The Year Without Summer (32 page)

Seventy miles to the east, naval officials loaned shovels and wheelbarrows to Plymouth
authorities so they could pay men to repair local roads. (The men were paid on a sliding
scale—married men with families received the top pay of seven shillings and tuppence
a week; “superannuated men”—i.e., the elderly—got only five shillings.) For counties
in the London area,
The Times
suggested picking oakum (the laborious process of untwisting hemp rope) or making
doormats. The most ambitious plan from the provinces came from Liverpool, where a
meeting of “clergy, gentlemen, merchants” and other respectable citizens agreed to
launch a fund-raising drive to employ up to 3,000 people during the winter on a project
to expand and improve the docks.

Other communities, such as York, Newcastle, and Leeds, opened soup kitchens supported
by private contributions. Rarely did they dispense any meals for free, except in extreme
circumstances; most of these kitchens, such as the one in Limehouse, required the
poor to pay a small fee for food—flour, potatoes, and beef—and for coals for fuel.
Even so, the rapidly growing ranks of the needy threatened to overwhelm the limited
charitable resources. A survey of Shropshire in early October revealed that one parish
had “650 men, women, and children, totally destitute,” while another neighborhood
counted between 2,000 and 3,000 laborers either out of work or only partially employed.
Shropshire itself totaled an estimated 12,000 people whom a local official described
as “in a state of utmost privation.”

Despite the reports of mediocre harvests, Liverpool’s government convinced itself
the country could survive the winter without a serious threat of famine, and that
conviction never wavered. In a letter to Peel on October 18, Lord Liverpool predicted
that Britain would have an adequate supply of grain; two months later, Castlereagh
assured John Quincy Adams that even though the harvest “had been partially bad, there
would turn out to be enough for the consumption of the people.”

But reports of real and anticipated shortages drove grain prices higher in a very
short time. In January 1816, wheat had sold for 52 shillings a quarter; by November,
the price had nearly doubled, to 98s./9p. A few merchants initially supplemented domestic
supplies with quantities of foreign grain illegally, in contravention of the Corn
Laws. In October, smugglers along the Brittany coast sent shipments of French wheat
clandestinely across the Channel, engaging in a brief skirmish with customs officials
outside of Boulogne. In early November, however, the British government’s complex
calculations determined that wheat prices had reached the tipping point specified
by the Corn Laws, and so it opened British ports to foreign grain.

Yet to only limited effect.

Britain’s usual sources of supply on the Continent possessed little or no grain to
sell except at exorbitant prices. Following the arrival of a few cargoes from the
Netherlands—including grain that had been sent to England at considerably lower prices
in 1815, only to be turned away when the Corn Laws went into effect—the Dutch government
prohibited further shipments. British merchants who attempted to purchase wheat in
Hamburg discovered that demand from other parts of Europe already had driven prices
higher than their customers were willing to pay.

So the price of bread continued to rise in Britain, as did the price of milk—a direct
result of the scarcity of fodder. A meeting of milkmen in Norwich declared that “through
the Providence of God, the crops of corn and grain are almost all destroyed,” hence
it would cost them more to feed their cows. Accordingly, they raised their prices
by 25 percent, from eight pence to ten pence a quart.

Liverpool fully expected the rising price of necessities—accompanied by higher unemployment
and stagnant trade—to generate increased disorder in the coming months. He warned
Sidmouth on October 21 that Britain faced “a Stormy Winter” stemming in large measure
from the unusually cold and sodden summer: “The evil of a high Price of Bread coming
upon us before we have got rid of our Commercial & Agricultural Distresses.” Indeed
the storm already had begun to break.

When the price of a quartern loaf (weighing about four pounds) of bread reached 1s.
2d. at the Surrey town of Guildford in the second week of October, an angry crowd
of several hundred people gathered at the house of a baker whom they felt was charging
excessive prices. Initially they expressed their outrage by banging on tin kettles
and blowing horns; emboldened by reinforcements, the demonstrators soon graduated
to violence, demolishing much of the building before the local authorities arrived
and read the Riot Act. Two days later, the mayor warned the local bakers to keep price
increases to a minimum.

