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I
To begin, it would be helpful to recall briefly some of the major developments in both the law and practice of franking prior to, and concurrent with, the period under consideration. Franking had originated with Cromwell's government. In 1652, the Council of State ordered that ". . . all public packets on extraordinary dispatches, letters of members of Parliament and Council of State, secretaries, clerks, or officers employed in public service under them, or their committees, or in any other service of public concernment, shall be carried free. . . ."[2] Extended into the Restoration, the privilege was noticeably abused, as reflected in a Royal Warrant on 4 March 1693: ". . . the King has suffered great prejudice in the Post Office Revenue by the free carriage of letters and packets which ought to have been paid for."[3] In response to the abuse, this warrant restricted free carriage to the two principal Secretaries of State, the Secretary of Scotland, the Secretary in Holland, and the earl of Portland; two days later members of Parliament were accorded the privilege, but only during the session and forty days before and after. In addition, to forestall further abuse, members were required to write their names and to give the impression of their seals in a book provided for the purpose. A few months later, the privilege was further extended to the Treasury Lords, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Admiralty.
These prescriptions, however, proved ineffective in constraining abuses, which continued to proliferate into the eighteenth century. Typical abuses were of several kinds: enclosure of private letters within franked packets by authorized persons; forging of members' names by constituents without complaint from the former; letters sent from the country to be re-addressed for delivery under members' signatures; letters directed to be sent under a privileged person's name to a City coffee house where it would be picked up by the intended recipient; the inclusion of private letters within newspaper packets that had been franked by a privileged person.
In 1715, complaints from the Postmasters-General prompted the House of Commons to enact further stipulations: franks on letters and packets were to be written in the hand of the privileged person; a letter would pass free only if a member was actually residing in the place to which the letter was addressed; a member was forbidden to frank a newspaper unless it was entirely in print (no letter enclosed).[4]
The ongoing anxieties of Postmasters-General were reflected in the reported losses to the King's revenue as a result of franked material, both legal and illegal. For instance, from Lady Day (25 March) 1716 to the same day of the following year, the government audit office reported losses to revenue of £18,471 as a result of franking by the King's ministers and an additional £237 as the loss from M.P.'s franking.[5]
Despite continuing government clarifications regarding persons entitled to the franking privilege and warnings to violators, the illegal use of franks proceeded to escalate through the first three decades of the eighteenth century. Finally, reported annual losses to revenue of £36,864 during the period 1730-1733 prompted the House of Commons to undertake its own investigation of the problem in 1735. Various Post Office officials were summoned to testify on the manner and extent of the misuse of franks. Although Edward Cave, a supervisor of franks, provided elaborate evidence of false franking (notably, M.P.'s franking of letters not concerned with their business and non-privileged persons' use of blank franks supplied by members), the House became irate when it learned of Cave's methods of discovering and dealing with illegal franks. He reported that when he knew a member was not actually residing at the address on a letter, he charged the letter with postage. More distressing to the House, however, was Cave's method of detecting fraudulent franks: examining all franked letters by candlelight.[6]
Ironically, the principal effect of the investigation was the enactment of restrictions on the Post Office rather than measures directed at curing the franking problem. The House passed a Resolution forbidding the tactics employed by Cave, regarding them as infringements on members' privacy and privilege.[7] When the Postmasters-General complained to the Treasury (who set policy for the Post Office) that they were now prevented from protecting the King's revenue by this new restriction, they were told to obey the House's Resolution.[8]
Four years after George III had surrendered the Post Office revenue in favor of a Civil List settlement in 1760, Parliament passed an act, giving sanction to this longstanding privilege and repeating the principal points of the original royal proclamation. However, it put some "teeth" into the new act by including an elaborate set of regulations against abuses, and, among them, one stipulating that anyone found illegally avoiding postage would be guilty of felony and liable to transportation for seven years.[9] Initially, the act significantly reduced the illegal use of franks, but, shortly after, when the
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