The report of this committee, recommending an increased pension or a grant, was not adopted; but in 1801 Palmer himself entered Parliament and fought his own battles. He printed and circulated among the members and in other circles a statement of his case, and in the course of eight years expended no less a sum than £13,000 in appeals for justice--in vain, and it was left for his eldest son, Colonel Charles Palmer, who succeeded him in the representation of Bath in 1808, to at last fight the question to a victorious issue. In 1813 he secured for his father an award of £50,000, and the continuance during his life of the commission on Post Office receipts originally agreed upon. In the meantime, Palmer had been variously honoured. Gainsborough, his neighbour at Royal Circus, Bath, painted his portrait; Glasgow merchants, members of the Chamber of Commerce in that city, had as early as 1789 presented him with a silver loving-cup, “as an acknowledgment of the benefits resulting from his plan to the trade and commerce of this kingdom”; and in 1797 three “mail-coach halfpennies” were struck by some now unknown admirer. They bear on the obverse a mail-coach, and on the reverse an inscription to him “as a token of gratitude for benefits received” from his system. A third tribute was the painting by George Robertson, engraved by James Fittler, and inscribed, curiously, to him as Comptroller-General, in 1803, eleven years after he had ceased to hold that position. He also received the freedom of eighteen cities and towns in recognition of his public services, was Mayor of Bath in 1796 and 1801, and represented that city in the four Parliaments of 1801, 1802, 1806, and 1807. He died at Brighton in 1818, in his seventy-sixth year. His body was conveyed to Bath and laid in the Abbey Church; but no monument marks the spot, and it is only recently that his residence at Royal Circus, and his birthplace in his native city, have been identified to the wayfarer by inscribed tablets. [Illustration: JOHN PALMER IN HIS 75TH YEAR. _From an etching by the Hon. Martha Jervis._ ] The very earliest mail-coaches were ill made, and were continually breaking down. Although the coaches themselves were supplied by the contractors, and the Post Office was not concerned in their cost, it was very closely interested in their efficiency; and so, early in 1787, Palmer had already represented to the contractors that the mails must be conveyed by more reliable coaches.