Post Office (Revenues) Act 1711

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The Post Office (Revenues) Act 1711, commonly known at the time as the Post Office Act of Queen Anne, was a landmark statute of the Parliament of Great Britain that created an empire-wide postal system and transformed letter-carrying into a major source of state tax revenue. Enacted during the final years of the War of the Spanish Succession, the law merged the separate English and Scottish mail networks into a single General Post Office (GPO) headquartered in London under one Postmaster General of Great Britain.

Formally cited as 9 Anne c. 11 (or 9 Anne c. 10 in the Ruffhead edition), the Act took effect on 1 June 1711. Beyond uniting the domestic posts after the 1707 political union of England and Scotland, the statute reorganized packet-boat routes to Europe, placed the North American colonial mail under direct London control, and raised postage rates across the realm to pay down wartime public debt. It also gave explicit statutory sanction to state mail interception, requiring postmasters to open private correspondence whenever commanded by a warrant from a Principal Secretary of State. The 1711 framework governed British communications for more than a century until the reforms of Sir Rowland Hill and the Uniform Penny Post in 1840.

Background and fiscal crisis

Before 1711, British postal operations were governed by separate laws in England and Scotland. The English post rested on the Post Office Act 1657, passed under Oliver Cromwell and confirmed at the Restoration by the Post Office Act 1660, while Scotland maintained its own distinct postal establishment under the Scottish Post Office Act of 1695. Although the Acts of Union in 1707 merged the two kingdoms into Great Britain, the two postal networks continued to operate independently for another four years, causing administrative friction along the border at Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The immediate catalyst for reform was financial rather than logistical. By late 1710, Britain had been fighting the War of the Spanish Succession for nearly a decade, and the Treasury faced severe deficits. Robert Harley, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (soon created Earl of Oxford), together with the joint Postmasters General—Sir Thomas Frankland and Sir John Evelyn—recognised that the Crown's monopoly on letter carrying could be used as an indirect tax to secure long-term government loans.

Rather than treating postage merely as a fee to cover the cost of horses and post-boys, Harley's ministry drafted a comprehensive bill that repealed the 1660 English statute and the 1695 Scottish Act. The new legislation raised inland and foreign letter tariffs by roughly one-third and pledged a mandatory weekly payment directly into the Exchequer to fund the ongoing war effort.

Statutory provisions and the 1711 tariff

The text of the Act was exhaustive, running to forty-five sections that regulated everything from the speed of post-horses to the measurement of ferry crossings. It formally abolished the separate Postmaster General of Scotland, folding the Edinburgh office into a unified General Post Office situated off Lombard Street in the City of London—a headquarters that would later move to St Martin's Le Grand in 1829.

The weekly wartime levy and Crown pensions

Under Section 36 of the Act, the Postmaster General was required to pay £700 every week directly into the Exchequer every Tuesday for a term of thirty-two years, beginning on 29 September 1711. This guaranteed annual stream of £36,400 was used to back a new lottery loan of £180,000 for the army and navy. Only after this weekly levy and the operating costs of the packet boats were satisfied could the Crown draw its customary hereditary revenue, including a controversial £4,700 annual Post Office pension granted to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough.

The "single sheet" rule and mileage rates

Postage under the 1711 Act was paid in cash by the recipient upon delivery, not by the sender. Charges were calculated according to two strict variables: the number of sheets of paper and the distance the letter travelled along the post roads from London.

A "single letter" was defined as a single sheet of paper weighing less than one ounce, folded upon itself and sealed with wax; envelopes were not used, because an outer wrapper counted as a second piece of paper and instantly doubled the fee. If a single sheet enclosed a bank note, a merchant's bill of exchange, or even a small clipping of cloth, clerks held the folded paper up to a candle flame on the sorting table and charged it as a "double letter" or "treble letter." Letters weighing one full ounce or more were charged at four times the single-sheet rate.

(Note: 12 pence [d] = 1 shilling [s]. A "Cross-Road" letter that passed through London to reach another town was charged for both legs of the journey separately.)

