. Bowen's intentions in sending his son over to bring so great a piece of news as that of the victory[31] to us ought to be esteemed as a great piece of civility, and, if the captain had not refused to sail when Mr. Bowen pressed him, we might have had the satisfaction of carrying the first account of that victory."

It was in the early summer of 1709, when this greed after news was at its height, that intelligence of vast import to the country was expected to arrive in London. Preliminaries of peace, after being arranged in Flanders, had been forwarded to Paris for confirmation. Would the King sign them? Or must the war which had already lasted more than six years be continued? A period of anxious suspense followed. The exhaustion of France, and the humiliating terms which were sought to be imposed upon her, made it certain that there would be neither ready acceptance nor ready rejection; and yet the latest date had passed on which a decision was expected and none had arrived. London was in a fever of expectation. Each mail from Ostend, as it reached the Post Office in Lombard Street, was eagerly seized and opened. The month of May was drawing to a close. On Saturday the 28th there was not only no news but no mail. Sunday came and, to the consternation of the postmasters-general, there was still no mail. The wind was in the right quarter. At Harwich the packets from Holland were arriving regularly. What could hinder the passage from Ostend? At length on Monday the 30th a mail arrived, and with it the news. The King had refused to sign the preliminaries of peace. Frankland and Evelyn[32] hurried off to the Lord Treasurer. Little were they prepared for the reception that awaited them. Godolphin's words have unfortunately not been preserved, but we know the substance of them. The news, he said, had reached the city the day before, having been conveyed there clandestinely. The packet agent or sub-agent at Ostend had sent it. Of this he held in his hand conclusive evidence. What means had been employed, and whether others were concerned in the nefarious transaction, it was for his hearers to ascertain; and the sooner they addressed themselves to the task the better. In short, the power of the purse had again prevailed, and the Post Office had been outwitted by the Stock Exchange.

It is difficult to suppose that the intelligence can have been conveyed from Ostend to London without Macky's connivance. And yet Frankland and Evelyn believed or affected to believe that he had had no hand in the business. Their position was, no doubt, one of embarrassment. Organised as the Post Office then was, they possessed no means of making an independent investigation. They contented themselves, therefore, with calling upon Macky to ascertain and report how it was that a letter from Ostend had reached London on Sunday, although on that day there had been no mail. The result might easily have been foreseen. Brown, the sub-agent at Ostend, whose letter it was, stood self-condemned, and Macky was required to dismiss him. And here the scandal ended. Macky's own character, with himself as reporter, may be presumed to have been cleared. At all events he appears to have been taken back into confidence, and, before many weeks were over, the postmasters-general had despatched him on an important mission.

This mission was no other than to lay down posts for the army in Flanders. The tardiness with which intelligence arrived from the seat of war had long been matter of complaint. In the city especially the dissatisfaction had been intense, and the recent scandal had not been calculated to allay it. With a view to remedy this state of things, Godolphin called upon the postmasters-general to devise some means for securing more rapid communication. The army was now in the neighbourhood of Lisle, and operations were about to begin anew. There was, therefore, no time to be lost. The postmasters-general had recourse to Macky, and in a few days he produced a plan with which Godolphin expressed himself highly pleased. Between Lisle and Ostend, and between Ostend and other places where the army might be, stages were to be settled; at each stage were to be relays of horses with postilions ready to start at any moment; responsible persons were to be appointed to collect and deliver the letters and to receive the postage; and the postage was to be regulated by distance and to be at the same rates as in England, and to go to the English Post Office.

Macky, to his extreme gratification, was commissioned to carry out his own plan. He was to repair at once to Flanders, to report himself to the Duke of Marlborough, and, having obtained his sanction, to proceed with the arrangement of details. Above all, he was to keep a close watch upon the sailing of the packets from Ostend, and to insist upon a rigid punctuality. From this time no more complaints were heard of the tardy arrival of intelligence from the seat of war. As postilions were employed on one side of the water, so expresses were employed on the other; and these, with punctual sailings between port and port, constituted a service which for those days might be considered excellent.

