Tag Archives: Charles I

Inventing the post office: A bit of British history

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Britain’s post office was established in 1660, under Charles II. Or in 1630, under Charles I. Or in 1711, under Queen Anne. Or in 1516, under Henry VIII.

All those dates have at least a semi-rational claim. One of the things I love about history is how clear-cut everything is. 

Let’s start with Henry. What he set up was a national network that would serve the court, although one website dates it to 1512, not 1516, and Cardinal Woolsey gets the credit instead of Henry, but we’re at least all talking the same language here, so it’s close enough for our purposes. 

The system involved relays of horses and messengers, and this was revolutionary stuff–the internet of its day. Up until then, if you wanted to send a letter, you had to send your own damn courier or find someone going in the right direction who’d carry your letter or package through the airport scanner for you. (“Did you pack your own luggage, sir?” “Of course not. I have minions who do that for me.” “Of course, sir. No problem, but you still can’t take your sword on the plane.”)

Or maybe Henry’s system wasn’t so new. According to WikiWhatsia, the first postal service was in Egypt, in 2400 BCE, and Persia had one in 550 BCE. Ancient Rome, ancient China, the Mongol Empire, and assorted other political entities can also stake early claims. Whether anyone in England knew about them at the time is up for grabs.

For us, it doesn’t matter. The system was new to England and people who were important enough to get close found ways to slip their own letters in with the court documents. 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia escaping a neighbor’s back yard in early February.

 

The service goes public

In 1630, the ill-fated Charles I (lost his head in the civil war) opened the service to the public. Or someone did it for him. Monarchs always get the credit for other people’s work, possibly because the initiative was theirs but possibly because they didn’t get in the other people’s way.

Never mind. Here’s how it worked: First we shift into the present tense, because it’s so much more exciting and because you want to drop Mom a note saying you’ll be home next Monday and what’s the point of doing that if Monday’s already in the past? You write your letter and take it somewhere–the write-ups aren’t clear on this, but it wasn’t your local post office and it wasn’t a mailbox, since neither exist yet. Probably to the nearest post, which is not a piece of wood driven into the ground but a place that’s part of the (ahem) postal network. The mail goes from one post to another, and the postmaster at each one pulls out the mail–sorry, the post–for his area and sends the rest on. 

We’re probably correct here in saying “his,” not “his or hers,” “theirs,” or some other awkward variation, although I can’t swear to that. Let’s let it stand this time.

England and Scotland have six main post roads, and letters travel along them, so if you and Mom aren’t that far apart but are in different postal areas that aren’t joined by a post road, your letter will first go to a post before it heads more or less backward to reach her. But it’s not all inefficiency, because the service works night and day, literally. 

Once your letter reaches the post in Mom’s area, it’s handed to a postboy, who’ll deliver it, either on horse or on foot, and if Mom wants it she’ll have to hand over some money, otherwise forget it: no letter. Of course, by the time it reaches her you might already be home, so she can save herself the expense.

How much does she save? It depends on weight and distance. When the system started, the charge was 2d for 80 miles for a single sheet of paper. 

A d? For no reason a rational person will ever remember, that stands for a penny, so 2 pence, or a day’s wage for a skilled tradesman. In other words, not cheap.

How fast was the system? (You’ll notice we’re in the past tense again, having forgotten all about you and your mother. Hope you had a nice visits.) A letter sent from Edinburgh to London might get a reply in something like two months. 

The system had competition from private carriers–hundreds of them, although I haven’t found any information on their systems, costs, or speed.

 

The Civil War and the Restoration

You’d think the English Civil War (it started in In 1642) might’ve distracted people, but staying connected mattered at least as much as it ever did, and the Commonwealth’s postal service covered England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1657, the General Post-Office was granted a monopoly, getting rid of those pesky competitors, and a fixed rate was established for letters. No one seems to list this as one of the post office’s many founding dates, but it strikes me as having a reasonable claim. 

That carries us to Charles II and another founding date. 

In this telling, Charles–or at least his government–gets credit for not just founding the General Post Office (no hyphen this time–think how much time and ink that saved) but for rolling it out across the country, although it sounds like the Commonwealth had already done that.  

How was this different from the hyphenated post office set up by the Commonwealth? Haven’t a clue. It might’ve been a major improvement and it might just be a case of the Commonwealth’s work not being taken as seriously as the monarchy’s. You’re on your own. 

It was under Charles II that postmarks became standard. They showed the date a letter was mailed, pushing the carriers not to stash a bundle at the pub for a week or two when things got busy.

