The History of the Post Office, from Its Establishment Down to 1836

by Herbert Joyce

The immediate effect of the Act of 1711 was, as might have been foreseen, enormously to stimulate clandestine traffic. The Post Office could do little to check it. In London officers were appointed whose duty it was to frequent the roads leading into the capital and keep a watch on all higglers and drivers of coaches who were notoriously carrying letters in defiance of the law. In the country the postmasters-general could get nothing done. In vain they urged upon the Treasury the paramount importance of appointing officers who should travel about the country and be authorised to open the mail bags at odd times and unexpectedly. By no other means, they declared, was it possible to keep any check upon either the London or the country letters. The London letters might not be charged correctly by the clerks of the roads; and of the country letters, it was perfectly well known, only a very small proportion was charged at all. But all to no purpose. The officers whom the postmasters-general proposed to appoint were to receive for remuneration and travelling expenses together £1 a day, and the Treasury declined to sanction the expense.

This, even for the Treasury, has always appeared to us a masterpiece of perversity. That large sums were being diverted into the pockets of the postmasters had been admitted in the Act itself;[40] nor could it be denied that the tendency of the Act was to make these sums larger. And yet the abuse was to be allowed to go on unchecked because its correction would involve a small outlay. For four years this penny-wise and pound-foolish policy continued, and it was not until 1715, as the consequence of a strong representation from Frankland and Evelyn's successors, that the officers whose appointment these two postmasters-general had consistently advocated were added to the establishment under the title of surveyors. To surprise the mail bags in course of transit and to check their contents—such was the humble function originally assigned to officers who have since become as indispensable to the Post Office as the mainspring is to a watch or the driving wheel to a steam engine.

It may here be noticed that the decisions which the postmasters-general received were not all of them conceived in the same spirit. So different indeed was the treatment of questions relating to home communications and communications with foreign parts as almost to suggest that they had been referred to different tribunals. Was the packet service which had come to an end through Dummer's misfortunes to be re-established or not? The cost was far, very far, in excess of the receipts; and yet the direction to the Post Office was to consult the West India merchants, and to be guided by their wishes. The two packets between Falmouth and the Groyne, which had been left running at the close of the war, were after a time discontinued. They cost £1600 a year to maintain, and the annual receipts from the letters and passengers they carried were less than £450. Yet upon a representation from the merchants trading with Spain pointing out the inconvenience which the stoppage had caused them, the boats were restored at once. But all such questions were decided by the Lord Treasurer himself, and his decisions were communicated under his own signature, or else under the sign-manual.

Very different was it with questions affecting intercourse within the kingdom. These, urgently as the postmasters-general might press them, received little or no attention. They would seem indeed to have been relegated to subordinates, who having been instructed to keep down expense proceeded to obey their orders without discrimination. Whether the packet agent at Dover had in his cups refused to drink to the health of the ministers, or whether the postmaster of Chester had said that Queen Anne, had she pursued the same course as was pursued by Charles the First, would have met with the same fate—these were questions of vital importance which must be investigated with all convenient speed; but when the question was merely one of improving the internal posts of the country, it was treated at leisure, and no considerations of public convenience, or even of prospective gain, were allowed to weigh against the bugbear of present expense. In 1710, for instance, the Lord Provost and magistrates of Glasgow had petitioned that the foot-post to Edinburgh might be converted into a horse-post. The mail would thus arrive sooner and leave later, and, as the petitioners pointed out, letters would fall into it which had heretofore been sent by private hand. Between a horse-post and a foot-post the difference in point of cost was £20 a year; and for the sake of this small sum the Treasury had refused the request, just as they now refused to sanction the appointment of surveyors, although the postmasters-general clearly demonstrated that by no other means could the misappropriation of postage be checked, and that within a few months the cost would be covered many times over.

But the addition to the establishment of a few appointments more or less was not the most serious charge which the Act of 1711 entailed. The Post Offices over a great part of England were then in farm. How, within the area over which these Post Offices extended, was the State to derive any benefit from the higher postage? The postage, whatever it might be, was under their leases secured to the farmers; and the farmers were under no obligation to pay any higher rent than that for which they had stipulated. This difficulty, which had without doubt been overlooked, took a most unexpected turn. The farmers had had only a short experience of the new rates before they found that these rates, far from bringing them a golden harvest, were fast contributing to their ruin; that they were in effect prohibitive rates; that the letters passing to and fro were getting fewer and fewer; and that the increase of charge by no means made up for the decrease in number. In short, the Crown or those who represented the Crown had taken for granted that under the new rates the returns would be relatively higher than under the old, whereas the farmers found to their cost that the returns were actually lower. Never, perhaps, has there been a more striking demonstration of the unwisdom of high rates of postage. In this dilemma the postmasters-general had recourse to an expedient which appears to have been considered satisfactory on both sides. They cancelled all the leases, nine in number,[41] and under the title of managers, appointed the farmers to superintend the Post Offices embraced within the area over which their farms extended. The managers who had heretofore been at the cost of the postmasters' salaries were to be relieved from this and all other payments; and as remuneration for their services they were to receive one-tenth part of the net produce derived from the postage.

