The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

by Andrew Pettegree

  Impressive though this was, the Taxis’ imperial service was still some way short of offering a fully functioning and integrated European postal network. In France the ambitious system laid out by Louis XI in the fifteenth century had largely fallen into decay. Paris and Blois were served by couriers on the imperial routes, and Lyon was a major postal hub between Spain and Germany; but the restrictions of the French royal system left many parts of the kingdom unserved.

  The reform of the French royal post was taken in hand in the brief reign of Francis II (1559–60).8 This was another period of internal political tension, a time of intense partisan agitation before the outbreak of the French wars of religion. The new decree introduced several postal routes, radiating out from Paris to the kingdom's frontiers, with two important lateral routes from Lyon to Marseille and Blois to Nantes. The arterial road from Paris to Bordeaux and onward to the Spanish frontier had fifty-three stages. The decree stipulated payments including stipends for twelve ferrymen: a reminder that not even all main roads were continuously linked by bridges, even at this point. Whether the reorganised French system worked in practice is also to be doubted. Within years France had been plunged into turmoil by the outbreak of the Huguenot rebellion. Fighting continued intermittently for forty years, rendering the already notorious French road system even more perilous.

  8.1 The postman, as represented in an early German newspaper.

  In England, rather as in France, the need for the improvement of the postal service was most acutely felt in times of emergency.9 When Henry VIII crossed the Channel for his first campaign in France (1513), he was accompanied by his master of the posts, Sir Brian Tuke, and fourteen messengers. But in the sixteenth century, as before, the main onus of ensuring the distribution of the post was placed on local agents, principally the king's sheriffs. The costs of maintaining the postal relays fell on the towns along the mail routes. It is interesting to contrast the vague nature of Tuke's instructions, as laid out in a letter to Thomas Cromwell in 1533, with the vastly more ambitious imperial system in continental Europe. ‘The king's pleasure,’ Tuke wrote,

  is that the posts be better appointed, and laid in all places most expedient; with the commandment to all townships in all places, on pain of life, to be in such readiness, and to make such provision of horses at all times, as no tract or loss of time be had in that behalf.10

  The English municipalities no doubt bore these burdens patiently, but the effeciency of the postal system had in effect been subcontracted to a host of subsidiary authorities of widely varying capabilities. Nevertheless, this was the way in which the English Crown conducted its business. An instruction preserved in the town archives of Southampton ordered the municipal authorities in 1500 ‘to see the letters enclosed conveyed to Jersey and Guernsey [the Channel Islands, off the coast of France] by the next convenient messenger’.11 The Crown also made generous use of the post maintained by the City of London.

  Those towns that lay along the road to the north were particularly burdened. In times of genuine crisis a special effort was called for. During the northern revolt in 1536 the mayors of Huntingdon, Stamford and Lincoln were required to appoint ‘an able man well horsed’ to be available night and day to carry letters from the king and Privy Council. But in more normal times municipal authorities found the expense hard to bear. The Council's attempt to keep the rate paid for post horses at the largely nominal penny a mile caused great resentment, but the resources were simply not available for a more substantial system. In 1568 Queen Elizabeth ordered that any local postmasters not prepared to serve for half their present wage should be discharged. The attempt to adopt some of the continental practices – the notation on letters of the times of despatch and arrival at intermediary stages on the route and other exhortations to haste, for instance – were only fitfully successful. Notwithstanding the urgent ‘For life, For Life’ on the package, letters had still taken nine days to reach Calais, complained a rather testy Lord Wharton in 1548. The use of the gallows sign to signal urgency also backfired when the treasurer of the northern garrison, clearly mistaking its meaning, took offence and wrote a pained letter of protest.12

  The Tudor Crown recognised a need to maintain on a permanent basis only the arterial roads to the Channel at Dover and to Scotland. In times of military necessity, postal relays were established to Holyhead or Milford Haven (that is, towards Ireland) or to Plymouth, to shadow potential dangers in the English Channel. Otherwise the distribution of official mail worked much as in medieval times, with royal messengers carrying writs to county sheriffs, who would take responsibility for distributing them locally.

