In the late seventeenth century the postal system was at the forefront of the Stuart intelligence system. It was one of the means by which intelligence could be both gathered and controlled. The origins of the English postal system lie in the later middle ages, but it is significant that a genuine postal system really emerges under the Tudors and early Stuarts. The new nation-state's wish to control the flow of information on both the domestic and foreign fronts and the need for points of contact between officials through correspondence meant that the Post Office rose in importance. As the nation-state arrived so did its bureaucracy and agencies of control. As John Brewer has noted, the ‘power of governments has been and always will be in large part dependent upon their capacity to order and manipulate … information’. The development of a Post Office was one of these elements. It was established in effect as a preventative monopoly. Once again the control of information was a key factor. As literacy developed so, allegedly did ‘dangerous’ and ‘seditious’ ideas. Indeed too much knowledge, according to one contemporary, ‘overheat[ed] the people's brains and [made] them … overbusy … with state affairs’. One of the ways in which such ideas could be transmitted was through correspondence. The best means to control such correspondence therefore was a government-sponsored agency. The suppression or absorption of rival postal services by the state in the period goes some way to proving this.