Now, as a consequence of these proceedings, and of the Act of the 11th October, the office passed into the hands of Dr. Benjamin Worsley, to whom the farm was then granted for a term of seven years, at a rental of £20,000. This seems a large advance upon the previous rent of £10,000; but Thurloe states that he improved the office £4000 per annum to the State voluntarily, which he might have put in his own purse; and the rent he was paying when he vacated the farm must have been £14,000 a year. But Worsley did not long enjoy the position, for shortly thereafter he was "violently turned out." Worsley had been selected, as one of several persons, for nomination to Parliament as a general officer by the Committee of Safety in July 1659. In October following, the government was in the hands of a Committee of Safety composed for the most part of officers; and Worsley being a military man, the Post Office might be supposed to be in safe hands if placed under his care. We have been unable to discover to what family Dr. Worsley belonged. It is not improbable that he was connected by family ties with Charles Worsley, who had been one of the colonels of Cromwell's own regiment of foot. According to the Journals of the House of Commons, Benjamin Worsley was, in July 1647, appointed to be one of the Physicians, General-Surgeons, and Apothecaries of the Army in Ireland, and was then sent to Dublin. In March 1650, he was appointed Secretary to the Commissioners under the Act for regulating Trade, and, in 1653, Secretary to the Commissioners for Ireland. He was then selected as a fit person to accompany Viscount Lisle, as secretary, in a projected embassy to Sweden; but the embassy, so far as Lisle was concerned, did not proceed. Now, on the 26th December 1659, the Rump was again in the ascendant, and constituted themselves a House. On the 3rd January 1660, Parliament appointed a new Council; on the 9th January, the House of Commons resolved to take the Post Office into its own hands, and that it should "be managed for the best advantage of the Commonwealth"; on the 10th January, Thomas Scott, a member of Parliament, one of the Council of State, and a hot-headed republican, was appointed by the House of Commons "to receive informations of private and public intelligence, as the Secretary of State heretofore had and used, and present them to the Council of State"; and, a week later, he was appointed Secretary of State to the Commonwealth. Now these events, taken in connection with the fact that, on the 21st January 1660, the Council of State issued an order "to apprehend Benj. Worsley and bring him in custody before the Council," may warrant us in concluding that this is the time when Worsley was "violently turned out" of the Post Office.