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

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:—

	On	On
	Single Letter.	Double Letter.	Per Ounce.
80 miles and under	2d.	4d.	8d.
Above 80 miles	3d.	6d.	12d.
To or from Berwick	3d.	6d.	18d.
From Berwick within Scotland—
40 miles and under	2d.	4d.	8d.
Above 40 miles	4d.	8d.	12d.
To or from Dublin	6d.	12d.	24d.
From Dublin within Ireland—
40 miles and under	2d.	4d.	8d.
Above 40 miles	4d.	8d.	12d.

      

      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