The Year Without Summer (18 page)

Opportunities for members of different social classes to mix were limited primarily
to public occasions such as markets, fairs, feast days, weddings, or county funerals.
Even during these events, however, it proved difficult for the wealthier Irish to
communicate with the poor, since most of the laboring class (semiliterate at best)
still spoke only Irish, and most of the landed classes spoke English—increasingly
the language of politics and business. The bane of public gatherings in the early
nineteenth century was the faction fight, an organized brawl in which two opposing
sides assaulted each other wielding clubs, blackthorn sticks, stones, or, less frequently,
swords. The factions might have divided along family lines, or parishes, or by trade,
or religion; motives for fighting included arguments over property, family vendettas,
personal insults or perceived slights, tensions between competing economic groups,
or religious antagonism. A few notorious fights involved several thousand combatants;
most numbered several hundred. Enough men died or suffered serious injuries during
these brawls that the Catholic Church stoutly condemned the custom and threatened
to excommunicate anyone who joined in. Nonetheless, landlords sometimes encouraged
faction fights as a safety valve, to allow their laborers and tenants to vent their
frustrations and anger on other members of the lower class.

Irish diets improved along with the economy, although the rising standard of living
set the stage for future disaster. Laborers and the poorest farmers subsisted entirely
on potatoes and water, and occasionally a bit of salt fish or meal; those who could
afford a more varied diet typically added milk, then oatmeal and wheat bread. Whiskey,
beer, and tobacco also were relatively inexpensive. But potatoes remained the foundation
of the Irish peasantry’s diet; indeed, it was one of the main causes of the increase
in population in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spanish merchants
had introduced potatoes to Europe in the late sixteenth century, but widespread public
resistance to their cultivation and consumption restricted their use to animal fodder
for more than a century. (Some Europeans feared the ugly tubers were the fruit of
the devil, while others scorned any food that grew under the soil.) By the late eighteenth
century, however, physicians and government officials recognized their exceptional
nutritional value (high in potassium and vitamin C), and potatoes became a staple
of the Europeans’ diet, particularly among the poor. Even a child could cultivate
them, and they required little effort to cook or store. No wonder that Adam Smith,
the renowned Scottish philosopher and classical economist, concluded that potatoes
were “particularly suitable to the health of the human constitution.”

Hence the population of Ireland embarked upon a dramatic increase, as did much of
western and central Europe. Potatoes provided significantly more nutrients than the
Irish peasantry’s previous grain-based diets, and since a family of five or six could
subsist for a year on the potatoes grown on a few acres of land, Irish peasants began
to marry earlier and produce more children. And since a potato diet mitigated the
prevalence or effects of many of the diseases that afflicted the Irish peasantry—scurvy,
dysentery, tuberculosis—the infant mortality rate and the overall death rate both
declined.

Prosperity brought new complications in its wake, however. As the Irish population
swelled, and the price of agricultural products rose, the value of land soared as
well. Many landowners raised their rents accordingly; others evicted their tenants
and enclosed their lands as pasture for even more profitable sheep or cattle. Tenants
who found themselves unable to pay the higher rents were thrown off their land, and
a steady stream of dispossessed farmers headed for the cities—by 1816, Dublin’s population
had grown to about 200,000 residents—where they joined unemployed rural laborers who
had lost their jobs to farm machinery or the new water-powered textile looms in the
linen industry. Still, most of the unemployed remained in the countryside. And many
of those who did have jobs were underemployed; in an average year, by one estimate,
nearly half a million Irish were employed for six months or less.

Parliament’s recent decision to bind Ireland more tightly to Britain created additional
problems. The Act of Union of 1800, which established the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland, disbanded the Irish Parliament and provided seats for Irish representatives
in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. This removed one of the few reasons
for the Protestant gentry to spend any time whatsoever in Ireland; accordingly many
of them settled in England and became absentee landlords. Distance diminished their
sense of responsibility for the welfare of their tenants—it was said that they traded
their Irish sympathies for English prejudices—and in many cases their estates in Ireland
deteriorated from neglect. For its part, Parliament preferred to ignore Irish affairs
altogether whenever possible. Since their only representatives were Protestant members
of the propertied class, the Irish people at large were left with no voice in their
government at all.

