The Year Without Summer (21 page)

Britons who traveled to the Continent found conditions even worse there. “I thought
I was to leave all grumbling behind me in England,” noted a British tourist in Amsterdam,
“but here the good folks are ten times worse, for nobody is pleased: it is quite shocking—poverty
prevailing, and the country drowning: rains have been dreadful; in short, we have
not had one day without rain since our arrival.” In Burgundy, the rain and cold had
left the vineyards “in such a state, that the vintage is expected to be wholly unproductive.”
In the wine-making region of northwest Switzerland, Lake Bienne overflowed its banks,
inundating a vast tract of countryside. Much of the Bernese Oberland remained under
snow, forcing cattle to remain in their stables (at considerable expense to the farmers)
instead of grazing in the pastures. The Rems River in southwestern Germany flooded
on more than a dozen separate occasions, ruining the crops of grain and hay in the
surrounding fields.

In late July, a procession of eighty young women paraded through the streets of Paris,
holding lighted candles and praying to St. Genevieve—the patron saint of the city—for
drier weather, but the rain did not stop. By the end of the month, the rainfall totals
for July for most of France, parts of Belgium, Holland, and western Germany, southern
Ireland, and southwestern England were more than three times normal.

Incessant rain and gloomy skies confined Parisians to their homes and indoor amusements.
Their mood darkened further with the flocks of British visitors who swarmed into the
city that summer. It was the first summer in nearly a decade that Britain and France
had not been at war, and English sightseers took full advantage of the opportunity
to cross the Channel; one journalist estimated there were twenty-nine thousand Englishmen
in Paris in midsummer. Even though their French hosts appreciated the British willingness
to spend considerable sums during their stay, a national resentment over the presence
of Allied occupation troops occasionally surfaced as insults or attacks on British
tourists. Parisians did enjoy an opportunity to participate in the festivities surrounding
the marriage of the king’s nephew, the Duc de Berry, to Princess Caroline of Naples
and Sicily, a direct descendant of Philip V of Spain, the grandson of Louis XIV. Unfortunately
for the princess, married life did little to domesticate the duke, who was notorious
for both his philandering and his hot temper.

King Louis XVIII spent much of the summer deciding what to do about the intractable
Ultra-Royalist legislature—the
Chambre introuvable
—which had not met since the end of April. Allied representatives in Paris, notably
the Duke of Wellington, favored a dissolution of the chamber followed by new elections,
and hopefully a more moderate assembly. The Allies suspected that the current deputies
would never vote enough new taxes to pay France’s war indemnities to their governments,
the first installment of which was due in November 1816. They also feared that the
continued heavy-handed repression of antimonarchist elements would invite a popular
backlash and lead to a new round of civil strife. Louis’ minister of police, Élie
Decazes, a moderate royalist, joined the Allies’ campaign to persuade the king to
dismiss the legislature, in part because he felt a more conciliatory chamber would
convince the Allies to end their occupation earlier. Since the restoration, Louis
had grown quite dependent upon Decazes (whom he referred to as “my dear boy”) both
to handle the daily administrative details of domestic policy and to keep him entertained
with salacious gossip about well-known figures in Paris, which Decazes obtained through
an extensive network of spies and informers. By the middle of August, Wellington and
Decazes had worn down the king’s resistance, and Louis agreed to dissolve the chamber.

That solved only one of the French government’s problems. The nation’s finances remained
in a desperate state. Like the rest of Europe, the French economy remained primarily
agricultural, and by the end of July 1816 it seemed clear that the coming harvest
would be a disaster. That meant Louis’ government would be hard-pressed to collect
its normal tax revenues, much less impose new taxes, and that spending on emergency
relief measures would almost certainly soar. Since the national budget already was
badly out of balance, the government could meet its obligations only by assuming a
new foreign loan.