At first, indeed, the employment of expresses from Dover to London appears to have been a little overdone, and the postmasters-general, eager as they were to obtain early intelligence, found it necessary to regulate the practice. An express had arrived bringing a letter from Macky in Flanders. "Altho' we should be very well satisfied," they wrote to his deputy at Dover, "to receive an extraordinary piece of good news by a messenger hired for greater dispatch' sake, yet on ordinary occasions it might be more warrantable and make less noise and expectation to have the same sent by a flying pacquet under cover to us annext to the labell." This was written in August 1709, within six weeks of Macky's arrival in Flanders; and we know of no passage in the whole of the Post Office records which more forcibly brings home to us the difference between the London of to-day and the London of 180 years ago. Crowds no longer congregate at the doors of the Post Office eagerly waiting for news; nor is the neighbourhood of St. Martin's-le-Grand transported with excitement at the approach of a man on horseback.

On the cessation of hostilities at sea, which took place in the summer of 1712, although the Treaty of Utrecht was not signed until the following year, the postmasters-general proceeded to put the packets on a peace footing. The boats from Harwich to the Brill and from Dover to Ostend were reduced in number. The routes between Dover and Calais and between Dover and Dunkirk were reopened. The service between Falmouth and Lisbon, which during the war had been once a week, was now to be only once a fortnight; and the five boats engaged on this service, as carrying more hands than would any longer be necessary, were to be disposed of by public sale and their place to be taken by three of the largest from Harwich. The result of these several changes was to reduce the establishment, in point of numbers, by rather more than 120 men, and, in point of cost, from £21,960 to £15,632. As affecting the cost, hardly less important than the reduction of numbers was the permission now given to the packet boats to resume the carriage of merchandise. This was a source of profit to which the postmasters-general had long been looking as some set-off against the heavy expense.

Meanwhile Dummer's contract for the West India service had come to an abrupt termination. That contract had not been long in force before he began to realise how onerous was the condition that, out of a total sum of £12,500, he should receive only £4500 in money, and depend, for the difference on fares, freight, and postage. The postage, which from the first had fallen short of his expectations, did not increase; and the fact of his having, within a few months from the commencement of his undertaking, lost three of his boats, procured for him—what in the world of commerce is almost incompatible with success—the reputation of an unlucky man. The West India merchants enjoined their correspondents on no account to send goods by Dummer's boats. Thus the profits which he had expected to derive from freight had no more existence in fact than the profits from postage. Hoping against hope, Dummer struggled on; but ill-luck continued to pursue him. In little more than five years he lost no less than nine boats. In order to replace them he mortgaged his property to the full extent of its value and obtained advances on his quarterly allowance. This, of course, could not go on, and at length the crash came. The day had arrived for the West India mail to be despatched, and there was no boat to carry it. The whole of Dummer's property, boats included, had been seized for debt. The rest is soon told. The mortgagees, believing that they had the postmasters-general in a corner, refused to continue the service except at a preposterous charge, which Frankland and Evelyn declined to pay. Fortunately three private ships with consignments for the West Indies were then loading at Teignmouth and other ports in the south-west of England, and these relieved the Post Office from what might otherwise have been a serious dilemma.

Bankrupt and broken-hearted, Edmund Dummer died in April 1713, within eighteen months of the termination of his contract. It is his honourable distinction that he succeeded in all that he undertook for others, and that it was only in what he undertook for himself that he failed.

CHAPTER VIII

AMERICAN POSTS
1692-1707

American progress has long been the wonder of the world, and in nothing perhaps has it displayed itself more remarkably than in the matter of the posts. The figures which the United States Post Office presents to us year after year—figures as compared with which even those of the Post Office of Great Britain fall into insignificance—make it difficult to believe that only two hundred years ago an enterprising Englishman was struggling to erect a post between New York and Boston.

An Order in Council dated the 22nd of July 1688, after prescribing the rates of postage to be charged not only between England and the island of Jamaica, but within the island itself, ended with these words: "And His Majesty is also pleased to order that letter offices be settled in such other of His Majesty's plantations in America as shall by the said Earle of Rochester be found convenient for His Majesty's service, and the ease and benefitt of his subjects, according to the method and rates herein settled for His Majesty's island of Jamaica."

