In the United States, 1812 brought significantly cooler temperatures and greater precipitation than usual; at Middlebury College in Vermont, Professor Frederick Hall noted that “crops were destroyed by the coldness and wetness of the season,” and observers in New England reported frosts in late August and snow in September. The following two years were only slightly colder than normal, but the growing season of 1815 in New England was cut short by May snows and early September killing frosts. In eastern Canada, the province of Quebec suffered devastating losses to its harvests in 1815. The relatively mild North American winter of 1815–16, therefore, generated few complaints.
Then April arrived. After a mild start, the weather took a decidedly nasty turn in the middle of the month. On April 12, nearly a foot of snow fell on Quebec City, and it continued to snow for the next five days. “The country has all the appearance of the middle of winter,” noted a news report on April 18, “the depth of snow being still between 3 and 4 feet. We understand that in many parishes the cattle are already suffering from a scarcity of forage.” The same storm hit Albany, New York, a day later, leaving the roofs of houses and the nearby hills completely covered with snow. To the west of the city, “the country in many places had the appearance of winter; the hills being as white as in the month of January.” Further west, the storm surprised settlers in the town of Chillicothe, then the capital of Ohio. On April 18, one correspondent reported “a temperature extraordinary at this season of the year. In the latter part of last week, the weather was excessively cold—on Sunday, snow fell to the depth of several inches; and since that time the weather has been clear, but nearly as cold as it was in February.”
But the advent of a heat wave at the end of the month raised farmers’ spirits; by the time the sunspots appeared in late April, Vermont farmers—who already had planted some of their crops—were sweltering under highs in the low 80s.
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COOLER temperatures also settled across the European continent in 1810, ushering in a decade that would be the coldest in several centuries for much of western and central Europe. From 1810–1815, the difference was felt mainly during the autumns and winters; the summers were not unusually frigid. In 1812, central Italy experienced snow and a highly atypical hard freeze in April, followed by a very cold autumn; harvests in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands also suffered from the cold. After relatively normal weather in 1813, exceptionally low temperatures returned in 1814—the coldest year on record for much of central Europe. Conditions did not improve significantly in 1815: Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Austria (especially in the southern provinces of Styria and Carinthia) all endured heavy precipitation and a colder than usual autumn, resulting in poor harvests which sent the price of wheat sharply higher. Weather during the winter of 1815–16 was unsettled across much of Europe; in Germany, strong winds and a lack of snow cover blew wheat seeds off the soil, forcing farmers to replant their fields.
In Britain, 1810 marked the start of the coldest decade in Great Britain since the 1690s, with average temperatures one to two degrees Celcius colder than normal, frigid enough to provoke a change in women’s fashions. During the 1790s, English women had adopted revealing styles of undergarments from France; as temperatures dropped, however, they covered up their cleavage with the more modest and far warmer shifts known as “bosom friends” to help fend off the chilling winds.
Despite the cooler weather, British farmers enjoyed a very good harvest in the autumn of 1815. The following winter began colder than usual in Britain, with highs in the upper 30s and low 40s in January and February. March brought spells of warmer weather, but significantly more precipitation; it snowed or rained for nearly half the days, and one storm dropped a foot of snow on Lancashire. Sleet and snow returned on April 9, along with subfreezing temperatures that kept several inches of snow on the ground in southern England. Four days later, heavy snow along the east coast prevented travelers from leaving Dover for the continent; more snow fell on April 14. By the last week in April, highs were back in the mid 60s, and farmers could finally plant their crops, but the growing season already had been delayed. In Ireland, too, the spring was abnormally late.
Scotland fared worse. In Aberdeenshire, frost and snow from mid-November through mid-March froze the turnips used for cattle fodder, and the plants rotted in the alternating frosts and snow. “We never experienced a worse winter for feeding,” complained the Aberdeen Journal. Farmers began taking their cattle to market much earlier than usual, driving down the price of beef. The remainder of March in eastern Scotland was “stormy in the extreme; in consequence of which … very little ploughing was got done.” April was cold and dry. Virtually nothing was growing by the beginning of May: “Even on the coast, there is yet no appearance of vegetation.” Conditions improved little in May. “Throughout the whole of this month,” noted a report from Midlothian, just south of Edinburgh, “the weather has been unusually barren, from a continued cold, sharp, dry wind, generally from the north.… The fields, in general, are backward and in great want of warm sun, especially the grass and wheat, which is near a month later than ordinary, and are weak and unpromising at present.”
Across most of western and central Europe, spring was lost in the waves of cold weather that swept over the continent in April and May. Travelers to Calais in mid-April encountered a storm that brought “a considerable quantity of snow” to northern France. In the Abruzzo region of central Italy, farms in the higher elevations still had so much snow on the ground in late May that farmers could not sow their wheat, and the price of grain was rising. There were late frosts in Austria, and the stormy winter and cold spring already had created a shortage of grain and higher prices in southwestern Germany, as well.
On May 12, sleet pelted English fields and towns. “Never was there such a backward season,” muttered the English reformer and part-time farmer William Cobbett. “The extreme changeableness of the weather which has prevailed so long, still continues,” reported the Royal Cornwall Gazette. “Every flattering prospect of genial warmth has been quickly succeeded throughout the spring, with the reverse of a chilling and searching, or damp atmosphere.” Particularly in northern England, oats had “a yellow and unhealthy appearance,” and wheat looked so sickly that many farmers simply ploughed up their fields and resowed their lands with barley. Pastures and meadows seemed barren and backward. “Such an ungenial season has necessarily been unfavorable to all the production of the earth,” concluded the Gazette, “giving the assurance of a late harvest, so full of risk and experience in the northern parts.”
This news did not please Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, an unimaginative, no-nonsense Tory who had led His Majesty’s Government since the assassination of his predecessor, Spencer Perceval, in 1812. “Led” perhaps was too strong a word; Liverpool, whom Benjamin Disraeli later referred to as “the arch-mediocrity,” was the titular head only of the Conservative Party. His subordinates, including Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, regularly took turns usurping his authority.
Royal authority was exercised in 1816 by the Prince Regent, the eldest son of King George III, although the king was still alive. Beginning with a brief attack in 1765, George III experienced periodic bouts of madness that appear to have been the result of porphyria, a rare blood disorder. His symptoms included delusions, hallucinations, severe abdominal pains, insomnia, confusion, and muscular weakness. His physicians’ inability to determine the cause of his illness, and their understandable reluctance to hazard a guess about the likelihood of any recovery, had contributed to a constitutional crisis when the king suffered a second, prolonged attack in 1788. Parliament waited more than six months for George to recover; finally the House of Commons passed a Regency Act to transfer authority to the Prince of Wales. But as the Lords debated the measure, the king suddenly and unexpectedly recovered, and remained in good health until the next attack in 1801. A fifth and final attack in 1810 convinced parliamentary leaders to approve another measure to
permit the Prince of Wales to rule in place of the seventy-two-year-old monarch, although fleeting glimpses of sanity in the first year or two kept alive hopes of the king’s eventual recovery.
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. Th
e 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…”
MAY 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.
The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History Page 5