  The postal systems of France and England also differed from the imperial system in that the Crown maintained them for the exclusive use of official business. This meant that potential private or commercial customers had to shift for themselves. By far the most developed and efficient private postal system was that set up by the foreign merchant community in London, the Merchant Strangers. This linked the English capital with the imperial postal network, and with a second route through France via Rouen and Paris. From London the merchant post also carried letters down to the English ports: to Plymouth and Exeter in the West Country, to Norwich, Colchester and Harwich in East Anglia.

  The Italian Corsini family, which established a base in London during Elizabeth's reign, achieved a remarkably regular connection with their agents in these coastal towns and with correspondents abroad.13 The volume carried by these merchant posts kept the rates low, and the English Merchant Adventurers could also rely on the constant passage of ships between London and their staple markets abroad. For private citizens not enrolled in these two associations secure connections were much more difficult to achieve, and more expensive.

  The failure of ambition implied by these parallel systems was an impoverishment of the network as a whole. Deprived of this additional lucrative business, the postmasters of the royal post had little incentive to invest to improve the system. For much of the sixteenth century, therefore, France and England remained essentially outside the European postal network. The provision of news for these places, in consequence, always required a greater effort and the use of merchant posts. In these respects the merchant metropolis of Lyon, strategically situated halfway between Paris and the German trading regions, played a crucial role. The density of commerce between Antwerp and London helped speed communications across the Channel. But even here the English Crown made life more difficult for those anxious for news by imposing stricter controls on the foreign merchant posts in the last decades of the sixteenth century.

  The other major drawback to the imperial system was that it made little provision for the German cities. This, it must be said, was partly through their own choice. Having fought so hard to establish their jurisdictional independence, the imperial cities were extremely reluctant to admit a Habsburg institution within their walls.14 They also refused under any circumstances to open the city gates at night, and the imperial post ran continuously round the clock. There was, too, the not insignificant matter that during the course of the Reformation most of the imperial cities had adhered to Protestantism. The imperial post was very much a Catholic institution, and the Taxis postmasters proved unwavering in their allegiance. In consequence the only imperial city that formed part of the Habsburg postal network was Augsburg. Speyer, though it lay at a strategic juncture on the route, refused to admit a post office. Even the splendid new post office at Augsburg in 1549 was built outside the city walls. Apart from Augsburg the German postal stations had perforce to be placed in relatively small settlements, like Rheinhausen, the crucial Rhine crossing just a few miles from Speyer.

  The merchant communities of the German cities were the major victims of this ideological purity. The Fugger and Welser of Augsburg were able to make full and profitable use of the post; in fact the Fugger system of agents, which reached its highest state of development during these years, is virtually inconceivable without their access to the i
mperial post.15 Alongside substantial sums for letters sent through the post, the Fugger accounts also record generous gifts to the Taxis postmasters, with whom they were on friendly terms.16 In the other German cities the merchants were obliged to carry their post to the nearest imperial post station. In the case of Frankfurt, this would have been Rheinhausen, over 120 kilometres distant. This was a critical liability both for the German cities and for the European international commercial system. It even began to distort German political life. Speyer and Augsburg were increasingly chosen for meetings of the imperial Diet specifically because they were close to the main postal routes.