Nearly four years later, namely, in February 1692, Thomas Neale obtained a grant from the Crown authorising him to set up posts in North America. The grant was secured by letters patent, which were to hold good for twenty-one years. Neale, who appears never to have set foot out of England, appointed as his representative in America Andrew Hamilton; or rather, as the patent required, Neale nominated and the postmasters-general appointed him. The patent also required that at the expiration of three years Neale should render an account showing his receipts and expenditure; but it was not until the year 1698 that this condition was fulfilled, and in the same year Hamilton came to England to report progress.

By this time a post, to run once a week, had been established along seven hundred miles of road, from Boston to New York, and from New York to Newcastle in Pennsylvania. What the postage rates were we do not know, except indeed that the charge on a letter between New York and Boston was 1s. On other points the account which Hamilton furnished on Neale's behalf gives full information. A salary of £20 a year is paid to "Mr. Sharpus that keeps the letter office at New York." Mr. Sharpus also receives two allowances, one of £110 a year "for carrying the mail half-way to Boston," and another of £60 "for carrying the mail from New York to Philadelphia." Of the former allowance, Hamilton states that after the 4th of November 1696 he "retrenched" it from £110 to £90. There is also a salary of £10 "allowed to him that keeps the letter office at Philadelphia"; and "an allowance of £100 sterling per annum given by Mr. Neale himself to Peter Hayman, deputy-postmaster of Virginia and Maryland." Hamilton's own salary was £200, and his travelling expenses are thus stated in his account:—

In America as in England, from the first erection of the posts, the correspondence went on steadily increasing year after year. Thus, in the first year beginning the 1st of May 1693 the "New York Post" produced £61; in the second, £82; in the third, £93; and in the fourth year, ending the 1st of May 1697, it produced £122. The same progress is to be seen in what were called the "Boston, Road Island, Connecticut and Piscataway Posts." In the first two years beginning also in May 1693 these produced £296 or at the rate of £148 a year; in the third year they produced £227; and in the fourth, £298. The returns of the Philadelphia post also kept improving; but here Hamilton encountered difficulties of management, as will be seen by his own entries:—

The Virginia and Maryland posts were the single exception. Of these Hamilton records "The Virginia and Maryland posts never yielded anything, but cost Mr. Neale near £600." However much these posts might be improved, he dared not reckon upon the correspondence exceeding one hundred letters a year.

There is only one more entry which we will quote from Hamilton's account. It is this:—

Promising as the prospect was on the whole, Neale's receipts from the posts fell far short of his expenses in erecting and maintaining them. His expenses up to May 1697 were £3817, and his receipts £1457, leaving him not only out of pocket to the amount of £2360, but with his means and his credit exhausted. It was admitted on all hands that the posts must before long become self-supporting, even if they should not prove remunerative. But meanwhile how were they to be carried on? Hamilton had his own plan to propose. This was first that within America the postage rates should be raised, and "that the post and his horse should go fferry-free"; and second, that between England and America rates should be settled, and that shipmasters should be required on the other as on this side of the Atlantic to take their letters at once to the Post Office of the port at which they first touched, and hand them to the postmaster, receiving as remuneration one penny a letter.

For inland letters the increased rates which Hamilton proposed were as follows, all but the first two entries being in his own words:—

It may surprise our readers to learn that between England and America there actually existed, 200 years ago, what now is little more than the dream of the postal reformer,—an ocean penny postage. Yet such is the fact. In 1698 it was the custom of the masters of ships bound for America to hang up bags in coffee-houses, and any letters that might be dropped into these bags they carried, and were glad to carry, over for one penny or twopence a letter, according as it was a single or a double one. This custom, as Hamilton pointed out, was liable to abuse. In the first place, any one who had put a letter into a coffee-house bag might, under pretence of wanting his own letter back, possess himself of the letter of somebody else. And secondly, on arrival in America, the shipmasters being under no obligation to make a prompt delivery, were apt to deliver the letters, not when they reached a port, but when they were on the point of leaving it, and after they had disposed of their lading. All this would be remedied if rates of postage were settled between England and America. The letters would then be in the custody of the Post Office until delivered to the shipmaster, and the shipmaster would be bound to restore them to the same custody as soon as he arrived at his destination.

