The use of "ye" as a polite singular was an artificial attempt to mimic the T-V distinction of French. It never truly caught on and led to a lot of confusion.
I hope you're not still confused after all this time, Loob, but I only now came across this old thread.
The T-V distinction is common to French (
tu/vous), Italian (
tu/voi) and other Romance languages. In those languages, it can correspond either to singular/plural, or to familiar/polite, or both. In English it began as a singular/plural marker but by about 1600 it had changed its force. I find this when directing Shakespeare's plays in French. Our translators usually try to keep to Shakespeare's usage, translating
thou as
tu and
you as
vous, but this confuses the actors no end because it isn't the same as French usage.
By the time he wrote
King Lear (circa 1605) Will was using the
switch between thou and you as an indicator of emotion. For example, in act I scene i, Lear addresses his two elder daughters as
thou. and they reply with
you. (This unequal usage reflects intimate vs. respectful relations, and can still be seem in some upper-class families in continental Europe.) Lear begins by addressing his third daughter Cordelia in the same way as
thou, but when she says "I love your majesty According to my bond; no more nor less" he responds with "How, how Cordelia! Mend
your speech a little...".
The courtier Kent then gets angry with the king, and calls him
thou, and Lear replies in kind, but still speaks to the foreign princes as
you.
Another fifty years after that play, and most people in Britain were using
you in most circumstances; the big exception was the Quakers who stood out by using an egalitarian
thou to everyone, like Russian communists calling everyone comrade.