  Crisis

  In 1889 workmen clearing an administrative building in Frankfurt made a remarkable discovery. Tucked away in an unassuming sack was a large cache of letters written three hundred years previously, in the year 1585: the sack contained a total of 272 items of post. This, it turned out, was the remnant of two or more mail sacks from the imperial postal service. Somewhere north of Rheinhausen the mail had been intercepted. The most politically sensitive letters had been removed, and the remainder, routine business and family transactions, discarded. Swept into a bundle and stored in the corner of some office, somehow they had survived the next three hundred years to emerge as a mute witness to the late sixteenth-century postal system, its vitality and its dangers.17

  The surviving letters, now a prized possession of the Frankfurt Museum of Telecommunications, offer a fascinating snapshot of the European news network, almost a century after the imperial postal couriers had first begun to make their way along the trans-continental highways. The discarded mail linked merchants and other correspondents in twenty different Italian cities with friends and business partners in Cologne, Liège and numerous places in the Low Countries (the messengers had clearly been travelling north). The overwhelming majority of the surviving letters are from Italian merchants to their business partners in northern Europe, mostly in Antwerp and Cologne. Particularly striking is the number of Italian names among the addressees: trans-continental trade still relied to a large extent on connections between Italian merchants and members of the extended family settled (often long settled) in northern Europe. A significant number of the letters was destined for friends in Antwerp, even though the city was under close siege from the army of the Duke of Parma. Another group of letters was destined for soldiers in the besieging armies.

  The letters contain details of transactions in an impressive variety of commodities, a testimony both to the continuing vitality of international trade and to the role of the imperial post in sustaining it.18 Except for one thing: these letters never got through. These postal deliveries fell victim to the political turbulence then raging in Germany, specifically the warfare that had erupted (1583–8) when the Archbishop of Cologne attempted to convert his domain to Protestantism. Nor was this an isolated example: the imperial postal system, functioning so efficiently up to the abdication of Charles V in 1555, ran into serious difficulties in the second half of the century, partly as an inevitable consequence of these troubled times. The protracted military and political conflict unleashed by the Revolt of the Netherlands badly disrupted the northern end of the postal system.

  The Low Countries experienced serious fighting in 1566, 1568, 1572–4 and 1579–85. The attempt to flush out the Dutch Protestant minority also stimulated widespread emigration among the merchant and artisan communities, leading to the creation of a new type of postal service: a clandestine courier service operated by the exiles themselves to keep in touch with family members they had left behind. Unusually, we know a great deal about the functioning of this Protestant underground thanks to the interception of one consignment before delivery: letters were discovered in the false bottom of a basket of vegetables close to the villages where they had been gathered up before transportation to England.19 If this consignment failed to get through, others clearly did: the letters speak of regular communication, and they have an unhurried sense of routine, even if many express a moving sense of loss at the separation from husbands and fathers now forced to live abroad.20

  Such a service could be remarkably efficient in speeding letters to their destination in just a few days. The dense merchant traffic that linked Antwerp, England and the north German ports provided the perfect cover. The landward connections down the Rhine were more problematic, passing as they did through lands often disrupted by campaigning armies: these, of course, were the vital arteries of the imperial post. The sack of Antwerp by mutinous Spanish troops in 1576 was also a hammer blow to the northern trade emporium, by this point a critical node in Europe's commercial network. As noted, the war of the Archbishopric of Cologne was another highly disruptive conflict at a critical node of the northern postal network.

  The French Wars of Religion also had a significant impact on the imperial postal system, particularly on those routes that linked Italy and southern Germany to the Iberian Peninsula. We have seen already how critically the vulnerability of this road system through southern France impeded Philip II's communications with Rome and Vienna.21 The Fuggers, too, frequently expressed their frustration at the difficulty of maintaining correspondence with Spain. On 26 April 1587 the Fugger agent in Portugal was obliged to report that the ordinary post from Lisbon had been waylaid near Bordeaux, and the letters rifled.22 In the following decade the Fuggers were grimly aware that all their Spanish letters were being routinely opened in France. Eventually they felt they had no choice but to instruct their agents to send all correspondence by the sea route to Genoa, or even the circuitous northern route via Flanders.