Two questions may here be asked, to neither of which is it easy to give even a plausible reply. Of these the first is, How did it happen that the postmasters-general, who without authority from Whitehall could not even convert a foot-post into a horse-post, were able on their own motion to sanction an arrangement, the practical effect of which was to add to the establishment not only a large number of small salaries, amounting in the aggregate to a formidable total, but also a dead-weight annuity of nearly £2000 a year? This is an obscurity which we confess ourselves unable to penetrate. We can only record the fact, a fact the more surprising because only recently Godolphin had laid it down under his own hand that in the Post Office "all extraordinary payments or allowances are to be vouched by warrant from Her Majesty or myself, or from the Lord High Treasurer or the Commissioners of the Treasury for the time being." The second question is hardly less perplexing. How, except in name, did managers differ from surveyors, whose appointment the postmasters-general were urging, and urging in vain? Or what could surveyors have done which it was not equally competent to managers to do? This question also we cannot answer. We only know that the very men who as farmers had rendered signal service to the Post Office, and earned the gratitude of the districts over which their farms extended, were found as managers to be of little use, even if they did not league themselves with the postmasters to intercept the postage.

Difficulties from an unexpected quarter added to the confusion into which, as the result of the Act of 1711, the Post Office was drifting. As soon as peace was declared, it became necessary to arrive at an agreement with France as to the conditions on which the British mails should pass through French territory. M. Pajot was still comptroller of the posts in Paris; and he proved to be hardly less untractable than before the war. Frankland and Evelyn committed their case to the care of Matthew Prior, who was at that time minister plenipotentiary to the Court of France. Prior, who had hated his commissionership of customs because, as Swift tells us, he was ever dreaming of cockets and dockets and other jargon, could hardly be expected to give his mind to anything so prosaic as postage and letter bills. The matter, moreover, was one of a highly technical character, and, without fuller information than could be contained in the most precise instructions, a far abler negotiator than Prior could claim to be might easily have found himself overmatched. Pajot, presuming on his superior knowledge, put forward the most extravagant demands; and it was not until an expert had been sent from London, upon whom it would have been useless to attempt to impose, that he abated his pretensions. Extravagant demands were now followed by frivolous objections, and at the last moment, when the conditions were practically settled, he actually refused to proceed further unless "Her Britannic Majesty," an expression employed in the Post Office treaty, were altered to "The Queen of Great Britain."

Vexatious as these proceedings were, the result was more vexatious still. Before the war a lump sum of 36,000 livres a year had been paid for the transit of the British mails across French territory. Pajot now refused to accept any lump sum at all. He insisted that each letter passing through France should be charged for separately, according to the French postage; and high as the English postage was, the French postage was higher still. In vain the postmasters-general pointed out that by virtue of such an arrangement they would on many letters have to pay more than Act of Parliament permitted them to receive. Pajot replied in effect that this was their affair and not his; and no better terms could they get. The treaty was eventually signed, and its onerous provisions will best be shewn by an example. On a single letter from Italy the postage prescribed by the Act of 1711 was fifteenpence, and on a letter weighing one ounce sixty pence. This was all which the Act permitted the postmasters-general to collect; and yet, under the terms of the treaty, the postage for which they had to account to the French Post Office was in the one case twenty-one sous and in the other eighty-four.

To this treaty we are indeed indebted for one piece of information. It gives us—what is not to be found elsewhere—a definition of the terms single and double as applied to letters. It is strange that the Acts of 1660 and 1711, while imposing distinctive rates on single and double letters, nowhere define what single and double letters are. This omission the treaty of 1713 supplies. "That piece," the treaty provides, "is to be esteemed a single letter which hath no sealed letter inclosed, and that to be esteemed a double letter which hath inclosures and is under the weight of an ounce." It will be interesting to note how far the Post Office adhered to its own definition.

On the accession of George the First, when almost every place of honour and profit under the Crown changed hands, the Post Office did not escape; and Frankland and Evelyn were succeeded by Cornwallis and Craggs. The natural tendency of the provision which had made members of the House of Commons ineligible for the office of postmasters-general was to throw the office into the hands of peers; and although this tendency did not fully develop itself until later in the century, the appointment of Lord Cornwallis was a first move in that direction. Peers have in our own time been among the ablest of the many able administrators who have presided over the Post Office; but at the beginning of the eighteenth century the conditions attaching to the appointment were in some respects different from what they are to-day. The postmasters-general had to write their own letters; their attendance was both early and late and during fixed hours; and they were expected to reside at the Post Office. Whether from a disinclination to satisfy these conditions, or on the score of health, which he was constantly pleading, Cornwallis had not been long in Lombard Street before he retired into the country, and left the conduct of affairs pretty much to his colleague. Craggs—or Craggs senior as he was commonly called, to distinguish him from his son, the Secretary of State—was an industrious, plain-spoken man; and deeply as he afterwards became implicated in the South Sea Scheme, there is no reason to suppose that his proceedings as postmaster-general would not bear inspection.