That brings us to postboys, the final link in the delivery chain and a problematic one, which they’d continue to be until late into the 18th century. They were badly paid and some of them dealt with that creatively, by robbing their post bags. Give them an A for initiative. 

However risky it was, it wasn’t uncommon for people to send cash. How else were you going to get money from Point A to Point B? Cheques weren’t used in England until 1640, the first checkbook wasn’t issued until 1830, and checks didn’t circulate widely until the late 1800s. 

But postboys weren’t the only people who thought of looking inside the post bags: highwaymen regularly attacked carriers and stole the mail.  

Even if no money was stolen and the mail wasn’t stashed at the pub for a week or two, the service was slowed down by roads that could be pot-holed, ankle-deep in mud, and in general a mess. And we’re talking about a 24-hour service, remember. In the dark, it wouldn’t have been easy to tell the road from the countryside around it. 

 

Following the money

In 1711, under Queen Anne, a bill created a single post office of the United Kingdom and set postage rates and delivery times, which is why some sources give that as the founding date. The Post Office (what the hell, let’s use caps here*) was now a branch of the Treasury and its goal was to raise money for the state.

Where had the money gone before that? During the Restoration, it was used to pay pensions to court favorites. After the Revolution (I think this means the Glorious Revolution, so 1688-1689) it paid pensions to peers and statesmen. By 1699, a third of the Post Office’s income went to pay pensions. Compare that to what the postboys and highwaymen stole and they’ll come across as minor-league players.

The bill took that nice little pot of money and put it in the state’s hands so it could do something useful with it, like fund a war. 

What war? I find two: Queen Anne’s War, where England and France fought for control of North America, and the War of the Spanish Succession, where assorted countries fought over, um, the Spanish succession. (You’d never have guessed that without my help, would you?) If I’ve missed any, feel free to pencil them in yourself. The point is, think what an improvement this was.

 

I’m bored. Could we have a scandal?

Oh, always. 

From the Restoration on, it was accepted practice for MPs and Lords to send and receive letters for free. That’s called franking, which comes from Latin francus, or free, and I had to look it up too.

By the 18th century, MPs (and I assume Lords) were sending other people’s mail for free under their signed covers–it was a nice little favor they could do for friends and supporters and general hangers-on–and by 1754  that was costing the post office £23,600 in lost revenue, which in 2023 money would be something north of £4,000,000. 

How did the post office deal with that? Why, it set up a system to look for abuse of the system, of course, and that brought in a new way to abuse the system. It could almost make a person cynical, couldn’t it? In 1735, opposition MPs complained that their mail was being opened in the post office on behalf of the ministry. 

What ministry? Damned if I know. Apparently it’s too obvious to need saying, but this was the government snooping on the opposition under cover of being sure they didn’t abuse their franking privileges.

This led to the revelation that the inspector of franks, Edward Cave, had been gathering material for his own publication, The Gentleman’s Magazine, from the newsletters and gazettes that passed through his hands on their way to (or possibly from) MPs. And although I’ve lost the link by now, one source mentioned money being stolen from the mail in the House of Commons post office. By the person in charge of it. In the name of being sure no one was misusing their franking privileges.

To deal with the problem, the Commons decried abuse of the franking system. We can all guess how effective that was. Then in 1764, an act dealing with franking set up “harsh penalties for those trying to defraud the Post Office, including transportation to the colonies.”

I can’t find a record of a single MP or Lord being transported under the act. I’m sure you’re as surprised as I am.

 

Want a bit of corruption that doesn’t qualify as a scandal?

Throughout the 18th century, the post office had two postmasters at a time. These were patronage positions: lucrative places to drop people you owed a favor to and who you knew had no interest in doing any real work. Most of the postmasters were peers or the sons of aristocrats at the end of their careers. One, Thomas Villiers, Baron Hyde of Hindon (later earl of Clarendon), called it “a very good bed for old courtiers to rest in,” 

Why isn’t that a scandal? It was business as usual. It’s only a scandal if enough people are shocked.

 

* My capitalization of post office is wildly inconsistent, but you know what? I’ve worked as a copyeditor and I’m  retired now. That means I officially don’t have to give a fuck. Whee.

The Monmouth Rebellion and the king who wasn’t

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If you tied a knot in the thread of English history every time somebody led a rebellion, you’d make a mess of your sewing. So let’s skip the knots–they weren’t my best idea–and talk about the Monmouth Rebellion, which was led by (no points for guessing this one) Monmouth, the Duke of.