But Hamilton's main argument in favour of establishing sea-rates of postage was the impossibility of things remaining as they were. Neale was without resources, and the posts were not self-supporting. Unless, therefore, some means should be devised for increasing the receipts, the posts must be given up. Let sea-rates be imposed, and the receipts would be increased at once, for all letters from Europe, which on arrival in America were now being delivered by private hand, would then fall into the post, and be forced to pay American postage. It was true that between the mother country and her colonies a packet service did not exist, and that to impose a charge where no service was rendered in return would be contrary to Post Office usage; but the object to be gained was too important to allow this consideration to prevail. Such were the arguments by which Hamilton supported his proposal that on letters between England and America postage should be charged—of 6d. for a single letter, 1s. for a double letter, and 1s. 6d. for "a packet."

There were one or two points on which Cotton and Frankland did not agree with Hamilton. Experience had taught them, as they stated on another occasion, that the way to improve the Post Office revenue was to "make the intercourse of letters easy to people." So now, in their representation to the Treasury, they condemned the inland rates which Hamilton proposed as altogether too high. They had been long enough at the Post Office, they said, to know that "the easy and cheap corresponding doth encourage people to write letters, and that this revenue was but little in proportion to what it is now till the postage of letters was reduced from 6d.[33] to 3d."

Hamilton had contemplated the passing of a fresh Act of Parliament in order to impose sea-rates and to oblige shipmasters to give up their letters as soon as they reached port. Cotton and Frankland were not satisfied that a fresh Act of Parliament was necessary; nor did they express any opinion as to the particular rates which should be imposed. They recommended, however, the appointment of an officer whose duty it should be "to take care of" all letters for America, and to put them into a special bag to be sealed with the office seal. Public notice should at the same time be given prohibiting the collection of such letters by other persons. To the shipmaster to whom the bag might be delivered the inducement to take it without delay to the Post Office of the port at which he should first arrive would be that he would there receive one penny for each letter the bag might contain. Hitherto, under the coffee-house arrangement, the penny had been paid in England; for the future, it would be paid in America. In other words, the shipmaster, instead of receiving his recompense in advance, would receive it after his work was done and only provided it was done properly.

On one point the postmasters-general held a decided opinion. Towards the support of the posts the Government of New York had made an annual contribution of £50, in consideration of which the Government letters appear to have been carried free; but otherwise Neale's undertaking had not received from the authorities that countenance and support which, in Cotton and Frankland's opinion, were essential to its success. They expressed themselves convinced that, for want of due encouragement, the posts would never prosper in private hands, and recommended that they should be transferred to the Crown.

Whether any, and if so, what action was taken upon the postmaster-general's representation we do not know. There is some reason to think that between England and America sea-rates of postage were settled, as had been done a few years before in the case of Jamaica; but we possess no certain information on the point. All we know is that, upon Neale being informed of the postmaster-general's opinion that the inland posts should be transferred to the Crown, he immediately offered to surrender his patent, and that the offer was not accepted. The payment he demanded was either a capital sum of £5000 or else £1000 a year for life or for the unexpired term of his grant.

Hamilton returned to America. The next we hear of him is in 1700. Neale was then dead, having shortly before his death assigned his interest in the posts as security for his debts. To Hamilton he owed £1100, and to an Englishman of the name of West he owed for money advanced £200; and into the hands of these two persons, in default of any one willing to act as Neale's executor or administrator, the posts now came. In April 1703 Hamilton also died; and for three or four years his widow carried on the posts at her own charge.

In 1706 Mrs. Hamilton and West urged that their patent, which had seven and a half years yet to run, might be enlarged for a further term of twenty-one years, and that they might have permission to set up packet boats between England and America. To this Cotton and Frankland were opposed, being still of opinion that the posts should not remain in private hands; and they recommended, as a more politic measure, that the patent should be purchased for £1664, a sum which the patentees had expressed themselves willing to accept. Whether this was the sum actually given we know not; but in the following year the patent was surrendered and the posts of America became vested in the Crown.

In connection with the transfer John Hamilton, Andrew's son, was appointed to his father's place of deputy postmaster-general, and this appointment he retained until 1722, when he resigned. It was then and not until then that the posts became self-supporting. "We have now," write the postmasters-general on the 10th of August in that year, "put the Post Office in North America and the West Indies upon such a foot that for the future, if it produce no profit to the revenue, it will no longer be a charge to it, but we have good reason to hope there will be some return rather from thence."

