The Year Without Summer (26 page)

Against this ominous and sodden backdrop, King Louis formally signed the ordinance
dissolving the Chamber of Deputies on September 5. In its brief existence, the
Chambre introuvable
had solved none of France’s critical difficulties; instead, it had tried to restore
aristocratic and religious privileges inimical to the interests of the nation’s masses.
“Such a set of venal, merciless, and ignorant bigots and blockheads never were collected
in any assembly,” concluded a British visitor in Paris. The French public appears
to have greeted the call for new elections with relief; certainly the Allied governments
welcomed it. The Duke of Wellington responded by reducing (slightly) the size of the
army of occupation, partly to relieve pressure on the French treasury, but also to
ease tensions at a time when reports of Gallic insults to English tourists appeared
in newspapers nearly every day. Wellington also agreed to postpone the autumn maneuvers
of the Allied occupation force—ostensibly because of the shortage of food in the most
hard-pressed departments, but also to avoid arousing antigovernment sentiment during
the election campaign.

Ultra-Royalists and moderate monarchists alike spent September canvassing the countryside.
Although France’s electoral qualifications had not changed, the government clearly
hoped that voters who had abstained from the previous election would exercise their
franchise this time. Government officials in the provinces received orders from Paris
to encourage voters to reject extremists (i.e., Ultras) and support only “pure but
moderate” candidates “who do not believe that loving the king and serving him well
exempts them from obeying the laws.” Local officials who supported the Ultras exerted
their own pressure on voters to return the incumbent deputies. With the king firmly
aligned with the moderates, erstwhile revolutionaries were heard shouting “Vive le
Roi!” as they passed Ultras in the street.

Rain, elections, cold, the rising price of bread—and then sunspots returned in the
middle of September. “They are more considerable, and in greater numbers, than were
remarked during the month of July,” noted the
Gazette de France
. This time they resembled two strings of beads: the first dominated by spots that
looked like two large cherries, with a dozen other spots between them; the second
consisting of seven or eight smaller spots strung together. To an English commentator,
the accompanying diagram in the
Gazette
of the sun “with its cheeks all covered with spots” resembled caricatures of “the
patches on a fashionable English lady one hundred years ago.”

*   *   *

“T
HERE
has not been this whole summer one day of steady sunshine, not one day of heat, nor
one night when a coverlet and blanket could have been thrown off with comfort,” wrote
an exasperated John Quincy Adams in his diary in London on Wednesday, August 28. “There
was not one of the forty days from St. Swithin’s [July 15], to a certainty, without
rain, so that the old prediction”—if it rained on St. Swithin’s Day, it would rain
for the next forty days—“seems to have been this year made good.” Adams recently had
managed to get through one night without his flannel waistcoat, but was obliged to
don it again the next day. The 28th actually turned out to be “warm and fine,” Adams
noted, the day “most like summer” all season, despite a frost the previous evening.
But Adams feared for the British harvest, whose prospects he termed “precarious.”

Two days later, another powerful storm struck Britain. One report from Kent, in southeast
England, described it as “one of the most violent storms of wind and rain … that has
occurred at this period of the year within recollection.” Brutal winds tore up trees
and broke them into pieces, leveled poles of hops, and left shocks of corn strewn
over the ground. “In the orchards and gardens,” noted an observer, “the far greater
portion of the fruit has been stripped from the trees.” Snow fell in Barnet, about
forty miles north of London, and in the Sussex town of Lewes. “Snow in harvest is
no common occurrence,” noted the Lewes Journal, “but it is a fact that it occurred
here yesterday, as witnessed by several persons in the town.”