Two weeks later, a mob assaulted farmers at a market at Sunderland in northern England
and grabbed all the grain they could carry, dividing the spoil among themselves. At
Walsall, eight miles outside of Birmingham, rioters broke the windows of several bakers,
then marched to a grain mill about a mile outside of town and demolished it, too.
The panic-stricken magistrates summoned detachments of cavalry from Wolverhampton
and Handsworth, but by the time they arrived, most of the rioters had fled with their
plunder.

Birmingham itself enjoyed a long tradition of amicable relations between employers
and laborers, but at the end of October a crowd attacked the house and shop of a printer
who had published a circular advising the poor to “quietly and peaceably wait till
Providence shall please to restore to you prosperity,” adding that the penalty for
violent riot would be death or exile. After demolishing the printer’s house, the mob
turned on the police and the local prison keeper; only the arrival of cavalry and
the usual reading of the Riot Act quelled the disturbance around midnight, but not
until several rioters were ridden down by horses, and one of them killed.

South Wales witnessed worse disorders. In Glamorgan, ironworkers struck on October
18 when their employers—facing a loss of government orders in peacetime—cut their
wages to one shilling per day. Supported by local miners, the ironworkers forced the
closure of furnaces in Merthyr Tydfil, the center of the Welsh iron industry. Claiming
that the miners had assumed “a most alarming appearance,” the high sheriff asked for
troops from Swansea. Meanwhile, the strike spread to Monmouthshire and Newport. “I
must also say that the discontented are in great force,” reported one eyewitness,
“and determined to oppose every thing sent against them.” Several detachments of cavalry,
including some troops who had fought at Waterloo a year earlier, eventually restored
order. Thirty strikers were arrested and sent to Cardiff for trial. “I am much afraid,”
a bystander predicted, “distress will be severely felt this winter.”

Spontaneous local disorders stemming from low wages and the high price of bread did
not frighten Lord Liverpool and his cabinet unduly. What terrified them more than
anything was the threat of mass action orchestrated by radical reformers whom the
government believed were actually revolutionaries in disguise. With the French Terror
less than twenty years behind them, Liverpool’s ministry equated popular meetings
with mob rule; hence their apprehension when approximately 8,000 people gathered at
Spa Fields, just north of London, on Friday, November 15, to hear Henry Hunt urge
them to petition the Prince Regent for relief from their distress.

The arrival of sharply colder weather deepened the misery of the poor. On the morning
of November 8, residents of London arose to a severe frost, with temperatures falling
to 27 degrees. In York, the mercury slid all the way to 21 degrees, “a circumstance
not remembered by the oldest inhabitant at this early period of the winter.” That
evening the barometer dropped dramatically. On the morning of November 10, a powerful
storm brought snow and sleet to the capital, followed by subfreezing temperatures
that lasted until late the following day. This time, no one could blame sunspots for
the frigid weather; as news reports pointed out, the spots had disappeared altogether
from the face of the sun.

But Liverpool’s stormy winter was already under way. As Hunt spoke to the massive
crowd from the open window of a tavern at the edge of Spa Fields, he focused on the
evils of corrupt government that burdened the people with a heavy load of taxes: “Everything
that concerned their subsistence or comfort was taxed. Was not their loaf taxed, was
not beer taxed, were not their coats taxed, were not their shirts taxed, was not everything
that they ate, drank, wore, and even said taxed?” All of this was quite unexceptionable,
but the government doubtless noticed that Hunt was accompanied by two men, one carrying
a tricolor flag of green, white, and red (“the colours of the future British Republic,”
someone said recklessly) and the other a pike tipped with a cap of liberty. Nor did
Liverpool and his colleagues welcome a reference to the nearby Coldbath Fields Prison
as “the British Bastille, where so much tyranny had formerly been exercised.” The
meeting ended peaceably, but later that evening a mob looted several bakers’ and butchers’
shops in the area.

Instead of summoning Parliament at the end of the year, as previously planned, Liverpool
decided to wait until February. By that time, he felt sure, the radicals would have
thrown off their disguise, and the nation could see them for the insurrectionaries
they really were.

