The Year Without Summer (7 page)

By January 1816, his doctors had given up hope. “It is the opinion of the medical
gentlemen attending him,” read their official statement to the public, “that nothing
far short of a miracle can bring about a recovery from his afflicting malady.” For
the remainder of his life, George III resided in a suite of thirteen rooms in Windsor
Castle. Although the king initially enjoyed walking on the terrace around the castle,
by 1816 he was virtually blind and no longer ventured outside, although his coterie
of attendants still dressed him every day for dinner (roast beef on Sundays) at 1:30
in the afternoon.

The Prince Regent, meanwhile, had achieved a well-deserved reputation as an indolent
gambler and womanizer who ran up immense debts. One newspaper estimated that by March
1815, the Prince Regent had accumulated debts worth 1,480,600 pounds sterling during
his lifetime. He also was known as a heavy drinker in an age when London gentlemen
routinely consumed four or five bottles of port in a single evening. Not surprisingly,
he suffered severely from gout. Whenever he wished to ride a horse, the Prince Regent
sat in a special chair fitted with rollers, which was wheeled up a ramp to a platform;
then a horse was passed underneath, and the prince was lowered gently into the saddle.

Partly to assuage parliamentary anxieties about his numerous illicit liaisons, and
partly as the price of a deal with Parliament to pay off part of his debts, the prince
had married Princess Caroline of Brunswick in 1795. They took an instant dislike to
each other, and separated soon after the birth of their only child, Charlotte, a year
later.

Before he assumed his father’s authority, the prince had befriended Whig politicians,
largely because they were not his father’s friends. Once he became the Prince Regent,
however, he aligned himself firmly with the Tory party, and with Liverpool’s ministry
from 1812. If that did not make the government more popular, the successful prosecution
of the war against Napoléon did.

Nevertheless, Liverpool entered 1816 facing a host of problems as Britain made the
transition from war to a peacetime economy. A trade recession caused in part by the
termination of wartime contracts forced numerous businesses to cut wages or lay off
workers, and others to declare bankruptcy. The ranks of the unemployed swelled further
as the government rapidly demobilized the army, throwing more than a third of a million
more men into the labor market. “The nation,” wrote one observer, “was in the condition
of a man who, after struggling with some deadly fever, has crept out of the contest,
bankrupt of energy.”

Although British farmers enjoyed a bountiful harvest in 1815, grain prices remained
relatively high due to the Corn Laws which Parliament had passed at the end of the
year. (In the early nineteenth century, the British used
corn
as a generic term for grain.) These measures, hotly debated and greatly resented
by English liberals at the time, prohibited the importation of foreign wheat unless
the price of domestic grain fell below a specified price. They were intended to protect
English landowners, especially those who had brought marginal lands under cultivation
during the recent war, when Napoléon denied Britain its normal sources of supply on
the continent. The government feared that if it removed these price supports, grain
prices would plummet and landowners, tenant farmers, and rural laborers alike would
suffer ruin. Given that most English voters—and even more certainly most Members of
Parliament—belonged to the landowning class, repeal of the Corn Laws seemed unlikely
for the foreseeable future.

Yet a high price for wheat wrought great hardship on the urban working classes. In
normal times, a poor laboring family might spend half its meager income on food, primarily
bread. When harvests failed or other disasters caused the price of grain to rise,
workers found themselves hard-pressed to purchase enough food to survive, never mind
spending on clothes or other manufactured goods. The same logic dampened the spending
of middle-class consumers as well, which exacerbated the trade recession.

Parliament, meanwhile, kept howling for the government to cut spending and reduce
taxes now that the war had come to a successful conclusion. “The main root of the
evil is in the taxes,” grumbled a typical landowner, and hundreds of petitions poured
into Parliament to abolish the income tax which had been passed as a wartime emergency
measure. “Economy is more the order of the day than war ever was,” complained Lord
Castlereagh in early 1816. “Endless debates upon economy and a sour, discontented
temper among our friends.” It was, Castlereagh informed the Duke of Wellington, “one
of the most disagreeable political experiences through which he had ever passed.”
The foreign secretary found it necessary to trim his European policies to fit a British
public reluctant to spend any money in peacetime on continental affairs. As one observer
has noted, “With Napoléon safely locked away in Saint Helena, the great majority of
English people were completely indifferent to what went on in Europe.”