Such, hardly 200 years ago, were the humble beginnings of a Post Office with which, in the magnitude and diversity of its operations, no other in the world can now compare.

CHAPTER IX

THE POST OFFICE ACT OF 1711

In 1707, on the passing of the Act of Union between England and Scotland, the first step taken by the postmasters-general was to alter the colours of the packets. The cross of St. Andrew, with its blue ground, united with the red cross of St. George, now became the national ensign; and the packets no less than the ships of the Royal Navy were under obligation to carry it.

The Post Office in Scotland was at this time held in farm at a rent of £1194 a year. The lease expired on the 11th of November, and from that date the postmasters-general held themselves responsible for the Scotch no less than the English posts. They at once proceeded to frame an establishment. George Main, the farmer, was appointed deputy-postmaster of Edinburgh at a salary of £200, this being the amount which one year with another he had made out of his contract. Three persons were appointed to assist him, an accomptant and two clerks. These, with three letter-carriers at a crown a week each, and a postmaster at the foot of the Canongate, constituted the Edinburgh establishment.

In the country there were thirty-four postmasters, of whom only twelve were paid by salary, the remaining twenty-two receiving as their remuneration a certain proportion of the postage on inland letters. Thus, three had one-half of this postage, one had one-third, and eighteen had one-fourth. The highest salaries were given to the postmasters of Haddington and Cockburnspath, who received £50 apiece, the reason being no doubt that these two towns were on the direct line of road between Edinburgh and London. At Aberdeen, the postmaster's salary was £28; at Glasgow, £25; at Dundee, Montrose, and Inverness, £15; and at Dumfries and Ayr, £12. Runners[34] at a fixed charge were maintained between town and town—as, for instance, between Edinburgh and Aberdeen at £60 a year, between Aberdeen and Inverness at £30 a year, and between Inverness and Thurso at £18 a year: but except at Edinburgh there was no letter-carrier, and except between Edinburgh and Berwick there was no horse-post north of the Tweed. The establishment charges for the whole of Scotland, Edinburgh included, were less than £1000 a year.

But something more was necessary than to frame an establishment and to alter the colours of the packets. Serious doubts had arisen whether, as the law stood, the postmasters-general of England were competent to deal with the posts of Scotland; and, this vital consideration apart, between the two divisions of the kingdom certain inequalities existed which only fresh legislation could redress. Under the Scotch Act of 1695 the postage on a single letter between Edinburgh and Berwick was 2d. Under the English Act of 1660, 2d. would carry a single letter from Berwick northwards for only forty miles, and considerably more than forty miles separated Berwick from Edinburgh. This difference arose no doubt from mere inaccuracy of reckoning on the English side; and yet it was one which nothing less than a new Act, an Act by the united Parliament, would adjust.

It is the more singular that at this time the postmasters-general should not have taken steps to promote legislation, because, in connection with the English no less than the Scotch Post Office, there were several matters on which fresh legislation had become necessary. The statute on which the very existence of the Post Office itself depended had been found difficult to deal with, on account of its loose and ambiguous wording. The postage to America and the West Indies rested on no legal sanction. For the pence paid upon ship-letters the postmasters-general had no authority to produce, and the auditors had threatened to disallow, the payment. Even the penny post was of doubtful legality. The Courts had indeed decided that Dockwra's undertaking was an infraction of the rights of the Crown; but they had not decided, nor had they been called upon to decide, whether in the hands of the Crown the same undertaking would be legal. The law, as it stood, prescribed no postage lower than twopence. By the penny post the postage was one half of that amount.

With these and other matters requiring adjustment, it might well be supposed that the postmasters-general would have been glad of the opportunity which the Act of Union afforded to set their house in order. Yet, so far from taking any steps in that direction, they now remained perfectly passive. Of the reason for this inaction we are not informed; but we venture to suggest an explanation. Cotton and Frankland were advocates of cheap postage. Should fresh legislation be entered upon, what guarantee had they that postage would not be made dearer? So far, indeed, as they could judge, such was much more likely than not to be the case. As early as William's reign they had been asked to estimate how much an additional penny of postage would produce; and the necessities of the Civil List which had prompted the inquiry had since become more and more pressing.