When the gale reached Bury, outside of Manchester, it shattered trees and flattened
fields of wheat and oats. The region around Newcastle suffered similar damage. In
Cambridge and Huntingdonshire, “a considerable fall of snow” accompanied by a severe
frost destroyed the area’s extensive market vegetable crops of French beans and cucumbers.
A local newspaper in Essex reported that a combination of snow, a hailstorm, and the
“somewhat extraordinary” appearance of ice four inches thick threatened to completely
ruin the second crop of hay. Even from Edinburgh, known for its sudden shocks of cold,
wind, and rain, came complaints that “the weather here, for these eight days past,
has been excessively cold and rainy; and this unfavourable change has considerably
damped those hopes which the genial weather of the preceding fortnight had excited.”
The price of grain in the city’s markets rose dramatically.

“Indeed, the whole country is in a very disastrous state,” reported
The Times
of London, “as the little corn yet reaped is too green to be carried, and without
more warmth and sunshine than we have at present, can never be completely ripened,
and must prove of bad sample.” Unless the weather drastically improved, farmers feared
their wheat would never ripen; “and still the weather is very cold and unseasonable.”

“The gale has abated,” noted Adams on the evening of September 2, “and the weather
this day was part of the day, fair, but with the decided character of autumn, and
so cold that we had a fire again in the evening.” All the hopes for a good, albeit
late harvest had vanished, Adams wrote. “They are now desperate.”

Reports from across England confirmed Adams’ assessment. In Worcester, the cold nights
had ruined the hops, and prices already had increased by nearly a third. At Chelmsford
in Essex, potatoes, beans, peas, barley, and grapes were severely damaged by the “extraordinary
visitation” of snow and ice, which “already remind us of the approaching winter.”
The Hereford
Journal
reported substantial damage to the wheat from the continuous rains; and “the hops
have been nearly destroyed in the course of the last week by the inclement season.”
The cold nights left farmers in Worcestershire so little to harvest that they wondered
if the profit would outweigh the expense of picking. The oat crop suffered significantly
from the recent evening frosts, and hay already was scarce. And in Littleham, Exeter,
a seventy-three-year-old farmer who had reaped wheat every summer for fifty-three
years declared that “the present harvest is one month later than any year he has known.”

A week of fair weather provided a window for farmers to harvest any remaining crops
that were even close to maturing, but when rain returned on September 9, they could
only watch helplessly as the downpour pounded their fields. Two days later southeastern
England suffered another violent storm that brought rain, hail, and snow. Outside
of Maidstone, in Kent, hailstones “as large as nuts” severely damaged both wheat and
barley. “Snow fell once or twice in the neighbourhood during the week,” reported
The Times
, “and more than once ice of the thickness of half-a-crown was found in the morning.”
Hops farmers in Canterbury suffered losses worth thousands of pounds sterling from
storm damage.

Surveying the devastation,
The Times
of London clung to its assertion that despite “the late and wet season,” the wheat
harvest “has proved propitious as the husbandman could desire.” It acknowledged, however,
that the quality of wheat varied widely among different regions, especially since
many farmers cut their grain too early or when it was damp. With so much wheat spoiled,
seed for the following season would be in short supply. Even optimistic observers
acknowledged that more than 75 percent of the hops harvest was lost. A considerable
quantity of barley had been harvested, but most of it was of inferior quality. Although
peas and beans from the east were plentiful, in the home counties “they have run too
much to straw.”

From Gatcombe Park, David Ricardo reported that “the continuance of the cold and wet
weather does not afford us a very good propect for the harvest, and I am very much
afraid that the poor will have much to suffer during the next winter.” Malthus agreed.
The harvest in Hertfordshire, Malthus informed his friend in a letter of September
8, “has begun about us at last and seems as if it would be pretty good if it could
be got in, but there has hardly ever been known so late a year, and in the backward
parts of the country, a late year is always a bad one.”

As real and anticipated shortages sent commodity prices higher, the peculiar operation
of the Corn Laws delayed the importation of foreign grain. The legislation compelled
the government to close or open the ports to grain imports for three months at a time,
based upon the average price of wheat over a six-week period. The implementation of
the law therefore always lagged behind the actual movement of prices. By the end of
September 1816, wheat was selling well above the eighty shillings per quarter threshold
established by the Corn Laws. Given the dismal failure of the harvest on much of the
Continent, there seemed little chance the price of wheat would fall below the threshold
anytime soon.

