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.