It is not impossible that there was another, though subordinate, reason. Between Whitehall and Lombard Street communications had been passing from time to time, which might fairly raise the presumption that advantage would be taken of any fresh Act to insert a clause under which all Post Office servants, the postmasters-general included, would be disfranchised. Cotton and Frankland, who still retained their seats, the one for Cambridgeshire, and the other for the borough of Thirsk, were not the men to be deterred by personal considerations from doing what they conceived to be their duty; but if on principle they objected to an increase in the rates of postage, it was little calculated to reconcile them to a measure which they regarded as mischievous that, as a probable consequence of its introduction, they would lose their seats. But be the reason what it might, the fact remains that, whereas at one time they were continually suggesting the propriety of fresh legislation in order to clear up ambiguities in the existing statute, no such suggestion had been recently made, and they now remained perfectly silent.

Thus matters stood when, in October 1708, or a year and a half after the Act of Union had passed, an incident occurred which made silence no longer possible. Letters of Privy Seal had been issued granting salaries payable out of the revenue of the Scotch Post Office to certain professors of the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and warrants for payment of these salaries were sent to Lombard Street to be signed. The postmasters-general, being in doubt whether their signature would be valid, took the precaution of consulting the law officers. The law officers' opinion, which was not given until the end of December, must have struck dismay into the hearts of those who sought it. It was to the effect that the postmasters-general of England could not act as postmasters-general of Scotland until they had been to Edinburgh and taken the oaths prescribed by the Scotch law. A journey to Edinburgh in those days, especially in the depth of winter, was no light undertaking. But this was not all. And as soon—the opinion proceeded—as they have taken the oaths and qualified as postmasters-general of Scotland, they will cease to be postmasters-general of England.

The warrants were returned to the Treasury unsigned. And now that silence had once been broken, the postmasters-general offered suggestion after suggestion, each having for its object to remove the difficulty. Might not a clause be inserted in some bill now before Parliament, a clause under which they should be constituted postmasters-general of Great Britain, and be given jurisdiction over the Scotch as over the English Post Office? Would not the Scotch bill for drawbacks answer the purpose, or if that were likely to be displeasing to the North British members, some one of the many money-bills that were then pending? Would not the requirements of the law be satisfied if for the management of the Scotch Post Office some one were appointed by letters patent under the Privy Seal of Scotland, and placed under the orders of the postmasters-general of England? Or in view of a recent Act passed by the united Parliament, might not the English postmasters-general themselves be so appointed? To these suggestions, of which the first was made in December 1708, and the last in April 1710, the Lord Treasurer returned no reply. It was clear that Godolphin had other intentions.

Meanwhile events had taken place in London which must have gone far to convince the postmasters-general that, impolitic as an increase in the rates of postage might be, the need for fresh legislation was urgent. Charles Povey had set up a halfpenny post or, as he called it himself, a "half-penny carriage." For the sum of one halfpenny he undertook to do what Dockwra had done, and what the postmasters-general were now doing, for the sum of one penny. There were indeed points of difference. The penny post extended not only over the whole of London proper, but to the remote suburbs; the halfpenny post was confined to the busy parts of the metropolis, to the cities of London and Westminster and to the borough of Southwark. For the halfpenny post, again, letters were collected by the sound of bell. That is to say, Povey's men carried bells, which they rang as they passed along the streets, and so gave notice of their approach. This, though no doubt intended merely as an advertisement, possessed the merit of convenience. People had only to await the coming of one of these bell-ringers, and letters and parcels which they must otherwise have carried to the post themselves were carried for them.

Povey fancied himself a second Dockwra; but the two men were as unlike as the circumstances under which their undertakings were launched. Dockwra was gentle and conciliatory. Povey was violent and aggressive. Dockwra disclaimed all intention of transgressing the law. It was only necessary that his undertaking should become better known, and His Royal Highness, he felt sure, would withdraw his opposition. Povey expressed the utmost indifference whether his undertaking was legal or illegal, and defied the law to do its worst. Dockwra was a pioneer. When he established his penny post, there was nothing in existence at all resembling it, nothing with which it competed, and by supplying an acknowledged want he conferred an inestimable boon upon the community. Povey, on the contrary, was a mere adventurer. His halfpenny carriage was in direct opposition to an institution already existing and in full activity, an institution which supplied every reasonable want, and which it was the sole purpose of his enterprise to supplant for his own advantage.