Okay, half a point if you got the Duke part right.

Like everything else of its time (1685) and place (England), the rebellion only makes sense when you paint in the background: the wrestling match between Catholics, Protestants, and super-Protestants for the soul–and more importantly, the throne–of England. 

Can a wrestling match have three contestants or does that make it a free-for-all? Does a contest involving three people take place between them or among them? Does anyone care about the answers to these questions?

Probably not. 

Irrelevant photo: mountain ash berries. Fall is coming. Or autumn , if we’re speaking British.

We’ll start our tale in (for no good reason) the present tense at a time when King Nobody (the first and last of that name) wears England’s crown. Cromwell and some of the super-Protestants are in power. The last king’s dead. The country’s kingless. The super-Protestants lack superpowers, though. They get their name (from me; no one else calls them that) because they’re further along the Protestant spectrum than the more moderate Church of England Protestants. 

That lack of superpowers explains why–

But I’m getting ahead of our story. Cromwell’s in power and Charles II, son of the now-beheaded Charles I, is in exile. 

 

What does Charles get up to while he’s in exile?

Some regal hanky-panky, and the fairly predictable result of that is a son, James.

Time rolls on, as time will. Everybody involved gets older. Cromwell dies. The super-Protestants don’t find a way to continue a kingless government. (See above: lack of superpowers.) Charles comes back to England as king, becoming Charles II. If you’ve seen portraits of the Charleses, he’s the one who looks like an aging and particularly dissolute Bob Dylan. The thought of anyone being or ever having been in bed with him–

No, let’s put that out of our minds.

Charles may be the king, but he doesn’t have superpowers either. All around him are forces pushing to lock the Church of England into place and edge both Catholics and nonconforming Protestants to the furthest corners of the national picture.

It’s in this context that he flirts dangerously with both Catholicism and Europe’s Catholic powers, and it’s also in this context that he and his wife fail to produce–forget a son, they don’t have any kids at all. So his brother is next in line for the throne and he’s–gasp, wheeze–a Catholic convert.

It’s easy to think this is all intolerant and silly, but the country has just emerged from a time when people killed each other in the name of religion, and even now, when things have settled down a bit, which religion you’d committed to decides what earthly doors are open or closed to you. So everyone has solid material reasons not to want Those People from the Other Religion(s) in power. 

That’s in addition to whatever religious reasons they have.

 

Yeah, but what about little James?

Well, James gets knocked around a bit. Before he’s ten, he’s kidnapped, jailed, exiled, and kidnapped again, this time by his father’s agents, who dump him into the household of his father’s gentleman of the bedchamber, where he’s barely educated. 

Gentleman of the bedchamber? It’s not a lascivious as it sounds. He dresses the king, waits on him when he eats alone, and generally hangs out with him. 

At some point, Charles wakes up, says, “Didn’t I have a kid around here somewhere?” and brings him to court, where he becomes a favorite and is turned into a Duke and given a bunch of other titles that if you’re not used to British traditions sound like something JK Rowling made up. He also has a variety of income streams arranged for him. When he’s older, he fights for the king here and there and gains quite the reputation as a soldier. He joins the privy council.

So far, he barely justifies a footnote to history, but the thing is, James is a Protestant and a king’s son, even if he wasn’t born with the right paperwork.

But hold on a minute. His mother (who’s now conveniently dead) always claimed that she’d been married to Charles, and since marriage records haven’t been computerized yet, no one can prove she wasn’t, even if, equally, no one can prove she was. That makes it possible to build a case that he should be the next–safely Protestant–king. So schemes to set James on the throne buzz around him like flies around roadkill.

Eventually he gets involved in a conspiracy, the Rye House Plot (it would’ve involved killing the king and his brother). After a bit of back and forth James goes to live in the Netherlands.

 

And doesn’t live happily ever after

Instead, when Charles dies, James–

But let’s call him Monmouth from here on. It’ll help us remember who’s the king (James, Charles’s brother) and who’s the wannabe (also James, Charles’s son a.k.a. Monmouth). 

So Charles dies and Monmoth launches a full-scale rebellion–or invasion if you prefer–that’s coordinated with an anti-Catholic Scottish rebellion in the highlands.

Why the Scots? Well, England and Scotland are two separate countries, but they have a single king, and if you think that’s confusing try to explain the pronunciation of Worcestershire to someone who learned to read English using phonics. 

The Scottish rising fails while Monmouth’s still crossing the Channel, though, leaving him and 82 men to land in Lyme Regis (that’s in Dorset, in the southwest) without anything to distract the government’s attention. 

