the Post Office, p. 290). Before 1784 there had been constant robbery of the mails, involving great expense in prosecutions; from 1784 to 1792 no mail-coach was stopped or robbed. In 1788 no less than 320 towns which had formerly had a post thrice a week had one daily. The speed had been increased from five or six miles to seven miles an hour, in spite of badly made and hilly roads; and the old and unsatisfactory coaches had all been replaced by 1792 by coaches supplied by a patentee named Besant (ib. pp. 282-3). Honours came to Palmer from many quarters. He had been presented with the freedom of Liverpool, York, Hull, Chester, Macclesfield, Edinburgh, Ennis, Aberdeen, Perth, Glasgow, Gloucester, Inverness, and other towns; tokens had been struck in his honour, and a silver cup given him by the Glasgow chamber of commerce; this was presented in 1875 to the Bath corporation by his granddaughter (Malet, Annals of the Road', p. 29). Palmer would have held a higher position as a postal reformer if he had aimed at cheapening postage instead of merely so improving the service as to justify increased rates.
Palmer had given up the management of the Bath Theatre in 1785, appointing others to carry on that business, as well as a large spermaceti manufactory in Bath which belonged to him (Notes and Queries, 5th ser. vi. 514-15). In 1796, and again in 1809, he was chosen mayor of Bath, and while occupying that position published a circular letter, proposing a general subscription for the public service. He himself gave liberally, and his wife's relatives, the Longs, contributed three thousand guineas (Annual Biography, 1820, p. 72). Palmer was chosen M.P. for Bath in 1801, 1802, 1806, and 1807; but he accepted the Chiltern Hundreds in 1808, when his son, Charles Palmer (1777-1851) (see below), was elected in his place.
From 1794 Palmer pressed his grievances connected with the post office upon the treasury. A committee of the house reported in Palmer's favour in 1799, but his claims to remuneration beyond his pension of 3,000l. were overruled by Pitt's government. After Pitt's death the question was reopened, the agitation being henceforth mainly conducted by the claimant's son Charles. Finally, in 1813, Lord Liverpool's government introduced a bill for the payment to Palmer of 50,000l. from the consolidated fund without any fee or deduction, and without affecting the pension of 3,000l. a year granted in 1798. This bill (53 Geo. Ill, cap. 157), the fourth which had been introduced, was read a third time in the commons on 14 July 1813, and was at once accepted by the lords, who thus brought to a close a struggle which had cost Palmer 13,000l.
Palmer died at Brighton on 16 Aug. 1818. His remains were conveyed to Bath, and laid in the abbey church in the presence of the mayor and corporation; but there is no inscription. Palmer married, on 2 Nov. 1786, Miss Pratt, probably a relative of his friend, Lord Camden (Gent. Mag. 1786, ii. 995); but this must have been a second marriage, for in 1788 he described himself as having six children, and his eldest son was born in 1777. Besides his eldest son, Charles, a son John became a captain in the navy, while a third son, Edmund Palmer, C.B., also in the navy, distinguished himself in 1814 by capturing a French frigate, and married a niece of Lord St. Vincent. This lady had in her possession (1864) a painting of her father-in-law——a man of heroic size——by Gainsborough.
Charles Palmer (1777-1851), the eldest son, born at Weston near Bath on 6 May 1777, was educated at Eton and Oriel College, Oxford, and entered the army as cornet in the 10th dragoons in May 1796. He served during the whole of the Peninsular war with his regiment, of which he acted as lieutenant-colonel from May 1810 to November 1814. The prince regent appointed him one of his aides-de-camp on 8 Feb. 1811, and he held the appointment until he was promoted major-general on 27 May 1825. He represented Bath in the whig interest from 1808 to 1826, and again from 1830 to 1837. He was a large vine-grower in the Gironde, and became, upon his father's death, the proprietor of the Bath theatre. He died on 17 April 1851, having married Mary Elizabeth, eldest daughter of John Thomas Atkins of Hunterscombe House, Buckinghamshire. He printed a 'Speech on the State of the Nation on the Third Reading of the Reform Bill,' 1832 (Royal Military Calendar, 1820, iv. 243; Smith, Parliaments of England, 1844, i. 27-28; Gent, Mag. 1851, ii. 92).
[The fullest and best account of Palmer's work at the post office is to be found in Joyce's History of the Post Office, 1893. The subsequent parliamentary struggle is described at length in the Parliamentary Debates, vols. ix. xi. xiv. xx. xxiii. xvi. The Papers relative to the Agreement with Mr. Palmer, 1797, contain the best representation of Palmer's case. The reports of the various select committees which considered Palmer's case were reprinted in 1813 in a parliamentary paper numbered 222; the evidence taken in 1813 is given in paper 260. Murch's Ralph Allen, John Palmer, and the English Post Office, 1880, and Lewins's Her Majesty's Mails, 1865, may also be consulted. For Palmer's connection with Bath, reference should be
