According to the Queen's Majesty's pleasure, and your advertisement, you shall receive a form of prayer, which, after you have perused and judged of it, shall be put in print and published immediately, &c. &c.
From my house at Croyden, this 22d July, 1566, at four of the clock, afternoon.
This letter is thus endorsed by successive postmasters, according to the existing custom.
Received at Waltham Cross the 23d of July, at nine at night. Received at Ware the 23d of July at 12 at night. Received at Croxton the 24th of July, between 7 and 8 of the morning.
So that his Grace's letter, which would appear to have been so important as that one or more messengers were required to travel night and day in order to deliver it at the earliest possible moment, took 40 hours to travel 63 miles.
[8] Smiles's Lives of the Engineers, Vol. I.
[9] Historian of Craven, speaking of the close of the sixteenth century.
It was reserved for the Stuarts to organize for the first time in England a regular system of post communication, the benefits of which should be shared by all who could find the means. England was behind other European nations in establishing a public letter-post. It was not until the foreign post had been in existence a hundred years, and until the foreigners had drawn particular attention to their postal arrangements by their constant disputes, that the English government established a general post for inland letters, similar to the one whose benefits "the strangers" had enjoyed even prior to the reign of Henry the Eighth. Little progress towards this end was made in the reign of the first James, if we except a better organization for the conveyance of official despatches. At the same time, it ought to be stated, that the improved organization here referred to was the groundwork for the subsequent public post.
One of the results attendant on the accession[10] of the Scotch king to the English Crown necessitated important improvements in the system of horse posts, for which it called loudly. Immediately on his accession, the high road from Edinburgh to London was thronged night and day with the king's countrymen. All ordinary communications fell far short of the demand; so much so, that post messengers riding from the Council at Edinburgh to the king in London, or _vice versâ_, were stopped whole days on the road for want of horses, which had been taken by the Scottish lords and gentlemen rushing forward to the English capital to offer their congratulations to his majesty. As a remedy, the lords of the English council issued a proclamation, calling upon all magistrates to assist the postmasters "_in this time so full of business_," by seeing to it that they were supplied with "fresh and able horses as necessitie shall require." They were to be "able and sufficient horses," well furnished "of saddles, bridles, girts and stirropes, with good guides to look to them; who for the said horses shall demand and receive of such as shall ride on them the prices accustomed" (_Book of Proclamation_, 1603-1609).