And the price of bread continued to climb. In late July, textile workers in the town
of Castres, in southern France, rioted to demand cheaper bread. The mayor called out
the national guard to suppress the demonstrations, but when many members of the guard
decided to support the rioters, the authorities had no choice but to grant the workers’
demands. To prevent further outbursts of violence, King Louis issued an ordinance
stating that “grain, meal of every kind, bread, and sea biscuit, may be imported free
of duty, either by sea or land, till otherwise ordered.”

More than a year after Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo, the French economy was still
struggling to recover from the lengthy wars. Nearly two decades of conflict had disarranged
commerce, increased taxation, and consumed vast amounts of manpower. Resources that
might have been used in productive enterprises had vanished on battlefields from Spain
to Moscow. Nor could the French economy transform itself overnight from a wartime
footing to peacetime production; the transition would need time, as businesses reallocated
capital to the manufacture of civilian goods. “And the necessary consequence,” noted
one contemporary observer, “is that many of the labourers, to whom these capitals
had given employment [during wartime], are thrown out of work, and wander idle in
our streets, because no man hath hired them.”

French ports that had been crippled by the British blockade sank into depression.
French manufactures—which had flourished during the war in the absence of British
competition—could not survive the flood of cheap British imports once peace returned.
The French linen industry, a major supplement to the income of farm families who spun
the flax and wove the fabric in their homes, collapsed under a wave of inexpensive
Irish linens and British cotton goods. (In 1810, Napoléon reportedly had offered a
reward of a million francs to anyone who could invent a mechanical loom to produce
linen, but no one did.)

Belgium, the German states, Switzerland, and the Netherlands faced similar difficulties.
Both the Belgian cotton industry, based in Ghent, and its Swiss counterpart succumbed
to British textile imports woven on machines that reduced production costs far below
those of their continental competitors. As European textile firms laid off workers,
demand for manufactured goods declined further. The rising price of bread added to
the distress, especially among working families who spent half their income on bread
in normal times. No wonder a crowd of Belgian workingmen made a public display of
burning a mountain of English textiles, particularly shawls and handkerchiefs, at
the corn market in Ghent in late July.

Even though the importation of inexpensive British goods exacerbated the unemployment
problem on the Continent, the British economy was suffering its own travails in the
summer of 1816. The resumption of trade between Britain and the Continent in 1815
led British manufacturers to produce more than European consumers—impoverished by
war and taxation—could purchase, and so a glut of British goods sat on the docks for
months. They were sold only at a substantial loss; so while they undercut continental
manufactures, and forced layoffs in the French and German textile industries, they
brought no profit to British firms and led those employers, too, to reduce their workforce.

In short, Britain had too many workers and not enough work. “Instead of crowding our
ports with ships and goods, and filling our streets with the bustle of trade,” noted
one perceptive observer, peace had produced “a calm, a stillness, as to trade, truly
gloomy.” The Bank of England’s decision to sharply contract the amount of money in
circulation only deepened the slump in trade. By the summer of 1816, employment on
the London docks had fallen from 1,500 men to a mere 500 as commerce slowed to a trickle.
On one particularly quiet day, the Customs House recorded no entry for either import
or export, “a circumstance without parallel in the annals of that extensive establishment.”

Iron prices plunged by more than half; artisans sold their tools to buy bread. Up
to 10,000 servants reportedly lacked employment. For months, members of the opposition
had been complaining in Parliament about the numbers of beggars tramping throughout
Britain—over 30,000 in London alone. “Scarcely a day passes without bringing one,
and generally more, beggars to my door,” declared William Cobbett, a leading advocate
of parliamentary reform. “They swarm over the country like vermin upon their own bodies;
and are produced by causes nearly similar.”

Small wonder that investors displayed a marked lack of enthusiasm to buy British government
securities, but
The Times
of London feared “something peculiar” was at work in the financial markets. “When
no other sufficient cause can be assigned for low spirits in individuals,”
The Times
noted, “it is generally thought to be unpleasant weather that produces them: but …
we apprehend it is the low spirits of the nation that occasion the depressed state
of the funds.” Or perhaps the unpleasant weather played upon the spirits of investors,
as well.