  The Taxis also had their difficulties in these years. The division of the Habsburg inheritance between Spain and Austria compromised their existing contracts as imperial postmasters, and led to legal and jurisdictional problems. The imperial post had to this point been paid for by the Netherlandish treasury, underwritten by Spanish subventions. When Philip II inherited the Netherlands, the service became de facto Spanish. This in itself was sufficient to alarm the German postmasters, since a number of those appointed to man the local stations were Protestants. In 1566 two members of the Taxis clan, Leonhard the general postmaster, and Seraphin, postmaster of Augsburg and Rheinhausen, actually embarked on litigation with each other to resolve a dispute over the division of fees along the Netherlandish/German road.23 That the payment of the postmasters’ salaries depended on Spanish subventions became increasingly critical when the Spanish treasury ran out of money. Spanish bankruptcy meant that salaries went unpaid. The system began to creak. In 1568 Cardinal Granvelle was already complaining of stoppages and major delays. A decade later the German postmasters could stand it no more; in 1579 they went on strike.

  For the German Lutherans the patent inadequacies of the imperial postal service in this period represented something of an opportunity. The leading princes established their own messenger relays. In 1563 Philip of Hessen and August of Saxony joined together to sponsor a courier service to keep them in touch with William of Orange, a vital ally in the Netherlands.24 Later Württemberg and Brandenburg-Prussia would be brought into the network, though it remained essentially a private system of communication between the German Protestant courts, not open to the public.

  For the imperial cities, the motivation was more commercial than political. For some time a single arterial network that privileged official government mail had not suited their needs particularly well. In 1571 the merchants of Nuremberg petitioned for the establishment of a direct link with Antwerp via Frankfurt and Cologne. The following year Frankfurt established its own weekly postal service to Leipzig. These Ordinari-Boten were the descendants of the fifteenth-century city messengers. The difference was that the system would, like the imperial post, be open to all, and would follow a regular published timetable.

  The 1570s witnessed the establishment of a dense network of these city courier services throughout Germany.25 The northern city of Hamburg had previously laboured under a significant disadvantage through its dist
ance from the main postal routes.26 Now, starting in 1570, the city created a whole postal network of its own, with weekly services to Amsterdam, Leipzig, Bremen, Emden, Cologne and Danzig. The influence of the Netherlandish Protestant diaspora is evident in the choice of routes, since many of these cities (Hamburg included) had significant colonies of exiled Dutch merchants. Even in privileged Augsburg the merchants saw which way the wind was blowing. In 1577 they established their own independent merchant post to Antwerp via Cologne.27

  The Augsburg postmaster, Seraphin von Taxis, was understandably furious at this apostasy, but while the imperial post was in chaos there was little he could do. This same year the general postmaster Leonhard was forced to flee Brussels to avoid being imprisoned by the Dutch rebels. The situation could not go on, and in the last two decades of the sixteenth century the Emperor himself intervened to take matters in hand.

  Regeneration

  The reform of the post became the rather unlikely crusade of Emperor Rudolph II, who had succeeded his father Maximilian II as ruler in the Habsburg dominions in 1576. In his last years Rudolph would become a tragic figure, self-exiled to his castle in Prague with his ever-expanding collection of curiosities. But even Rudolph could see that the brewing crisis of religion in the imperial lands required closer coordination of imperial Habsburg policy. The result, in 1597, was a milestone edict reforming the imperial post.28 This mandate proclaimed the reunification of the Spanish and imperial systems and simultaneously announced stern measures against unauthorised competition. If this had the urban courier services in its sights, it was bound to remain a dead letter while the imperial postal routes provided no service for the major German cities. In 1598 therefore the imperial post took a major step forward with the establishment of an imperial post office in Frankfurt, with a branch line linking Germany's main commercial marketplace to the existing network. An entirely new post road then connected Frankfurt directly with the Netherlands via Cologne. After protracted negotiations a new east–west service was created between Cologne and Prague, via Frankfurt and Nuremberg. Finally a direct service between Cologne and Hamburg, and between Frankfurt and Leipzig, brought the principal cities of the north and east into the system.29