Colonial posts, the Penny Post, and electoral restraint

The 1711 Act was the first statute to legislate directly for the postal systems of the British Empire. It superseded the royal patent previously held by Thomas Neale in North America and authorized the Postmaster General in London to establish a "Chief Letter Office" in the City of New York, alongside subordinate hubs in Boston, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Charleston, and across the Leeward Islands. Decades later, when Benjamin Franklin served as Deputy Postmaster General for North America (1753–1774), his authority and his disputes with colonial assemblies derived directly from the rate tables and monopoly clauses of the 1711 Act.

Domestically, the Act formalized the London Penny Post—originally started as a private municipal courier by merchant William Dockwra in 1680—allowing letters weighing up to four ounces to be delivered within a ten-mile radius of the General Letter Office for one penny, with a second penny charged for deliveries into the surrounding country towns.

To protect the state monopoly, common carriers, stagecoach drivers, and ship captains were forbidden from carrying letters for hire under penalty of a £5 fine for every offence, plus £100 for every week they persisted in running an illegal courier service. Only "letters of merchants and masters" strictly accompanying physical cargo on the same cart or vessel were exempt. Conversely, to curb political corruption by the Crown, the final sections of the Act strictly barred any postmaster, sorting clerk, or packet-boat captain from persuading or intimidating voters during parliamentary elections, under threat of a £100 fine and permanent disqualification from holding any office of trust under the Sovereign.

Section 40 and the "Secret Office"

While most of the Act dealt with horses, milestones, and pence, its fortieth section became one of the most consequential—and controversial—provisions in British constitutional law.

Under the guise of preventing postal clerks from embezzling or delaying the mail, Section 40 made it a statutory offence for any person to open, detain, or delay a letter after it had been handed into the post, except under a specific legal carving-out:

"And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That from and after the said First Day of June, One thousand seven hundred and eleven, no Person or Persons shall presume wittingly, willingly, or knowingly, to open, detain, or delay, or cause, procure, permit, or suffer to be opened, detained, or delayed, any Letter or Letters, Packet or Packets... except by an express Warrant in Writing under the Hand of One of the Principal Secretaries of State for every such opening, detaining, or delaying..."

Although state espionage under John Thurloe during the 1650s and Sir Samuel Morland after 1660 had long relied on Crown prerogative and lease clauses, the 1711 Act placed ministerial mail interception on a permanent parliamentary footing.

Armed with blanket warrants signed by the Secretaries of State, the Postmasters General quietly maintained a clandestine decryption and copying unit inside the London headquarters known as the Secret Office (alongside a partner "Deciphering Branch"). Clerks skilled in chemistry and engraving used heated knives and bread-paste moulds to lift wax seals from diplomatic pouches and domestic political correspondence, transcribed the contents, and resealed the letters with forged signets before returning them to the sorting frames. This statutory power operated in near-total secrecy for 133 years until June 1844, when the 1844 Mazzini letter-opening scandal exposed the Secret Office to a furious House of Commons and led to the modern regime of individually accounted Home Office Warrants.

Contemporary reactions and evasions

The passage of the Act in the spring of 1711 provoked immediate grumbling among merchants, Coffee-House proprietors, and literary figures across Britain and the American colonies, who viewed the new rates as a stealth tax on commerce and correspondence.

London merchants in 1711 inspecting a folded single-sheet letter by candlelight, a practice used by GPO clerks to charge double rates for hidden enclosures.⛶

In his private letters to Esther Johnson (later published as the Journal to Stella), the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, then living in London and writing propaganda for Harley's Tory ministry, complained repeatedly about the financial pinch of the new statute and the tightening of rules around parliamentary "franking" (the privilege allowing Members of Parliament to send mail for free by signing the outside of the sheet):

"Look here, the Post Office Act takes place tomorrow, and we shall be ruined in three-pences and four-pences... You must write closer, on thin gilt paper, and never wrap a scrap inside, or the rogues at Lombard Street will candle it and charge me double for your blunders." — Jonathan Swift, May 1711

In Scotland, the reaction from the Convention of Royal Burghs and the merchants of Edinburgh and Glasgow was particularly sharp. Prior to 1711, Scottish merchants had enjoyed lower short-distance tariffs; after 1 June, sending a single sheet to a London business partner cost sixpence—roughly the daily wage of an agricultural labourer—and a two-sheet invoice cost a full shilling. Furthermore, because the 1711 Act abolished the independent Scottish Postmaster General and made the Edinburgh office a mere deputy branch, every change to horse relays between Aberdeen, Inverness, and the Lowlands required approval from London, delaying commercial reform for decades.