So impudent an infringement of the rights of the Crown could not, of course, be tolerated, and the postmasters-general called upon Povey to desist from his undertaking. Povey's reply must have extinguished any hope they may have entertained of avoiding an appeal to the Courts. He should certainly not, he said, be so unjust to himself as to lay down his undertaking at their demand. If they were resolved on trying the matter at law, he was quite content. And happily, he added, we live not under such a constitution as Dockwra lived, a constitution made up of an arbitrary government and bribed judges. Thus defied, the postmasters-general had only one course to pursue, and that was to bring an action. As a preliminary step Povey and the keepers of the shops at which he had opened offices were served with notices setting forth the illegality of their proceedings. The shopkeepers closed their offices at once, and Povey was left alone with his bell-ringers.

The man now revealed himself in his true character. When first informed that an information would be filed against him, he published a pamphlet in which, after loading the postmasters-general with ridicule and abuse, he dared them to proceed to trial, declaring that a trial in the Court of Exchequer was the very thing he desired; but as time drew on and he found them to be in earnest, he became alarmed and desired to effect a compromise. With this object he attended at the Post Office and pleaded his cause in person. If only his bell-ringers might continue to collect letters for the general post and "such as pass between man and man," he would pay to the Crown one-tenth more than had yet been received from the penny post. Or let him take the penny post to farm, and he would pay double what that post had ever produced. Or was it to his bells that exception was taken? If so, and if only proceedings were stayed, his bells should cease to-morrow. But even if at one time such overtures could have been listened to, it was now too late, and the postmasters-general so informed him. At this announcement, and while they were still speaking, Povey bounced from his chair and flung himself out of the room. The case came on for hearing in Easter term 1710, and Povey was fined £100.

It may here be mentioned that the practice of collecting letters by the sound of bell did not cease with the halfpenny carriage. It was adopted by the Post Office, became general throughout the kingdom, and continued down to a time well within the recollection of persons still living.[35]

Although the postmasters-general had won their suit, they were not altogether satisfied. What Povey had done might be done by others, and his proceedings, they did not attempt to conceal, had caused them great annoyance. As soon as he found them bent on suppressing his undertaking, he had had recourse to artifice. In order that his bell-ringers might escape molestation, he had changed them about from place to place and made them assume fictitious names, so that the man who appeared in Holborn to-day under one name might appear in Westminster to-morrow under another. The task of fixing evidence had thus been made extremely difficult, and the postmasters-general had at one time almost given it up in despair. They also bitterly complained of the law's delays. For no less than seven months—from the 4th of October 1709 to the 4th of May 1710—the halfpenny post had been in full activity, to the serious injury of the penny post. Must the institution which had been committed to their charge remain, for periods of longer or shorter duration, at the mercy of any unscrupulous person who might choose to follow Povey's example? Or against future assaults of the same kind was it not possible to provide themselves with some less cumbrous weapon than they had now to their hands?

Whether the Act which subsequently passed conferred upon the postmasters-general all the powers they desired may be open to question, but there can be no doubt that, after the experience of the past few months, the prospect of fresh legislation, if not actually welcome, had lost half its terrors. For fresh legislation, however, the time had not even yet arrived. It is true that Povey's case, pending the consideration of which nothing of course could be done, had been heard and determined; but now political difficulties arose. Godolphin, the Lord Treasurer, gave way to Harley; and Harley's advent to power was followed by a general election. It was not until the beginning of November, or three weeks before the Houses met, that a decision was at last announced. Subject to the consent of Parliament, the rates of postage were to be increased, and a bill to carry out the object was to be prepared at once.