Aside from a few minor disturbances in the Midlands and northern England, workers
still hesitated to engage in violent protest. But the ruling class could see trouble
ahead. On July 29, a distinguished company gathered at the City of London Tavern for
a public meeting to revive the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and
Labouring Poor, a society originally founded in 1812 by a group of philanthropists
including William Wilberforce, the evangelical politician best known for his campaign
to end Britain’s participation in the international slave trade. The July 29 meeting
was chaired by the Duke of York, the king’s fourth son and commander in chief of the
British army; others present included two of York’s younger brothers, the Duke of
Kent and the Duke of Cambridge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and the Bishop of London.

The purpose of the association was to encourage “conservative philanthropy”—private
donations to alleviate the plight of the poor while rejecting any government responsibility
for their condition. The organizers planned to spend the evening in a dignified discussion
of “the present distressed state of the lower classes, and the most effectual means
of extending relief to them,” but almost as soon as the meeting commenced, radicals
among the audience (led by Lord Cochrane, a famous British admiral and vocal proponent
of parliamentary reform) began calling for stronger measures by the government. York
could not maintain order long enough to conclude a rational discussion of the issues,
and the meeting soon deteriorated into disorganized squabbling. “No newspaper can
describe the meeting at the City of London Tavern last Monday,” wrote reformer Francis
Place to a friend. “Many years have passed since I witnessed anything so exhilirating.”
As York slipped out of the tavern under a shower of catcalls, the group concluded
its business by proclaiming that while “it be impossible for any Association to attempt
the general relief of such difficulties”—nor would the government attempt to do so—it
expected that “those who are able to afford the means of relief will contribute their
utmost endeavours to alleviate these sufferings.”

It would be a daunting task, especially as the cold, wet weather threw more agricultural
laborers out of work. In the town of Barnet, just north of London, scores of unemployed
haymakers gathered day after day in the marketplace. “It is impossible to conceive
the distress in which these poor people (a majority of them itinerant strangers) have
been reduced by the late incessant rains,” wrote one witness; many of them were “literally
starving.” When a passing gentleman saw about 140 of the desperate men standing together,
he ordered them all to be supplied with bread, and told them to come back tomorrow
for more. The next day, more than three hundred appeared, all of whom he fed. The
third day there were nearly eight hundred; they, too, received bread, and a quarter
pound of cheese from the parish.

Londoners who assembled outside St. James’s Palace on the evening of July 23 received
cake instead. In the season’s second royal wedding, William Frederick, the Duke of
Gloucester, a nephew of the king, married his cousin Princess Mary, one of the king’s
daughters. (Contemporaries noted that it seemed a suitable union, since both parties
had been born in the same year—1776.) King George did not attend his daughter’s wedding,
of course, although Queen Charlotte appeared near the end of the festivities. The
ceremony featured an altar adorned with a spectacular display of gold plate, including
chalices made of solid gold. After the bride and groom rode away in a carriage, the
crowd—according to custom—was treated to pieces of wedding cake.

The wedding may have cheered Englishmen still saddened by the death on July 7 of Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, the greatest playwright of his age. While still in his twenties,
Sheridan authored two brilliant comedies,
The Rivals
and
The School for Scandal
, and then wrote very little for the rest of his life, perhaps fearful he could not
replicate his early success. He served in Parliament as a leading member of the Whig
Party, earning a reputation as a remarkably persuasive speaker and an incorruptible
politician (although his private moral standards were not as strict). Sheridan also
managed and owned London’s most famous playhouse, the Drury Lane Theatre, until it
was destroyed in 1809 by fire, despite a curtain made of iron and a large reservoir
of water on the roof for just such emergencies. Sheridan, who calmly watched his theater
burn (“A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside,” he
reportedly remarked to a bystander), never recovered from the financial loss. He subsequently
quarreled with his patron and longtime crony, the Prince Regent, began drinking heavily,
and died deeply in debt.