An Absurd Fiction of the Postmaster’s Corporate Sole

Posting the letter while holding a cauliflower

We have no difficulty ascribing corporate status to groups of individuals. But to one individual? It was a quirk of English jurisprudence, complained the legal historian F. W. Maitland, that an individual with power vested in the crown or the state could be regarded as a corporation in law. The fiction of a king with two bodies (one natural, the other artificial) originally intended to simplify early modern matters of state, such as the personal property rights of the ruler, became a source of irritation as the Crown gradually lost power to parliament and judges. English common law could (and did) cope with the anomaly, but only by constantly creating new statutes to get around difficulties arising from this theory that a real person could also be a corpulent corporate body in a government office. 

Not only did this fiction of a two-bodied person-corporation play havoc with the proper conceptualisation of the state, said Maitland, it also “makes a mess” of the legal position of civil servants -- public administrators -- i.e. the people whose legal status overlapped with the Crown’s. One of Maitland’s two exhibits in his case against the ‘corporation sole’ (one corporation in the body of one person) was the Postmaster General. What if the Postmaster or his subordinate is no good, or a thief? A Postmaster was simultaneously in the service of “the State”, “Her Majesty”, and “the Crown”. Through which of these is he liable in law and accountable to the public? The Postmaster is a “body corporate” but at the same time he is an individual holding property in trust for the state.

“When a Postmaster-General dies, what becomes of the freehold of countless post offices? … [Then] suppose that a prisoner is indicted for stealing a letter being the proper goods of ‘the Postmaster General’, and suppose that he objects that at the time in question there was no Postmaster General, he can be silenced; but this is so, not because the Postmaster is a corporation sole, but because a statute seems to have said with sufficient clearness that the indictment is good … [So] we must for ever be laboriously stopping holes through which a criminal might glide. Another critical question would be whether the man who is Postmaster … could be indicted for stealing the goods of the Postmaster.”

Maitland objected to the confusion in trying to “make two persons of one man, or one person with two bodies”. The Postmaster is an owner, but as a corporation, not in his own right. He cannot transfer ownership of post offices, but he could enjoy and exploit them. In the end common law prevailed, yet it was having to invent statutes to ‘stop the holes through which a criminal might glide’. Time and energy was being used up addressing the absence of clarity. 

If Maitland were alive I would send him an email mentioning that in the whole of Gerald Aylmer’s trilogy on England’s seventeenth century civil administration I have not once found a single mention of anything that could be construed as a ‘corporation sole’ dilemma. 

In 1625 the Postmaster General’s appointment, promotion, and tenure were the “gift” of the Crown, and they still were in 1685. Even mid-century, when Parliament appointed Postmasters and there was pressure for genuine reform, Patrimony, Patronage, and Purchase continued to rule the roost. Postmaster was a senior position on the Central Executive with responsibilities for spying as well as delivery of letters. Although some Postmasters performed with admirable efficiency, expertise, and good motives, there were cases of Postmasters having to be disciplined or sacked, and it was not particularly difficult to make them depart their corporate body. 

post-30s: Lord Stanhope was “evicted” from the Post Office in 1637 because of a grievance, it is difficult to be sure what, it may have been ideological, for he would appear to have been one of the Angry Men who did not adequately support the King during the Civil War. But there was also a procedural dispute concerning the Post Office in the 1630s. Stanhope had opposed a new policy to centralise control of the Post Office. It is clear his motive was not Hayekian. He wanted to preserve his power to appoint a deputy to do all the work, with multi-layered retinues of clerks and servants. The Executive, in contrast, wished to prevent the proliferation of offices too remote from the centre, too costly, too hard to control. 

post-50s: During the Civil War and Republic more rule-based avenues became available to resolve competition for the sought-after post of Postmaster General. For example, the two Houses of Parliament each put forward their own candidates. Postmaster General from 1655-59, John Thurloe, was Cromwell’s Secretary of State and he was “accused of having made excessive profits”. Since postage was a ‘farmed’ service, more efficient management of the corporation would be expected to yield higher personal profit. As chief of intelligence for Cromwell, Thurloe could simply have been the victim of political attack. However, allegations against him continued, and they included other charges of abuse of office. A bad egg, probably. A separate equally interesting case in the 1650s concerns Clement Oxenbridge, second in command at the Post Office, who was reported to be the “leader, or moving spirit, of the free-enterprise interlopers who tried to undercut the official posts”. 

post-70s: Restoration of royal rule in 1660 did not mean a full return to business-as-usual, though patronage continued as the normal mode of appointment. A deputy Postmaster is recorded as complaining in 1676 that “the world is so altered”.  He had fewer perquisites. The Post Office was growing more complicated to control. In the management of sub-postmasters, and methods of financing and marketing, it had become a “semi-privatised agency” by the 1670s, most lucrative for those who farmed it efficiently. The Postmaster General in 1663, Colonel Henry Bishop, who invented the franked postmark, earned £21,500 a year. His office was looking more like that of a corporate executive. Nevertheless, in the 1670s Roger Whitley appears to have been summarily dismissed from the Post Office by the King on grounds of ideology (he was a Whig member of Parliament) or abuse of office.


A seventeenth century English lawyer might have agreed that in theory the Postmaster General mirrored the King’s two bodies, one artificial and one natural. He would have had to point out, however, that the the terms and conditions of office in his kingdom were only partially within the purview of the law. The fiction of the corporation sole, about which F. W. Maitland complained, only became noticeably messy in Maitland's lifetime, once impersonal rule of law had put a more impersonal state administration under the supervision of a more impersonal parliament. Then that joker with two bodies stood out like one sore thumb.

©2013