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.
Distress bred more disorder. In January 1816, Peel wrote to the prime minister informing him of a rash of crimes in Tipperary that amounted to a virtual rebellion. Many cases involved combinations of tenants avenging themselves upon anyone paying what they considered an excessive rent for land. The local magistrates responded harshly, condemning thirteen of the convicted men to death, with fourteen more transported to penal colonies. “You can have no idea of the moral depravation of the lower orders in that county,” complained Peel. Actually, Liverpool believed he could. “In truth,” the prime minister wrote, “Ireland is a political phenomenon—not influenced by the same feelings as appear to affect mankind in other countries—and the singular nature of the disorder must be the cause why it has hitherto been found impracticable to apply an effectual and permanent remedy.”
Springtime brought a brief respite, perhaps because the cold, wet weather of April and May dampened any hostile impulses among the citizenry. Whitworth believed that he and Peel deserved credit for the lull, based upon the forceful measures they had encouraged in recent months. “The people see that there is something stronger than themselves, from which they cannot escape,” the lord lieutenant concluded. “They have been taught respect, or at least dread of the law, and that is the instruction most wanted.” One of the more curious reports came from County Clare, where a band of moonshiners distilling illegal whiskey had barricaded themselves in a castle to avoid arrest. Local authorities asked the chief secretary to send artillery to demolish the castle; Peel urged them to try less drastic measures instead.
Calm continued into the summer, but so did the rain and the cold. “Eight weeks of rain in succession,” grumbled one writer. “Hay and corn crops in a deplorable state. The grains of corn in many places are covered with a reddish powder like rust”—probably a fungus which thrived in wet weather—“which has proved very destructive to the crop.” Especially in the western counties, “the fields of corn presented a lamentable appearance, in many places being quite black.”
* * *
DAVID Ricardo believed he knew the solution to Ireland’s economic woes. A successful stockbroker and economic theorist—his most recent work, An Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock (1815), had introduced the law of diminishing marginal returns—Ricardo was in the process of turning himself into an English country gentleman in the summer of 1816. Two years earlier, he had purchased Gatcombe Park, an estate in Gloucestershire in southwest England. In early July 1816, Ricardo spent several days at Gatcombe entertaining Thomas Robert Malthus, England’s other foremost political economist. “We were held prisoners by the weather,” Ricardo confided to a friend, but the constant rain provided the two men with an opportunity to discuss economic theory and the challenges currently confronting the government in London.
Malthus, an ordained Anglican priest who served as Professor of Modern History and Political Economy at the East India College in Haileybury, just north of London, had initially gained fame through the publication of his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. A reaction against the Enlightenment notion that human society could improve itself endlessly, Malthus’ essay suggested that a society’s population always had a tendency to expand beyond the available supply of food. Unless individuals voluntarily slowed the rate of population growth by “preventive checks” such as postponing marriage and practicing celibacy, nature would dispose of the “surplus population” through “positive checks,” including starvation and plague. In his original essay, Malthus argued that any attempts to ameliorate the condition of the poor through charitable donations would fail, since the increased income would be absorbed by even more offspring. Five years later, however, Malthus published a revised edition of his essay, in which he suggested that the poor could be taught to practice “moral restraint” and “virtuous celibacy”—delaying marriage until they could reasonably expect to earn an income that would allow them to support their (smaller) families at the level they wished to live. Once they became accustomed to a higher standard of living, Malthus believed the lower classes would continue to voluntarily limit the size of their families and thereby help keep the population in check.
This, Ricardo argued in July 1816, was precisely what Ireland required: “a taste for other objects besides mere food,” and less passion for mindless activities such as faction fighting. Any stimulus, Ricardo wrote, that would “rouse the Irish to activity which should induce them to dispose of their surplus time in procuring luxuries for themselves, instead of employing it in the most brutal pursuits, would tend more to the civilization and prosperity of their country than any other measures which could be recommended.”