Across the Atlantic, colonial legislatures reacted with open hostility. When Deputy Postmaster General John Hamilton attempted to enforce the 1711 rates in Virginia in 1718, the Virginia House of Burgesses protested that the British Parliament had no constitutional right to levy an internal tax on colonial letter-writers without the consent of their own assembly. The Burgesses passed a counter-bill imposing an impossible schedule of fines on postmasters who delayed deliveries across Virginian rivers, effectively stalling the implementation of the Act in the Chesapeake until the 1730s.

Ordinary citizens quickly developed ingenious ways to evade the 1711 sheet-counting rules:

• Cross-writing: To avoid paying for a second sheet of paper, correspondents filled a page horizontally from top to bottom, then rotated the paper ninety degrees and wrote a second full page of text directly across the first at right angles—sometimes adding a third layer diagonally in red ink.
• Frank-begging and forgery: Because Members of Parliament and peers of the realm only had to scrawl their signature ("Free, J. Smith") on the outer fold of a letter for it to travel free of charge, coffee-houses did a brisk trade in pre-signed blank sheets given away by obliging MPs to their constituents, banker friends, and family members.
• Coach smuggling: Despite the £5 fine, provincial merchants routinely hid bundles of letters inside boxes of cheese, bolts of wool, or barrels of oysters shipped via private stage-waggons to bypass the Royal Mail altogether.

Subsequent amendments and repeal

Although the 1711 Act established the enduring structure of the General Post Office, its monopoly and rate schedules required frequent statutory patching over the next century as British roads and commerce transformed:

1. The Cross-Posts Act 1720 (6 Geo. 1 c. 21): Under the 1711 Act, almost all main post roads radiated like spokes from London, meaning a letter from Bristol to Exeter had to travel east to London and back out again, paying double mileage. In 1720, the Bath postmaster Ralph Allen secured a contract and supporting statutory authority to lease and expand the "Bye-Posts" and "Cross-Posts," linking provincial towns directly and using wheeled mail-carts to catch smugglers.
2. The Franking Act 1764 (4 Geo. 3 c. 24): By the 1760s, forged and gifted parliamentary franks were costing the GPO over £170,000 a year in lost revenue. Parliament amended the 1711 rules to require that the Member of Parliament write the entire address and the date on the letter in his own handwriting, and that the letter be posted within twenty miles of where the MP was physically present on that day.
3. Palmer's Mail Coaches and the 1784 Rate Hikes (24 Geo. 3 Sess. 2 c. 37): When theatre proprietor John Palmer replaced slow post-boys on horseback with armed, high-speed mail coaches running to strict timetables in 1784, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger amended the 1711 tariffs upward to help pay off debts from the American Revolutionary War.
4. The Napoleonic Peak (1812): Successive wartime budget acts pushed the 1711 mileage bands to extreme levels. By 1812, sending a single sheet of paper from London to Edinburgh cost 1 shilling and 1½ pence (13½d), making legal correspondence entirely unaffordable for working-class Britons.

In 1837, wanting to consolidate more than 130 scattered postal laws passed since the reign of Queen Anne, Parliament enacted the Post Office (Offences) Act 1837 and companionrepeal statutes (7 Will. 4 & 1 Vict. c. 32–36), which formally repealed the bulk of the 1711 text while re-enacting its core provisions—including the Secretary of State's interception warrant power—almost verbatim. Three years later, the Postage Duties Act 1840 swept away the entire 1711 philosophy of distance-based, sheet-counted fees paid on delivery, replacing it with Rowland Hill's Uniform Penny Post and the prepaid Penny Black stamp.

The unified ministerial office of Postmaster General created by the 1711 Act survived for 258 years until it was finally abolished on 1 October 1969 by the Post Office Act 1969.

See also

• General Post Office
• Postmaster General
• Post Office Act 1657
• 1844 Mazzini letter-opening scandal
• St Martin's Le Grand
• Post Office Act 1969