Coachmen seem never to have been averse from loading their coaches to their fullest capacity, except in one particular. Barrels of oysters, kegs of spirits, hampers of game, and such heavy and bulky things, seem never to have roused objections; but they nursed a grudge against literature, for when the quarterly reviews were published and magazine-time came round, and the fore and hind boots of the night coaches were crammed with the damp sheets just issued from the press, they discovered that the weight severely tried weak teams over long stages, Edinburgh and Quarterly reviewers prided themselves on their literary weight, which was an unknown quantity to the coachmen, who cursed them for their avoirdupois.
These old Automedons rarely took a holiday, and when they did were at a loss how to use it. Like London omnibus drivers of the present time under similar circumstances, they generally spent their off-time in riding on some other coach and criticising the driving. The postboys were alike in this respect. One of the fraternity—Tom King, of the “Crown,” at Amersham, spent his holiday in a most peculiar manner. He had had the honour, on one occasion, of driving “Farmer George” post, after hunting with the Royal Staghounds, from Amersham to Windsor; and to the end of his life he would do no work on the anniversary of that day. After breakfast he repaired to the same yellow post-chaise, and sat in it till nightfall, on the seat his Sovereign had occupied. Throughout the day he refreshed himself liberally with pots of ale, and if he took his pipe from his lips at intervals, it was only to replace it with a key-bugle and to play “God save the King.” His master humoured his fancy, and visited the post-chaise with many others during the day, to see Tom indulging in these quaint Pleasures of Memory.
CHAPTER XI
MAIL-GUARDS
When Palmer first introduced his plan of mail-coaches he proposed that, while the contractors supplied coaches and horses and the men to drive them, the guards should be the servants of the Post Office, and should, considering the dangers of the roads, be retired soldiers, who, from their past training and habits of discipline, would be reliable servants and men capable of defending the mails against attack. This advice was not followed, and the first mail-guards were provided by the contractors, who employed such unsatisfactory men that in a very short time the Post Office was obliged to make the position of a mail-guard a Post Office appointment and the guards themselves servants of and directly responsible to the Department.
Placed on this footing, they were by no means fellow-servants with the coachmen, but their official superiors, and not properly concerned in any way with the passengers or any unofficial parcels or luggage. In practice, however, they took part in all these things, and although the coachmen were technically under their orders, it was only when ill-assorted and quarrelsome men came together on one coach that any disputes arose.
Mail-coaches had not long been established before the guards, those protectors of his Majesty’s mails, presuming upon their position, became the tyrants of the road. Pennant, writing in 1792, tells how, in his district of Wales, “the guards, relying on the name of royalty, in the course of the Irish road through North Wales, committed great excesses. One, on a trifling quarrel, shot dead a poor old gatekeeper.... In Anglesey another of these guards discharged his pistol wantonly in the face of a chaise-horse, drawing his master, the Rev. John Bulkeley, who was flung out and died, either on the spot or soon after. These guards shoot at dogs, hogs, sheep, and poultry as they pass the road, and even in towns, to the great terror and danger of the inhabitants.” As with the mail-guards, so with the mail-coachmen. “It has been a common practice with them to divert themselves with flinging out their lashes at harmless passengers, by way of fun. Very lately, one of these wretches succeeded so well as to twist his lash round a poor fellow’s neck in the parish where I live. He dragged the man under the wheels, by which one of his arms was broken.”
Not only Pennant complained of the early mail-guards. The country in general went in terror of them and their lethal weapons, the bell-mouthed blunderbusses which they carried to protect the mails and were wont to discharge at random as they went along. It was, with some pardonable exaggeration, said that the Post Office had conferred a licence for indiscriminate slaughter upon them; for not only were they armed against attack, but during the wars with France (and we were always fighting the French in those days) the Postmaster-General issued a kind of commission to mail-guards to shoot any prisoner of war breaking parole. To promote zeal in this direction, a reward of £5 was offered for every prisoner so winged or killed. Prisoners of war were plentiful then, and in Edinburgh Castle, on Dartmoor, and at “Yaxley Barracks,” near Norman Cross, on the Great North Road, were to be counted in thousands. At Yaxley, as also perhaps at other places, they were often allowed out on parole, with the understanding that they were not to leave the high road and were not to remain out after sunset. It is not on record that any prisoner was thus shot, but many inoffensive rustics were wounded by guards sportively inclined, or—with what St. Paul calls a “zeal not according to discretion”—eager to earn the reward offered.
The mail-guards were, indeed, very dangerous fellows to the law-abiding subjects of the King, however innocuous they may have been to the law-breakers. We may dismiss the cutlass with which they were armed. Not much damage could be accidentally wrought by that; but the blunderbuss was a terror to nervous passengers by the mail, for when the guard sportively loosed it off at the wayside sparrows, or at the ploughman busy against the sky-line, it exploded with the roar of a cannon, and some of its slugs generally whistled unpleasantly past the ears of the outsides or pierced their tall beaver hats. The guard, in fact, was a person to be shunned when he took his blunderbuss in hand, either for practice or examination; for it was not only dangerous as a gun, but was furnished with a bayonet which, folding back on a hinge against the barrel, was released by touching a powerful spring. How many persons were accidentally slain or mutilated by the guards’ awkward handling of this infernal contrivance we shall never know.
It was not, however, until 1811 that anything was done to stop this indiscriminate shooting on the part of the guards; but in that year an Act of Parliament came into existence which forbade the firing of their blunderbusses except for defence, and instituting a penalty of £5 for breaking this new law.