The accepted wisdom is that the elite corps of royal couriers has its origins in four men who served Charles II (although earlier monarchs certainly had special messengers in their service), and he broke off some silver greyhound embellishments from a platter and transformed them into badges for his four picked men – hence their nickname of the Silver Greyhounds. From 1782, the Messengers were more generally important, being split into the King’s Home Service Messengers and the Corps of King’s Foreign Service. Since then they have been severely reduced in number, but there is no doubt that in the period from the Regency to the interwar years there was more than a little of the James Bond about their lives and missions.

What do they do?
The history of the Silver Greyhounds has always presented writers and historians with the problem of marginality. Their role had a central one of diplomatic communication, but they were always a flexible concept too. They could be used in extremis as special security, as they were at times of social disorder and mass violence. If there was any possibility of a large-scale criminal enterprise anywhere in the land, they could be called in. Before the 1829 arrival of the first professional police force, they were similar to the Bow Street Runners, a force that occasionally went out into the shires to bolster security.

Rather than being detectives, the Messengers were escorts, agents provocateurs and stealthy ancillary forces behind the militia or the magistrates in the counties. This being the case, it is no surprise that we often learn of their activities when something newsworthy happens. In such an instance, a torch is shone into the usual obscurity of their lives as a largely invisible arm of national policing.

So much in social history happens out of the spotlight of this press interest as well, so that only in archives and letters do the sources come along which will allow more in-depth knowledge to become a possibility for the historian. Where the beam of interest settles on the stories that immediately attract attention, the Messengers are often ‘stage left’ and out of focus, but reports and responses do sometimes emerge. And in between these searches, there are elements of life in which suddenly the light settles on something rather more important than what first meets the eye. Such occasions include when the law steps in. In terms of the Messengers, an example was when some of their personnel were involved in government suppression: liberty was seen as an enemy of the state’s equilibrium. The process of law may show the modern researcher the workings of the human mind more successfully than the official record. Where there has been transgression, there will be documentation, and this paper chronicle has its fascinating footnotes.

By the mid-18th century, criminal law in Britain was working by piling up statutes against malefactors of all kinds, but particularly against those who would commit offences against property. At this time, Georgian legislation grew against poachers and trespassers on land. The new rich were building their new country houses, having done the Grand Tour of Europe; they wanted land; they longed for great vistas of lakes, pasture and forest, and they wanted to protect all this against the desperate poor who saw hunting animals on rich people’s lands to feed the family as their traditional right.

Matters in this respect escalated with the American War of Independence and then the French Revolution towards the end of the century. There was ample legislation against the common man as the possessions of the rich were protected. As early as 1723 there had been the Black Act which was passed after several affrays from poaching and confrontations in Windsor Forest. Aggravated poaching offences were made capital crimes, and the so-called ‘Bloody Code’ ruled supreme, with a gradual accumulation of capital offences.

But it has to be asked: if the law was repressive and extreme, what was the place of human rights in such a state? If there were so many transgressions which could lead to transportation, long imprisonment or the scaffold, what was the reverse of the situation in terms of how individual rights were preserved, and in particular, how and to what extent was a person’s own land and property to be protected in a climate of fear? Strangely, the King’s Messengers were to play a prominent part in this area of our law.

By c.1750 the Messengers’ status and responsibilities were subject to ad hoc and pragmatic situations; in other words, they could be called upon to act as an arm of the law. Just as public policing was inadequate, with local constables and the night watch being largely inefficient and piecemeal, so the organisation of state security at the highest level was also in flux and subject to several weaknesses. The Home Office, for instance, was not created until 1782 and before that there were Secretaries of State. It was a man in this office, George Montagu-Dunk, the 2nd Earl of Halifax, who was to cause a stir in the whole issue of trespass and individual rights. Halifax became Secretary of State for the Northern Department in October 1762 and then took over the Southern Department a year later. This was early in the reign of George III and sedition was in the air.

The case of John Entick
The Secretary of State was expected to be active in the suppression of any seditious activity. In that world of tough criminal law and encroachments of the state into civil liberties, he was the leader of the pack when it came to searching for radicals and Jacobins. In November 1762, he issued a warrant for the home of one John Entick to be searched and all papers there to be seized. Entick was at the time almost 60, a hack writer thoroughly entrenched in Grub Street, where struggling authors battled hard to make a living from their pens. He lived in Stepney, in St Dunstan’s parish, and he chose a path in his writing life which would inevitably lead to trouble: he wrote political invective. Working for John Shebbeare and Jonathan Scott’s radical paper The Monitor, he agreed to be one of their principal writers, earning £200 a year, and so in relative terms he was successful. But he was still a hack, and a political one. His politics were against the established regime of course, and hence his name was noticed by Halifax and his minions.

Before running into Shebbeare and Scott, he had followed the trajectory of so many writers of the time who wanted to stake a place in the literary world: he dabbled in education, producing a Latin workbook, the Speculum Latinum; he put on a religious front for the media, becoming ‘The Rev. John Entick’, and he did what the great Dr Samuel Johnson did, namely propose a major literary project. He approached publishers with a plan to produce a new scholarly text of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer in two volumes, and in this strategy he also became John Entick MA. He was, it seems, a master of spin as much as of arts.