Why such a small force? Monmouth’s counting on the country to rise in his support, and initially that seems to work. He’s popular in the southwest, and he gathers an army of 3,000, which is a nice number, trailing an appealing collection of zeroes. The problem with them is that none of them come from the gentry–the people with some soldierly training. He has an army of enthusiastic amateurs without much in the way of weaponry. 

By another count, his army is uphill of 1,000.  How far uphill? Will you stop splitting hairs? We’ll never get out of here. 

Monmouth’s not exactly claiming the throne at this point, just saying he has a right to it but will only take it with Parliament’s agreement. Let’s not split hairs, though. A lot of his followers call him King Monmouth, and they have time to defeat a few county militias before the king’s army arrives. Commoners and the poor flock to his banner, and in Taunton he’s proclaimed king. By now, he has some 6,000 soldiers. 

We’ll skip the back and forth. Monmouth’s and the king’s armies meet at Sedgemoor and Monmouth loses badly. After the battle, his soldiers are hunted down and killed on the spot. (They were commoners anyway, and you can do that to commoners and still sleep at night.) Some 200 who are caught later are tried before being killed. Another 2,000 are transported to the West Indies to work–in a weird and little-known footnote to history–to work alongside slaves from Africa.

Or by that other count, 320 executed and 800 transported. By a third, it’s 333 and 860. Let’s treat the numbers as rough guesses. 

Men, women, and children with remote connections to the rebellion are flogged. Monmouth is captured and executed. 

David Horspool, whose book The English Rebel I rely on whenever I write about rebellions (and I’m a sucker for a good rebellion), thinks Monmouth’s failure was a result of rushing into his rebellion instead of waiting for James to discredit himself. 

 

What happens then?

James discredits himself. He interprets Monmouth’s defeat to mean that the country values stability above everything else and overestimates their tolerance for religious tolerance. He appoints Catholics to important positions, most controversially to positions in the military. He grants for all religions more leeway than they’ve had. And when I say “all religions” here, we do seem to be talking about all religions, including Jews, Muslims, and dissenting Christians. As far as I know, that’s the limit of England’s religious population at this point.  He When judges, justices of the peace, and lords lieutenant resist his moves, he fires them and he comes into conflict with Parliament–nothing new for kings, but the whiff of Catholic incense hanging over the conflict supercharges the reaction he gets.  

Is he genuinely trying to build a state that tolerates multiple religions or is he making sneaky moves toward a Catholic state? I don’t know, but a lot of powerful Church of England Protestants think they do. They believe he’s favoring Catholics and setting the building blocks of a Catholic state in place. 

There’s something very contemporary about that fear, don’t you think? Just slot a more modern into place and the rhetoric’s the same. Immigrants, Muslims, Black people, whoever. There’s a lot of it going around. I know you’ve heard it.

 

Why does any of this matter?

Because it sets up the Glorious Revolution, which hits the Eject button that’s been quietly installed on James’s throne, replacing him with a Protestant monarchy. 

But that’s a story for another time. 

Parliament, Cromwell, Charles I, and Tourette

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In 1653, with Charles I beheaded, Charles II in exile, and the rebellions in Ireland suppressed (brutally, since you asked), Oliver Cromwell had no one left to fight with but his allies. So off he toddled to the House of Commons and closed it down.

How’d we get to this point?  

Before Charles I was executed and when the odds of him losing his throne looked about the same as the odds that he’d invent the rechargeable battery, he knocked heads with his parliament over money and power. It’s hard, when you’re not just the king but the head of your country’s church, not to think that god meant you to be the head of everything else too, so Charlie believed he had a divine right to be king.

Semi-relevant photo: Minnie the Moocher believes she has a divine right to be in bed.

He wasn’t the only one. It was a long-standing European belief, but that didn’t make it any less of an issue, because  Parliament, for the most part, didn’t believe it. It believed in the Magna Carta, which said (with just the slightest bit of paraphrasing), Sure, this guy can be king but there are limits. So Parliament voted him money by the teaspoonful and did everything it could to limit his power.

Charlie sent them home, because that was one of the powers that they both agreed he had.

Bad Parliament. You can’t play at Our house anymore.

Did I say “house”? I meant “palace.”

But dissolving Parliament turned off his largest money tap. He cobbled together assorted of ways to raise money, but after eleven years he needed those pesky parliamentarians again. He’d gotten himself in a war with Scotland over prayer books and bishops. No, seriously: That stuff mattered. Either that or it stood in for what mattered more but didn’t play as well to the crowd.