Ireland was one of the few subjects upon which Ricardo and Malthus agreed, however. Their differences were especially sharp on the issue of Britain’s Corn Laws. Ricardo steadfastly opposed protectionist legislation, believing that the artifically high price of grain kept too much marginal land in production and reduced the profits of business owners, thereby hindering Britain’s economic progress. Although Malthus originally had opposed the Corn Laws, by 1816 he had reversed his position. The need for Britain to maintain self-sufficiency in food production, Malthus claimed, outweighed any deleterious economic effects of the legislation. But both men foresaw serious trouble ahead if the dismal summer weather continued, threatening Britain’s harvest.
* * *
ENGLISH tourists continued to flood into Switzerland—ten thousand, by one estimate. One British correspondent complained that Geneva was so full of his fellow countrymen that English families who wished to send their children there for an education in a foreign culture “could not find a family to place them in where there were not other English boarders.”
“I hear old England is to be quite deserted this summer,” wrote Lady Caroline Capel. Her daughter Georgy agreed: “I should think England was the only part of the world now where there was a lack of English. Lausanne is full of them, there are several here, in short it is quite amazing!” Lady Capel and her family had rented the Château Bel Air (“too small for our size … but very well furnished”) about half a mile outside Vevey, on the north shore of Lake Geneva, and were having a splendid time touring local historical sites—including the notorious Castle of Chillon, the former fortress/arsenal/prison built on an island in the lake—and scrambling about the hillsides surrounding their house when the weather permitted.
But it seldom did. For nearly the entire month of July, the rain had “been violent & incessant with the exception of 4 or 5 days.” Prices for produce in the local markets were rising rapidly, complained Lady Caroline. “It is being rather out of Luck, for the Oldest Man in the Country does not remember the price of Bread so high as it is at this time.” She blamed the exorbitant prices on “the dreadfull & tremendous rains which have now continued so long.” The vineyards, too, were “totally spoilt as well as the Corn, & the greatest scarcity is apprehended. The same accounts are received from Italy & your letter mentions the bad Weather in England—Heaven defend Us from a Famine! Sometimes I have the most gloomy forebodings.”
Farther down the lake, Percy Bysshe Shelley crammed as much travel into the summer as he could. Following the evenings of ghost stories at Lord Byron’s villa in late June, the two poets had embarked on a weeklong tour of Lake Geneva. They intended to visit a number of sites made famous by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosophe who was a native and sometime resident of Geneva, and whose books were eventually banned by the local authorities. The trip was something of a pilgrimage for Shelley, who spoke in awed tones of “the divine beauty” of Rousseau’s imagination. “In my mind,” Shelley wrote to a friend in London, “Rousseau is indeed … the greatest man the world has produced since Milton.”
Following
the geography set out in Rousseau’s 1761 historical novel, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Byron and Shelley began their pilgrimage at the Castle of Chillon. Shelley shuddered at the dungeons, excavated below the lake, with their iron rings, narrow cells, and the engraven names of prisoners. “I never saw a monument more terrible of that cold and inhuman tyranny, which it has been the delight of man to exercise over man,” he later told a friend. The poets then moved on to Vevey, where the Capels were staying, which Shelley considered “a town more beautiful in its simplicity than any I have ever seen.”
Looking out over a magnificent view of the Alps, Shelley suddenly mused about the end of the world. “What a thing it would be,” he said, “if all were involved in darkness at this moment, the sun and stars to go out. How terrible the idea!” Heavy rains subsequently forced a premature end to the poets’ expedition, although they did visit the house outside Lausanne where the British historian Edward Gibbon—whom Byron admired greatly—completed The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Before they left, Byron gathered a few acacia leaves to preserve in Gibbon’s memory.
After returning to the Villa Diodati, Byron spent much of July and August writing. The dismal weather deepened his customary melancholy. “Really we have had lately such stupid mists, fogs, and perpetual density,” Byron wrote to his publisher on July 22, “that one would think Castlereagh had the Foreign Affairs of the kingdom of Heaven also on his hands.” Despite his weather-induced gloom (or perhaps because of it), the summer was a remarkably creative period for Byron: “The Prisoner of Chillon,” the third canto of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” “The Dream,” “Sonnet To Lake Leman,” “Prometheus,” “Monody on the Death of the Right Hon. R. B. Sheridan,” and a poem directly inspired by the bleak summer of 1816, “Darkness.”
The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History Page 14