Lord Liverpool’s ministry inadvertently contributed to public anxiety over the prospect
of sharply higher food prices when it attempted to suppress the quarterly Report on
the Agricultural State of the Kingdom for March, April, and May. The report was a
routine gathering of information from farmers throughout Britain about the condition
of their crops and livestock, but the government found the farmers’ responses so alarming
that it printed only twenty-two copies of the report and tried to restrict access
to it. Even
The Times
deemed this foolish: “Secrecy is looked upon as a sign of extreme and imminent danger;
and what is kept back from knowledge acts far more terribly than what is known.”

Nevertheless, public demonstrations against the government remained rare, save for
isolated outbursts in Preston and Glasgow. Yet it seemed likely that widespread protests
wanted only deepening distress and the coordination of discontent by parliamentary
reformers. Following the end of the war against France, radicals led by Major Cartwright
and Sir Francis Burdett had helped to establish local reform clubs—usually known as
Hampden clubs—in numerous English counties. Unlike previous reform efforts, which
sought to mobilize only the middle and upper classes, this campaign attempted to mobilize
as many Englishmen as possible behind a platform of annual elections, equal parliamentary
constituencies, and the extension of the franchise to all taxpayers, and eventually
to all adult males. William Cobbett contributed ammunition on a weekly basis through
his “Two-Penny Trash,” an inexpensive, pamphlet version (which avoided the newspaper
tax) of his more staid
Political Register
; by the summer of 1816, Cobbett’s pamphlets were the primary printed source of news
for Britain’s working class, with a circulation that often exceeded 50,000.

In open-air meetings and gatherings in taverns and guild halls, speakers informed
factory hands and farm laborers that their current distress stemmed in large measure
from a corrupt and uncaring political system, and that their only remedy lay in a
reformed Parliament. In late August, a meeting of eight thousand angry liverymen—members
of London’s trade and craft organizations—unanimously demanded lower taxes and legislative
reform. When John Quincy Adams asked the Lord Mayor of London how such resolutions
could have been carried without even a murmur of dissent, the Lord Mayor replied that
“the friends of the Government had not dared to make any opposition.” At another meeting
on September 5 in Westminster, speakers denounced the government’s attempted suppression
of the Board of Agriculture’s report, and insisted that “the distresses of the country
were without parallel.” Shortly thereafter, a self-styled “Committee of Public Safety”—a
charged term, given the government’s paranoia about any movement recalling the French
Revolution—launched a campaign to obtain thousands of signatures on petitions demanding
reform, to be presented to Parliament when it reconvened in early 1817.

Tory journals insisted the government’s policies bore little, if any, responsibility
for the nation’s economic troubles. “Of distresses, such as now pervade the mass of
the community,” noted the
Quarterly Review
, “small indeed is the part which parliaments or governments either create or cure.”
Certainly Liverpool’s ministers and individual members of the royal family could encourage
more affluent Englishmen to contribute to charitable causes, while the government
cut spending and reduced taxes, in hopes of stimulating business activity. “Every
expedient should be used to reduce the expenses of Government, and lessen the burdens
of the people,” urged the editors of
The Times
of London, “in order that they may be put in good humour … The diminution of the
public burdens must and ought at all events to take place, whatever other measure
may ensue.”

Across the Atlantic, the American press foresaw trouble for Britain if the harvest
failed. In a September 10 editorial, the
Daily National Intelligencer
informed its readers that as bad as the summer had been for American farmers, “the
season has been even more unfavorable to agriculture in Europe than in this country.”
And if the poorer classes of Britain were stalked by hunger, at a time when the rest
of British society lived in relative comfort, “the consequences of a scarcity will
be terrible indeed.”