Parliament did, however, manage to find funds for the wedding of Princess Charlotte
of Wales, the Prince Regent’s only legitimate child (and therefore the heir apparent),
and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who were married in London on May 2. In the spring
of 1816, Charlotte enjoyed far more popularity with the British public than her father,
especially after she rejected an arranged marriage with the Prince of Orange, who
was nearly as dissolute as the Prince Regent. The House of Commons granted the couple
an income of 60,000 pounds sterling per year, plus 40,000 pounds for furnishing their
house, an additional 10,000 pounds for the princess’s wardrobe, and another 10,000
pounds for her new jewelry. (One disgruntled critic pointed out that Saxe-Coburg would
“drain the people of England of a sum more than eight times as much as the President
of the United States of America receives from the people of that country, for attending
to all their affairs, and presiding as the Chief Magistrate of a vast and free country,
containing ten millions of people.”) The gifts may have compensated Charlotte for
the enmity of her father; it was said that the Prince Regent disliked her primarily
because she was the daughter of his wife.

Four days later, a riot broke out in the town of Bridport, in West Dorset. Angered
by the combination of high rural unemployment and a fifty percent increase in the
price of wheat since January, a mob smashed the windows of several bakers and millers.
On May 16, a similar disturbance occurred more than 200 miles away in Bury St. Edmunds,
forcing the sheriff of Suffolk to rush to London to beg the home secretary for troops.

Disorder quickly spread throughout East Anglia. The population of the region had swelled
during wartime; now the return of demobilized soldiers coincided with the demise of
the cottage spinning industry to produce widespread joblessness. In some villages,
the unemployment rate reached 50 percent. For those fortunate enough to find work,
wages sometimes sank to the pitifully low rate of three to four shillings per week.
The rioters typically demanded higher wages and cheaper food—wheat at half a crown
a bushel, and a pound of choice meat at fourpence—and often targeted labor-saving
farm machinery, such as threshing machines, for destruction.

One group of demonstrators in Norfolk, reportedly numbering about fifteen hundred,
armed themselves with bludgeons studded with short iron spikes, and hoisted a flag
with the legend “Bread or Blood” before smashing the windows of shops and the homes
of the gentry. They wrecked farm machinery and broke into mills and carried away sacks
of flour, some of which (in a fit of absence of mind) they dumped into the river.
A mob in Norwich destroyed as much property as they could with axes, shovels, spades,
and saws before the militia arrived; then they stoned the soldiers.

On May 22, hundreds of villagers—some of whom were quite inebriated—gathered at the
Globe Inn in Littleport, Cambridgeshire, and commenced to rampage through the streets.
They began by plundering the house of a magistrate, proceeded to empty the cellars
of public houses, and carried on by robbing wealthier residents (many of whom fled
for their lives), demolishing their furniture, and hurling less portable possessions
into the street. The following day the mob moved on to the town of Ely, where they
demanded amnesty and a minimum wage tied to the price of flour. The local magistrates
initially consented, and provided beer to the demonstrators as a token of good faith.
But a small group of rioters returned to Littleport and resumed their depredations.
When a detachment of royal dragoons and a troop of yeoman cavalry appeared to subdue
them, the rioters barricaded themselves in the George and Dragon Inn. After a brief
sort of skirmish in which one rioter was shot dead, the rest surrendered. More than
eighty people were arrested; twenty-four were convicted, and five were hanged.

Alarmed, nearby villages began swearing in special constables, and the authorities
in Cambridge briefly considered arming university students to help defend the town.
Neither they nor Liverpool’s government in London had any way of knowing that the
British economy—already battered by a trade recession and rising unemployment—would
soon suffer the shock of a disastrous growing season that would send the price of
bread soaring even higher, and further fuel the discontent of the poorer classes.

3.

COLD FRONTS

“The most gloomy and extraordinary weather ever seen…”

M
AY DAWNED COLD
and dry over the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. A news report from
Quebec described “large quantities of snow” in the fields, ice in the St. Lawrence
River, and a hard frost on the evening of May 2. In Maine it seemed as if winter had
returned, and parts of New York State were still covered with six or more inches of
snow. The
New York Evening Post
blamed the frigid temperatures on “the unusual long spell of cold westerly winds
which have prevailed since the spring set in.… Vegetation at this season of the year
was never more backward.”