*   *   *

O
N
November 23, King George became the longest-reigning English monarch since the Norman
Conquest: fifty-six years and twenty-nine days, surpassing the previous record-holder,
Henry III. (Elizabeth I was in fourth place, just behind Edward III.) The occasion
warranted few festivities; a month earlier, the royal family had celebrated the anniversary
of the king’s accession to the throne with a private dinner party. King George himself
remained in seclusion. His physicians continued to issue reports on the state of his
health; on November 2, for instance, they declared that “His Majesty was rather less
composed than usual during the former part of the last month, but His Majesty has
since resumed his tranquility, and is in good bodily health.”

*   *   *

A
T
two o’clock on the afternoon of November 4, King Louis entered the Chamber of Deputies
to the accompaniment of artillery salvos outside the assembly. A larger crowd than
usual had gathered to hear the monarch open the new session of the legislature: Besides
the diplomatic corps from other European nations, and the Peers of France (cloaked
in their grand robes of state, bordered with ermine), there were numerous French and
foreign dignitaries among the galleries, and two hundred ladies watching from the
upper benches usually reserved for deputies.

“Tranquility reigns throughout the kingdom,” Louis began, curtly dismissing a recently
quashed insurrection in Lyon as “a senseless enterprise” that only proved the loyalty
of the army to his throne. France was at peace with all its neighbors; his government
had made its reparations payments on time; and it continued to meet its treaty obligations.
Only one unfortunate development cast a cloud over France’s tranquility. “The intemperance
of the season has delayed the harvest,” the king acknowledged. “My people suffer,
and I suffer more than they do,” he continued, with more ceremony than irony, “but
I have the consolation of being able to inform you, that the evil is but temporary,
and that the produce will be sufficient for the consumption.” Perhaps, but Louis admitted
that the dismal harvest would require the government to make substantial additional
expenditures to assist the nation’s poor. The king promised that the royal family
would “make the same sacrifices this year as the last; and for the rest, I rely upon
your attachment, and your zeal for the good of the State, and the honour of the French
name.”

Four days later, an angry crowd gathered at a marketplace in the southern French city
of Toulouse to protest the high price of bread, and to prevent shipments of grain
from leaving their region. The farms in the countryside around Toulouse, in the department
of Haute-Garonne, had enjoyed a reasonably normal harvest, but the extremely heavy
demand in areas such as Provence and Bas-Languedoc, which had suffered far worse from
the cold and rain, enticed local merchants to ship their grains to the neediest regions
to obtain the highest price. Even in Toulouse, the price of grain had risen to thirty-two
francs per hectolitre (100 litres), an increase of approximately 33 percent over the
past twelve months. Fearing that grain shipments out of Haute-Garonne would create
shortages in their own region over the winter and drive up the price of bread even
further, the protestors on November 8 demanded that the grain remain in the city and
that local authorities lower the cost to a “just” price of twenty-four francs per
hectolitre.

Police attempted to disperse the crowd, but the mob roughed them up. The arrival of
the mayor, accompanied by a detachment of soldiers, finally broke up the protest as
authorities arrested nearly a dozen demonstrators. But three days later the mob reassembled
and repeated its demand for bread at twenty-four francs. This time it took a company
of mounted troops to dislodge the protestors, who headed towards the town’s granaries
before the cavalry headed them off. The crowd responded by seizing three wagons loaded
with grain and barricading themselves in the Faubourg Saint-Cyprien, relenting only
when local officials summoned additional troops and a unit of the national guard from
outside the city.

A similar incident occurred at the same time in the Vendée, on the west coast of France,
where armed peasants stopped the shipment of wheat bound for Bayonne, and then stole
what grain they could carry away. Peasants and townspeople in so many other departments
followed suit, with merchants and soldiers battling mobs of men and women armed with
pitchforks and sticks—sometimes aided by local authorities who wished to avoid shortages
in their jurisdictions—that the minister of the interior issued instructions in mid-November
to the nation’s prefects “strictly prohibiting all such obstructions or restrictions,
as preventing the abundance of one district from supplying the deficiencies of another.”
At the same time, the central government provided assurances that it would not allow
French grain to be exported outside the nation’s boundaries. Meanwhile, officials
in Paris wondered if Ultra-Royalists, bitter over their losses in the recent elections,
were encouraging the popular discontent to embarrass the government.