Under these conditions, a rapidly growing population living on land already cultivated
to its maximum extent was courting disaster. Holdings were subdivided repeatedly from
one generation to the next; by the first decade of the nineteenth century, any perceptive
observer could see that the average size of a peasant’s holding soon would barely
suffice to feed a family even with a generous potato harvest. And in both towns and
countryside, the oversupply of labor kept wages depressed as the price of commodities
rose, further driving down the standard of living for those whose margin for survival
already was razor thin.

An expansion of trade had provided profitable foreign markets for Irish goods, but
Ireland’s commerce was growing dangerously unbalanced. Across the Atlantic, the products
of American farms replaced Irish crops, leaving Ireland heavily dependent upon the
English market; by 1816, approximately 85 percent of Irish exports went to Britain.
Prospects for further economic development appeared dim, due to a lack of capital
for investment in either industry or agriculture. Already Irish cotton and wool manufacturers—who
had enjoyed an edge from lower labor costs—were losing ground to English mills due
to a widespread failure to employ the latest developments in technology. Landowners
could obtain additional capital only by raising their rents or enclosing their lands,
but both options would have increased unemployment. And if the government lowered
taxes to allow landlords to acquire more capital, the laboring classes would suffer
from reductions in the funds available for poor relief.

Whenever Irish harvests failed and famine threatened, primary responsibility for humanitarian
relief—such as public works projects—and the preservation of order typically devolved
upon the local authorities: magistrates (drawn from the ranks of small farmers and
prosperous tenants), sheriffs, and the parish vestry. Since these officials were nearly
always Protestant, they often allocated a disproportionate share of relief funds to
the minority Protestant community. Other times they failed to carry out their responsibilities
at all due to corruption or incompetence. Nor did the landlords—more concerned with
order than charity—step in to fill the vacuum; as one observer noted, the Irish gentry
“had neither the will nor the way to carry the same administrative burden as their
English counterparts.” In either case, local authorities typically failed to provide
adequate services to the needy, thereby earning the distrust of the poorer classes,
most of whom were Catholic.

That left responsibilities squarely in the hands of private charities and the central
government in Dublin, headed by the viceroy—formally, the lord lieutenant—appointed
by Parliament. In the summer of 1816, relations between His Majesty’s Government and
the Irish masses were still troubled as a result of the bloodshed of 1798, when Irish
nationalists launched a poorly planned and ill-coordinated uprising that ended with
perhaps twenty thousand Irish rebels and civilians dead, along with six hundred British
soldiers, and much of the Irish countryside laid waste. Most of the Irish casualties
were the product of the vicious tactics employed by British forces—following the orders
of Castlereagh, then chief secretary for Ireland—in quelling the rebellion. If authorities
in London intended the Act of Union to bind Ireland more closely to Britain, it succeeded
only in deepening Irish resentment of their English masters, and fueled sectarian
hostility.

Few capable or ambitious politicians in London sought the office of lord lieutenant.
The unique challenges presented by governing Ireland posed far greater risks than
benefits to a politician on the rise. Consequently the viceroys were often second-
or third-raters. A case in point was the lord lieutenant in 1816, Lord Whitworth,
appointed in 1811 only after months of fruitless searching for a more widely known
or respected candidate; as one historian put it, Whitworth’s appointment “generated
universal amazement.” He was notorious largely as a reputed lover of Catherine the
Great of Russia (which he probably was not) during his tenure as British ambassador
to Russia, and for his marriage to a wealthy widow, the Duchess of Dorset, a match
which made him seem a social climber. Despite the elevated status bestowed by his
marriage, Whitworth remained so far down the ranks of the British aristocracy that
the king felt compelled to grant him an earldom upon his appointment as lord lieutenant
in Dublin, to boost his personal authority. Despite society’s doubts, however, Whitworth
was not without executive ability; one of his colleagues claimed that Whitworth possessed
a “cool and sure intellect … good sense, temper, firmness, and habits of business.”

