Stage-coach and Mail in Days of Yore, Volume 1 (of 2) / A picturesque history of the coaching age

by Charles G. Harper

The first mail-coaches were merely ordinary light post coaches or diligences pressed into the service; but, unlike those of other and unofficial coaches, whose stages ranged from ten to fifteen miles or more, the horses were changed at stages varying from six to eight miles. In this way it was possible to attain a running speed of eight miles an hour, to destroy the old reproach that the mail was the slowest service in the kingdom, and to set the pace to everything else on the road. Thus once again the Post Office commanded the utmost expedition, and to the mail-coaches those travellers flocked who desired the quickest, the most dignified, and the safest method of progression in that age.

The first results of the mail-coach system were of a very mixed nature. The course of post was, it is true, greatly accelerated, but the rates of postage were immediately raised, and although the added convenience was well worth the extra charge—which, after all, was much less than the surreptitious sending of letters by stage-coach had been—people grumbled. By the ordinary postboys the charge for a single letter had been a penny for one stage, twopence for two stages, and threepence for any higher distance up to eighty miles. Over that distance the charge was fourpence. The postboys’ stages ranged from ten to as many as fourteen miles. Under the new dispensation the postage was raised at once to twopence the first stage, and the stages themselves were rarely more than seven or eight miles, and often shorter. Correspondence going longer distances enjoyed, it is true, a reduction; for two stages cost threepence and distances exceeding two stages and not more than eighty miles were rated at fourpence.

The short-distance correspondence therefore paid from three to four times as much as under the old order of things, and long-distance letters a penny more; but all alike shared the advantage of the mail-coaches’ comparative immunity from attack and their going every day, including even Sundays. One class of correspondents, indeed, suffered inconvenience for a time while reorganisation was in progress. These were the residents on the bye-roads and in the smaller towns not situated on the great mail routes. It is obvious that the coaches could not be made to go along the secondary and very ill-kept roads, and that, even could that have been done, it would not have been possible, in the lack of passenger traffic along them, to have found contractors prepared to horse the coaches at the price they gladly accepted on the main arteries of travelling. The postboys had, on the other hand, gone everywhere, and the complex system of bye- and cross-posts established by Allen and maintained by these riders was really, for that time, a wonderful achievement. Residents off the mail routes now began to miss the postboy’s horn, and found their letters lying for days at the post-offices until they were called for. Instead of the post coming to the smaller towns and villages, those minor places had to send to the nearest post-office on the mail-coach road. These inconveniences only gradually disappeared on the organisation of a service of mail-carts from the post-towns to rural post-offices, collecting and delivering the cross-posts; and it was not until another ten years had passed that the bye-mails became, as well as the direct ones, what they should always have been, quicker than any other public conveyance on the roads. With this at length accomplished, the leakage of Post Office revenues automatically disappeared, for it is not to be supposed that, when the mails were more; frequent, cheaper, and more speedy than other methods, the public would resort to slow and more expensive ways of sending their letters.

The next mail-coach to be put on the road was the Norwich Mail, in March 1785; and in May of that same year the first of the cross-road mails was established. This was the Bristol and Portsmouth. It was followed in rapid succession by the long services from London: the Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, on July 25th; the London, Gloucester and Swansea; the Hereford, Carmarthen and Milford Haven, by Glasbury; the Worcester and Ludlow; the Birmingham and Shrewsbury; the Chester and Holyhead; the Exeter; the Portsmouth; and—on October 16th, 1786, in answer to the petition for a mail-coach along the Great North Road sent up by the cities and towns on that highway—by the York and Edinburgh Mail.

Palmer was not content with merely reorganising the inland mails; he was eager to see his plan adopted in France, and to this end opened up negotiations with Baron D’Ogny, the French Minister of Posts, in 1787. Correspondence between them, and between his secretary, Andrew Todd, and M. de Richebourg, was still proceeding in 1791, when the French Revolution put an end to all such things.

The success of his plan in England was no sooner assured than his position came up for discussion. We must by no means regard Palmer as a mere sentimental reformer. Nothing could be wider of the truth. He thought he saw, in thus being of service to the public, an excellent opportunity of furthering his own fortunes. He had observed how great a fortune Allen had made by the posts being farmed to him, and although by this time the business of the Post Office was grown too huge to be let out at a rent, his acute mind, as we have seen, devised a plan that brought him little financial risk or outlay. His were the brains; the Post Office, and the contractors who horsed the coaches, took the responsibility and the risk, if any.

It was now only to be expected that he should be rewarded for his idea and for the way in which he had brought the plan into being. He was accordingly, but not until October 1786, appointed Comptroller-General, with a yearly salary of £1,500, and 2½ per cent. on the net revenue in excess of £250,000; which sum represented the former Post Office revenue of £150,000 plus the £90,000 the newly-raised rates of postage had added to the year’s takings.