Whatever they’re about, though, wars are expensive.

So Parliament met and and the new one didn’t get along with the king any better than the last one had. The most Protestant Protestants among its members suspected Charles of edging the country toward Catholicism, what with his Catholic wife and his stained glass church windows and his priests in fancy dress.

No, I’m telling you. All of that mattered.  

In 1641, the new Parliament arm-wrestled Charles for various sorts of power and passed–barely–a list of complaints about the king, called the Grand Remonstrance. When Charles didn’t email back immediately and say, Hey, guys, great talking points, let’s discuss them, my door is always open, its supporters circulated the Remonstrance to the public.

And with that, the Parliamentary debate had broken powerfully into the world, where ordinary people were already debating these issues.

Before long, Charles broke into the House of Commons and tried to arrest the five members who annoyed him most, which must’ve been a hard choice. They were all getting on his refined and kingly nerves.

Within weeks, armed bands had invaded Westminster. The king and queen fled. Parliament held London.

Both sides armed themselves, the Scots came in on the side of Parliament, and everyone fought back and forth for a few years, with neither side knocking the other one off the board. That was the First Civil War.

Where did the army stand in all this? Funny you should ask. The country didn’t have a standing army. It raised one when it needed to, then sent it home when it didn’t. That’s how it had always been done, and it saved having to feed and pay soldiers to sit around during peacetime.

In 1645, Charles escaped a siege at Oxford and handed himself to the Scottish army for safety. After nine months of negotiations, Scotland sold him to Parliament for £100,000 and a promise that England would never enter the haggis market.

No, no, no. That bit about the haggis? Please don’t link to it.  

Charlie escaped again and made a deal with the Scots: You get rid of these pesky rebels and I’ll make England Presbyterian for three years.

What would have happened after three years if he’d had a chance to make good on the deal? Someone would have taken one chair away and the music would’ve started all over again. And they all pretty much knew that, but no one could tell who’d be chairless when the music stopped, so they all jumped in and started the Second Civil War, which ended with Charles captured again.

This left Parliament with an awkward problem: What were they supposed to do with this guy? No matter how many times he lost his tail feathers, he was still the king.

In the meantime, Parliament wasn’t getting along with its army much better than it had with Charles. Like everything else, this had a religious element to it. Everything had a religious element. It was the language of politics. It was the language of everything. If they’d had cooking shows, they’d have had a religious element to them as well.

What mattered more immediately was that Parliament wanted to negotiate with the king and that Oliver Cromwell, on behalf of the army, didn’t.

How do you settle a problem like that? Ollie tossed out the MPs who didn’t take his side and made his deal with the ones who were left.

And since everything had a religious element, God said it was okay.

The MPs who were left were called the Rump Parliament, not after anyone’s hind end but because the word also means a small part of something that used to be bigger, and they put the king on trial. The House of Lords and the highest available judges said it wasn’t a good idea, so they established a new court, tried the king, found him guilty, and executed him. No one called it revolutionary justice, but that’s pretty much what it was. When you tear down the old order, you make new laws because the old ones don’t work anymore. Is that right? Is that wrong? It depends on your point of view.

England was now a republic, or a commonwealth. The House of Lords was abolished.

Did they all live happily ever after? No, they fought the Third Civil War. The remaining royalists and Scotland rallied about Charles part Two, but by 1651 it was all over. When the last Irish resistance ended in 1653, there was no one left to oppose Cromwell.

And that’s when he lost it with the Rump Parliament. Cromwell and the army wanted it to dissolve itself so they could elect a new, godly assembly. Parliament thought it was plenty godly, thanks, and wanted to stay where it was.

It sounds familiar? It is. We’re still watching the same play, but Cromwell’s playing Charles and Parliament’s playing Parliament. The difference is that Cromwell was a better Charles than Charles was: He stomped into the House of Commons with some musketeers, had them seize the mace, that symbol of Parliament’s royal authority, and sent the MPs home.

The symbol of royal authority? Wasn’t the king dead? Well, yes, but old habits die hard and history–not to mention humans–is nothing if not contradictory. They were still using the thing.

The members of the new Parliament were chosen by the army’s officers for their religious fervor. But it turned out to be too radical and in 1653, when its more problematic members were in a prayer meeting, the remainder of the group dissolved itself.

That left Oliver Cromwell to become the Lord Protector: a king in all but name.

History doesn’t exactly repeat itself, but with the way it barks our repeated phrases you have to wonder sometimes if it doesn’t have tourette’s.