Certainly Whitworth had the good sense to rely upon his chief secretary, Robert Peel,
for the day-to-day administration of Irish affairs. The son of a successful textile
manufacturer, Peel had been educated at Oxford—where he distinguished himself in his
studies of the classics, mathematics, and physics—before embarking on a career in
law. He entered Parliament in 1810, at the age of twenty-two, and subsequently was
appointed under-secretary for the Colonies in Spencer Perceval’s administration. When
Liverpool assumed power two years later, following Perceval’s assassination, he named
Peel chief secretary for Ireland.

As chief secretary, Peel was responsible primarily for maintaining order in Ireland
(a daunting task in the best of times), and for upholding Protestant rule. For the
past several decades, Parliament had witnessed a series of campaigns in favor of Catholic
emancipation—the repeal of the penal laws that denied certain civil rights to Catholics
in Ireland. The Whig opposition in the House of Commons openly favored emancipation,
and a faction of Tories (including Liverpool) privately supported it. But King George
III and the House of Lords resolutely refused to consider emancipation, and Peel (who
sided with the Tory majority) never wavered from the party line.

In normal times, reports crossed Peel’s desk in Dublin recounting one instance after
another of smuggling, banditry, kidnapping, murder, arson, theft (generally of food
or weapons), rape, faction fighting, sedition, grave robbing, nonpayment of rent,
assault of revenue collectors, and disturbance of the peace. Local magistrates and
the county police often found themselves powerless to deal with these outrages, since
intimidation of witnesses and brutal retaliation against anyone brave enough to give
testimony discouraged cooperation with the authorities. Shortly after taking office,
Peel informed a colleague that “the country is in a very distracted state in many
parts.… It is very difficult to conceive the impunity with which the most horrible
crimes are committed in consequence of the fears even of the sufferers to come forward
to give evidence.”

Under the unique conditions of Irish life, with its deep-rooted tensions between the
Protestant gentry and their Catholic tenants, this litany of felonies actually served,
as Norman Gash put it, as a form of “intermittent social warfare.” Peel harbored no
illusions about his ability to ameliorate the situation. “The enormous and overgrown
population of Ireland is (considering the want of manufactures or any employment except
agricultural) a great obstacle in the way of general improvement,” he wrote, “and
an obstacle which much wiser men than I am will find it very difficult to remove.”

Peel’s initial response was to urge the establishment of a full-time body of police
in Ireland to assist local authorities in maintaining order. Parliament, wary of the
expense and distrustful of the precedent of a professional police force, grudgingly
passed the requisite legislation in July 1814. The force grew slowly, partly because
of a shortage of competent candidates, but it eventually took hold and became known
as the Royal Irish Constabulary, or (after Sir Robert) “Peelers” or “bobbies.”

The outbreak of peace at the end of the Hundred Days in June 1815 brought Whitworth
and Peel fresh troubles. As European governments demobilized their armies, foreign
demand for Irish foodstuffs and textiles declined. And foreign sources of supply increased
as agricultural production revived on the Continent. The price of Irish grain dropped
by 50 percent; beef prices slid even more. Marginal lands brought under cultivation
during the Napoleonic Wars turned unprofitable. Tenants failed to earn enough to pay
their rent; artisans and manufacturers lost their jobs as factories suspended operations.
One ray of hope stemmed from an increase in exports of agricultural goods to the United
States over the winter of 1815–16, but those sales were the result of Irish prices
being so low (and unsustainably so) that they undercut domestic American production.