It is not the purpose of these pages to enter into the long and pitiful story of the hatreds and jealousies that Palmer’s appearance at the Post Office excited, nor does the subject in hand admit any extended study of Palmer’s own character. When he went to the Post Office as Comptroller-General, he went with a determination to be unfettered in his actions, and expected to be supreme in fact, although nominally responsible to the Postmasters-General. At this period the Post Office, which had staggered on from job to job from its very inception, and had been purged from time to time only to settle down on every occasion into a new era of corruption and theft of every degree, from the most pettifogging pilfering up to malversation of funds on a monumental scale, was riddled through and through with scandals. There had long been a succession of joint Postmasters-General from 1690, when Sir Robert Cotton and Mr. Thomas Frankland were appointed; and that double-barrelled office, although conducted by those first incumbents in an efficient and altogether praiseworthy manner, had long degenerated into a political appointment. Cotton and Frankland had been more than official figureheads. They had resided at the General Post Office, and were hard-working and conscientious servants of the public. Their successors degenerated into impracticable officers of State, who usually only took part in Post Office work to the extent of signing official documents they never read, and never actively interfered but to perpetrate some new job, or—for they commonly were violently jealous of one another—for the purpose of undoing some already existent scandal set agoing by their fellow Postmaster-General.

It was Palmer’s misfortune to go to the Post Office at a time when these gilded figureheads were not perhaps more efficient, but certainly more interfering, than the generality, and, being himself hot-headed and impatient of control, he very soon came to disagreement from them. Their suggestions he at first haughtily ignored, as in his opinion likely to injure his plans, and when those suggestions became commands, he entirely disobeyed them. The chiefs with whom he thus came into bitter conflict were at first Lords Carteret and Walsingham: the former a “job-master,” as Palmer satirically styled him, of peculiar shamelessness and audacity; his colleague a man of probity, but with something of the formal prig in his constitution that irritated Palmer at last beyond endurance. Walsingham made a point of investigating everything. He may not have been a better man of business than Palmer, but he was a man of orderly methods, which Palmer was not. Palmer did things well, but in an unbusinesslike way; Walsingham must for ever be seeking precedents, calling for vouchers, and insisting upon official etiquette. All this was very poisonous to the new Comptroller-General, who found himself largely controlled instead of controlling. Carteret, being convicted by his colleague of a job, Palmer hotly thought his own honesty questioned when careless and unreported appointments solely on his own initiative were resented by his official superior. Thus affairs continued through six years of changes, in which Postmasters-General succeeded one another and returned like the changes of a kaleidoscope. But while other Postmasters disappeared, Walsingham, the stickler for form, remained. With others Palmer might have found some way of compromise, but with Walsingham he could not do other than carry on a struggle for mastery. The end came when that peer had for his fellow the Earl of Chesterfield, who possessed sufficient humour by himself to be amused with Palmer’s frettings against authority, but in conjunction with Walsingham could only follow his lead. Annoyed beyond his own powers of control (which, to be sure, were very limited) by the action of the joint Postmasters in referring to the Treasury an affair which he conceived to be a purely Post Office matter, concerning the mileage to be paid for the Carlisle and Portpatrick mail, Palmer forthwith suddenly stopped on his own authority the Falmouth, Bristol, Portsmouth and Plymouth mail-coaches, which were all being paid for at a higher rate than his superiors thought necessary, but which they had not agreed to discontinue. Questioned about this action, that had thrown the mails in the south-west of England into utter confusion, he insolently declared that what their lordships objected to on one road was surely objectionable on another; if they preferred mail-carts to mail-coaches they could have them. A violent quarrel then blazed up. Palmer charged the Postmasters-General with deliberately and capriciously thwarting his best arrangements. He would appeal to the Prime Minister against their interference.

The Postmasters desired nothing better; but Pitt, who had the greatest confidence in Palmer, long evaded the interview they sought with him to procure his dismissal, and when at length they did win to his presence he made it quite clear that it was not in their direction his sympathies extended. Indeed, it is quite possible that the Comptroller-General would have seen his masters out of office while he retained his own, had it not been for the extraordinary and unexplained treachery of Palmer’s own friend, Charles Bonnor, whom he had provided with a splendid post at the General Post Office. This man suddenly launched a pamphlet in which he accused his benefactor of delaying the London post in order to create popular demands for reforms Palmer himself desired to introduce, reforms that would place him in a position of higher authority. The Postmasters-General received the publication of this pamphlet with a well-simulated amazement, but the suspicion that they had themselves induced Bonnor to perform the part of Judas is inevitable, and is deepened by their subsequent action. Palmer, of course, suspended Bonnor, whereupon they asked the reason, and on Palmer refusing to give an explanation that must have been wholly unnecessary in fact, if not in actual form, they reinstated the man. Nay, more, when Bonnor repaired to my lords with the news that Palmer had refused to reinstate him, and had, in fact, ordered him with threats off the premises, they consented to read and to show to Pitt the private and confidential correspondence he had brought with him, addressed by Palmer to his former friend during a series of years, and containing not a little compromising matter, proving how Palmer had been steadily bent on asserting his own authority and on denying that of the Postmasters-General.