Soon things got worse. On May 12, strong winds swirling down from Canada brought snow
and freezing temperatures to New England, killing the buds and leaves on fruit trees.
Two days later, Albany, New York, reported that “the ground was covered with snow,
and the temperature of the weather during the day more like that of March than May.
Rarely has vegetation been more backward at this season of the year than it is now
in this city.” Residents of Trenton, New Jersey, awoke to find a “heavy black frost”
that had frozen the ground half an inch deep.

On May 14, the cold wave struck crops in Virginia (the
National Register
reported frost in the vicinity of Richmond), and by one account reached as far south
as Tennessee, ruining substantial quantities of cotton. The severe cold exacerbated
the effects of a prolonged drought throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southern states,
a highly unusual occurrence at that time of year. In Virginia, the
Norfolk Beacon
reported that farmers were “ploughing up and re-planting the corn. The temperature
of the weather with us is very fluctuating—the evenings and mornings generally so
cold as to render a fire quite agreeable.” As the cold persisted, ice formed nearly
an inch thick on rivers and ponds from Maine to Buffalo. “The season continues extremely
unfavorable to Agriculture,” mused a Quebec correspondent. “Masses of snow still lie
in the fields, and very little wheat has yet been sown in this district.”

Seasonably warm temperatures returned on May 19, but only briefly. Nine days later,
another front swept down upon Quebec from the northwest, bringing more snow and leaving
ice a quarter of an inch thick. As the cold advanced through New England, it killed
corn in the fields in central Maine. Snow fell in Vermont; the “remarkable cold” froze
the ground an inch deep. Cattle could not forage in the pastures, and farmers had
to use part of their corn supplies as fodder. “The last spring and the present,” noted
the
New England Palladium
, “are certainly the most backward of any for the last 25 years.” Again the frost
reached as far south as Richmond, and as far west as Cincinnati, where blossoms shriveled
on the fruit trees.

David Thomas, a farmer in Cayuga County, New York, left his home on May 21 on a journey
to explore the lands along the Wabash River in the territory of Indiana, which had
recently applied to Congress for admission as a state. As he departed, Thomas wrote
in his journal that “the season has been unusually cold, and vegetation proportionally
retarded.” Two days later, he noted that “the morning was rainy, cold, and uncomfortable,
with wind from the north,” the sort of wind by which “our deepest snows have been
borne along.” As he approached the town of Buffalo, he felt a breeze “so damp and
chill that instantly we stopt, and put on our great coats.” The following morning
(May 25), “was so cold that we shivered in a winter dress, with great coats and gloves.”
According to local residents, the spring had been so frigid that the ice along the
shore of Lake Erie had disappeared only five days earlier.

Conditions did not improve as Thomas continued westward. He found Chautauqua Lake
“wrapt in the drapery of winter,” and a cold rain delayed him for three hours as he
neared the border with Pennsylvania on May 28. “This morning was very frosty,” he
wrote in his journal on May 29, “and ice covered the water one-fourth of an inch thick.”
A brisk breeze from the northeast convinced Thomas to don his great coat again. The
next morning he observed “a severe frost”; then “the clouds rolled on heavily to the
eastward, and portentously to those who have neither home nor shelter.”

“When the last of May arrived,” wrote a Maine chronicler, “everything had been killed
by the cold,” although not much had been planted anyway. “The whole of the month has
been so cold and wet,” complained New Hampshire farmer Adino Brackett, “that wheat
could not be sown ’til late and then the ground could not be well prepared.” “Everybody
complains of the present ‘strange weather; this unnatural weather; this unseasonable
weather,’” noted the
Chambersburg
[Pennsylvania]
Democratic Republican
. Spring was “at least a month later than usual.” Instead of the usual warm, nourishing
showers of April and May, the Eastern United States was experiencing “general aridity,
the mountains are covered with snow, the valleys with ice, and the fruits of the earth
are stunted and withered. Weather-wise people are at a loss to account for this ‘strange
weather.’”