The office of Secretary to the Treasury was at this time held by William Lowndes, member of Parliament for the borough of Seaford. Lowndes had written a silly book on the currency, a book in which he endeavoured to prove that an Act of Parliament, by calling a sixpence a shilling, can double its purchasing power. He had seriously believed, when the postmasters-general recommended that the course of post to Warwick should be direct instead of by way of Coventry, that the recommendation was due to a bribe. When the postmasters-general were at their wits' end to put a stop to the illicit traffic in letters, he had suggested—and it was the only consolation which he had had to offer them—that in order to defray the expenses of the Civil List every letter passing through the post should be charged with an additional rate of 1d. Such was the man to whom was now entrusted the oversight of the Post Office bill. If confidence in the merits of the measure which the bill was designed to promote were any recommendation, a better selection could not have been made. Lowndes had long advocated an increase in the rates of postage. He had, there can be little doubt, brought Godolphin over to his views, and now, under Godolphin's successor, he obtained permission to carry them into effect.

At the Post Office, unfortunately, there was at this time no one to sound a note of alarm. Cotton was no more. Evelyn, Cotton's successor, was new to his duties. Frankland was old and gouty. Between Frankland and Lowndes, moreover, relations we suspect were somewhat strained. At all events, the fact remains that the postmasters-general, who never tired of inculcating as the result of experience that low postage attracts correspondence and high postage repels it, received notice of the intention to raise the rates without even an attempt to avert the mischief.

By the middle of December, or little more than six weeks from the time of the Post Office receiving notice to prepare for fresh legislation, the bill was in Lowndes's hands. Containing as it did some fifty clauses, and dealing with a matter of no little complexity, such despatch might do no discredit even to our own days of high pressure. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it was out of the common. But the explanation is simple. Swift, the solicitor to the Post Office, who was profoundly dissatisfied with the law as it stood, had for years past employed his leisure moments in framing clauses founded upon his conception of what the law ought to be, less probably in the hope of seeing them passed than with the view of giving relief to his feelings. These clauses he now collected, arranged, and added to, producing what he conceived to be a model measure. But while the bill had taken only six weeks to prepare, nearly double that period was occupied in revising it. Whatever may be thought of Lowndes's understanding, there can be no question about his industry. Day after day during the next three months he devoted to the task he had undertaken every moment he could snatch from his numerous other engagements. In conjunction with Swift, who now passed most of his time at Whitehall, he went through the bill clause by clause, discussing and arguing every point, and not seldom making alterations. Swift, as the representative of the Post Office, knew well what the Post Office wanted; but Lowndes knew, or thought that he knew, better, and in this as in other instances superior authority passed current for superior knowledge. It was not, however, to what for distinction's sake may be called the Post Office clauses of the bill that the chief interest attached. To these Lowndes added others, of which one, while dealing with a matter of the most delicate character, revealed an intention of which the Post Office had had no previous notice. The preparation of this clause severely taxed the abilities of its framers.

As the Post Office revenue was at this time vested in the Crown, the Crown would, of course, in the absence of express provision to the contrary, reap the benefit of any increase which additions to the rates of postage might produce. To divert the increase, or part of the increase, from the Crown to the public was the object of the clause on which Lowndes and Swift were now engaged. This clause having at length been settled to their satisfaction, the bill came before Parliament, and was with some modifications passed. The new rates as compared with the old were as follows:—

The old rates during the year ending the 29th of September 1710 had produced £111,461, and the new rates were estimated to produce £36,400 more. Of this increase the whole was to be paid into the Exchequer by weekly instalments of £700, so that a fund might be established for the purpose of carrying on the war; and of the surplus, if any, over and above £147,861, one-third was to be reserved to the disposal of Parliament for the use of the public. These provisions were to hold good for thirty-two years, after which the old rates were to be reverted to.

We have already seen how difficult the postmasters-general had found it, even with the lower rates of postage, to prevent the smuggling of letters; and of course, in exact proportion as the rates should be increased, the temptation to smuggle would become greater. This consequence had been foreseen and provided for. After declaring in the preamble that, as a condition of the new rates, provision must be made "for preventing the undue collecting and delivering of letters by private posts, carriers, higglers, watermen, drivers of stage-coaches, and other persons," the bill went on to give to the postmasters-general large powers of search. This clause was regarded as of the highest importance. Without it, indeed, even Lowndes would hardly have ventured to suggest that the rates should be increased. To his dismay, however, and, truth compels us to add, to the dismay also of the Post Office, the House of Commons, while passing the rates, rejected the searching clause. Only the declaration in the preamble remained, an enduring monument of a foolish intention.