The proclamation of 1603 was soon followed by another, prohibiting all persons not being duly authorised by the Master of the Posts from being concerned in the collecting, carrying, or delivering of letters. The effect, therefore, of the two proclamations together was that, except by private hand, no letter and, except along the bye-roads where posts did not exist, no traveller could pass between one part of the kingdom and another without coming under the observation of the Government. It has been suggested that the State monopoly of letters had its origin in a desire on the part of the Sovereign to reserve to himself the revenue which the letters brought; but in 1609, when the monopoly was created, the posts were maintained at a clear loss to the crown of £3400 a year, and this loss, as matters then stood, the erection of every fresh post would serve to increase. However it may have been in after years, the original object of the monopoly, the object avowed indeed and proclaimed, was that the State might possess the means of detecting and defeating conspiracies against itself. A system such as this object implies is absolutely abhorrent to our present notions; and yet it is a fact beyond all question that the posts in their infancy were regarded and largely employed as an instrument of police. It was not until the reign of William the Third that they began to assume their present shape of a mere channel for the transmission of letters.
But we are anticipating. In 1609 the cloud which obscures the earlier history of the posts begins to break, and from that year it is possible to present a tolerably connected narrative of their progress.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century the established posts were only four in number,--the post to Scotland, the post to Ireland, the post to Plymouth, and the post to Dover; and of these the most important by far, because the most used, was the last, the post through the county of Kent. It was through this county that the high-road to the Continent lay, and, while commercial relations as between one town and another within the kingdom were yet a thing of the future, the foreign trade of the country had already reached very considerable proportions. The persecutions in France and the Low Countries had driven a large number of foreigners to London, and here the Flemings introduced the manufacture of wool into cloth. In this commodity alone the exports from England to the Netherlands in the time of Philip the Second amounted to five millions of crowns annually.[4] In education no less than manufactures the Flemings were far in advance of our own countrymen. There was scarcely a peasant among them that could not both read and write. While, therefore, the other three posts of the kingdom were still being little used except for letters on affairs of State, the post to the Continent had already become matter of public concern.