He also had to be an all-rounder, a dilettante, as indeed Dr Johnson had been too. Where Johnson began his London life as a writer of biographies and translations for publishers around St Paul’s and The Strand, so Entick produced worthy volumes such as A New Naval History and A General History of the Late War, along with a spelling dictionary and a book on the topography of London. He must have been relieved when the work at The Monitor came along because it gave him regular earnings and a certain recognised status among his peers in Grub Street.

Then on 11 November 1762, his little home, seen as a hot-bed of violent dissent, received a visit from four men. They were Nathan Carrington, James Watson, Thomas Ardran and Robert Blackmore. In four hours of rough treatment they smashed doors, forced locks and turned everything upside down in a search for seditious materials. They left with a hundred charts and a hundred pamphlets. Lord Halifax had sent them, with a command to ‘make strict and diligent search for the author, or one concerned in the writing of several weekly very seditious papers entitled The Monitor or the British Freeholder’ .

Now, this particular little man in the hands of the powerful Secretary of State was not going to take all this lightly, and he sued the messengers for trespass. The context of this involves a far more famous name – that of John Wilkes, the celebrated spokesman for liberty at this repressive time. His radical paper, The North Briton, had become notorious and Wilkes had become the subject of a general warrant, imprisoned and then freed. Now here was another scribbler in trouble. Entick’s house had been ransacked but the writer himself had not been arrested. He was left a free man.

Three years passed before Entick’s case was heard, but it was heard in Westminster Hall, before the remarkable Lord Camden. The point of law was whether or not the warrants were lawful. This came from the concept of trespass, of course, which Entick had been advised to make the object of his prosecution.

The public were well aware of Carrington and his Messenger friends. After their confrontation with John Wilkes, and his release in April 1763, he had sued for damages too and won; a satirical print of the time headed ‘The Devils Triumphant or the Messengers in the Suds’ shows a dancing devil grabbing the collar of Nathan Carrington, who has his greyhound badge; in the foreground of the picture, more devils attack the other Messengers.

By the Michaelmas Term of 1765 there was a full court to hear Entick v Carrington. The man in charge, Lord Camden, was at the time fresh from his release of Wilkes, ruling that parliamentary privilege gave him immunity from arrest when it came to a charge of seditious libel. Camden was then Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. Earlier in his career he had defended a bookseller on a charge of seditious libel and won. By the time of Carrington’s trial, Camden, born Charles Pratt in 1714, was a man of great standing and wide esteem among his peers. When he looked at what Entick had endured, and as he considered the actions of the Messengers, he saw that there had been an obvious trespass, and his ruling was a statement of a fundamental right.

Camden said, among other things, ‘The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property. That right is preserved sacred and incommunicable in all instances… No man can set his foot upon my ground without my licence, but he is liable to an action.’ What he was asserting, of course, was the very same attitude behind the landed classes and their insistence on being severe and relentless in their prosecution of poachers. It was an admirable and bold statement of a fundamental right, and Camden’s summing up included the memorable words now in every law book concerned with human rights, ‘that the state may do nothing but that which is expressly authorised by law, while the individual may do anything but that which is forbidden by law’.

As for Halifax, he stayed in the background, no doubt utterly frustrated. But this was not going to stop him using the King’s Messengers whenever the need arose. There were far worse years to come for the conservative and frightened establishment. His chief Messenger, Nathan Carrington, a true veteran of the service, perhaps carried on for some time, but we know that he ended his days as a justice of the peace for Middlesex, dying in October 1777, so perhaps soon after this trial he moved on to pastures new. Certainly, he retired from a position in the ranks of the Windsor Poor Knights in 1778, so perhaps ill health or a need for more sedentary work was calling him after the King’s Bench trial.

Carrington was succeeded at Windsor by William Dick as Governor of the Poor Knights. Dick (1710–1800) had served as a Messenger since 1745, and research has shown that three generations of his family were of the Royal Household.

The tradition of the Messengers being in the Royal Household goes all the way back to the origins of the service. Carrington and Dick present fairly typical examples of such servants, and reading between the lines in the somewhat frantic and fearful context of the 1760s, it appears that the prominent and leading Messengers such as Carrington had a wide range of duties, and essentially acted like some kind of junior officer, taking the lead in more important operations.

Purely incidentally, then, the Messengers in the Entick case, and also with the more famous John Wilkes, played an important part in a fundamental event in legal history. This was not the first time that the trusted servants with the silver greyhound figured prominently in British life, and in this case, they even achieved the wrong kind of notoriety in the ever-popular political cartoons and caricatures, arguably the most influential, popular media of late Georgian society.

This case highlighted the confusing nature of the Greyhounds. It was clear to the public after the furor caused by these two men that the Messengers were moving unobserved through society, working silently in many cases as an arm of the law and as a version of internal espionage. As so often happens in legal history, it took a scandal to change perceptions and indeed, in this case, to reveal yet another instance of the Georgian state’s paranoia.

Victorian and Modern

Advancing to the heyday of empire, we find the Messengers travelling with their diplomatic bags by rail and by sea across all corners of the Victorian and Edwardian pink-shaded maps. They generally travelled alone, but at times had perhaps just one companion, and their diplomatic bags were sacrosanct for the whole journey. The Messengers are still around now, but in 2005 there were only 15 in service. Over the years, these special officers have been ex-military, and while in the past they have been commandeered to do all kinds of secondary duties, now they simply ensure the safe arrival of important documents. {