6.

THE LOST SUMMER

“A belief begins to prevail among the many in all countries that there is something more than natural in the present state of the weather…”

A SEEMINGLY ENDLESS series of storms struck Ireland in July. “The month was, without, perhaps, the exception of a single day, a continuity of showers of hail or rain, and at the same time very cold,” reported The Times of London. “A great blight in the wheat crop, particularly in Wicklow and Tipperary. The rain was so severe that scarcely any corn was left standing.”

In the summer of 1816, the Irish economy was struggling to adjust to the short-term demands of peacetime and the long-term effects of five decades of economic growth. Between 1765 and 1815, prices of the agricultural goods Ireland produced—primarily wheat, oats, pork, beef, and butter—more than doubled. During the first part of this period, much of the demand for Irish foodstuffs came from the British and French colonies in the West Indies, facilitated by the increasing volume of trans-Atlantic shipping. In the latter years, trade with Britain flourished to provide food for the expanding population of factory workers in England and Scotland; between 1778 and 1798, the value of Ireland’s exports (including linen, its main industrial product) shipped across the Irish Sea quadrupled. The Napoleonic Wars brought even more prosperity to Ireland, as the British government sought food for its armies while the normal supplies of agricultural produce from the Continent were cut off.

Rising food prices led to the cultivation of ever-greater quantities of land throughout Ireland. Landlords drained boglands and planted crops on mountainsides that were only marginally productive. As in England, much of this expansion was carried out with borrowed funds. So long as prices remained high, the benefits outweighed the costs, but Irish landlords, like their English counterparts, carried an increasing load of debt.

Ireland’s expanding economy also contributed to a substantial increase in population, as the island’s birthrate rose and the death rate fell. In 1767, Ireland’s population totaled 2.5 million; by 1816 it neared 6 million. A disproportionate share of this growth occurred in the poorer classes, and primarily in rural areas.

In the early nineteenth century, more than 80 percent of the Irish population depended on agriculture for a living. Nearly all of the land was owned by the Anglo-Irish gentry, who spent the bulk of their profits building grand houses on vast estates. Overwhelmingly Protestant, the great landowners dominated Irish political, economic, and social affairs. They often served as the only employer in the area surrounding their estates, hiring artisans, servants, and day laborers; sometimes they also owned the grain mills to which their tenants would bring their harvest. Tradition demanded that the gentry lighten the burdens of their neighbors by providing occasional entertainment to their community, and so they hosted parties and organized hunting and fishing expeditions; as their expenses mounted, many landlords found themselves sinking even deeper in debt. Tradition also expected the gentry to fulfill the social obligations of the propertied classes, notably by providing charity to the poor in times of need, but in early-nineteenth-century Ireland these duties were increasingly ignored.

Just below the landlords on the social scale came the substantial tenant farmers, who lived comfortably and displayed their wealth through a variety of household furnishings and tailored clothing (waistcoats, knee britches, warm stockings, and sturdy boots). If a prosperous farmer was a Protestant, he might hope that his son would rise into the legal or medical profession, or perhaps obtain a position in the Anglican Church. Catholics, on the other hand, were prohibited by the penal laws (passed by Parliament a century earlier) from attending British universities or serving in Parliament, and were likewise excluded from careers in the civil service, the law, or the armed forces. Hence the priesthood or a position as a schoolteacher seemed the only avenues for their advancement.

The great majority of Ireland’s rural population—probably between 75 and 80 percent—resided in the poorer classes of small tenant farmers, cottiers, and laborers. They typically lived in mud cabins, the meanest of which consisted of “a single room, a hole for a window with a board in it, the door generally off the hinges, a wicker-basket with a hole in the bottom or an old butter-tub stuck at one corner of the thatch for a chimney, the pig, as a matter of course, inside the cottage, and an extensive manufacture of manure … [taking place] on the floor.” Straw often sufficed for beds; the only cooking utensil a large iron pot; and stumps of fir trees for chairs. The walls and roof usually consisted of “rough stones and clay mortar; a few rough sticks, procured generally out of the bogs, which serve to support a bad covering of straw; sometimes interlined with heath for want of a sufficiency of straw, and seldom renewed while it is possible to inhabit it.” Those slightly better off might live in a four-room cabin, with a handmade table and wooden kitchenware, and a wardrobe of serviceable, albeit well-worn and patched, clothing. Their less fortunate brethren owned no overcoats at all, and women and children went barefoot all year-round.

Opportunities for members of different social classes to mix were limited primarily to public occasions such as markets, fairs, feast days, weddings, or county funerals. Even during these events, however, it proved difficult for the wealthier Irish to communicate with the poor, since most of the laboring class (semiliterate at best) still spoke only Irish, and most of the landed classes spoke English—increasingly the language of politics and business. The bane of public gatherings in the early nineteenth century was the faction fight, an organized brawl in which two opposing sides assaulted each other wielding clubs, blackthorn sticks, stones, or, less frequently, swords. The factions might have divided along family lines, or parishes, or by trade, or religion; motives for fighting included arguments over property, family vendettas, personal insults or perceived slights, tensions between competing economic groups, or religious antagonism. A few notorious fights involved several thousand combatants; most numbered several hundred. Enough men died or suffered serious injuries during these brawls that the Catholic Church stoutly condemned the custom and threatened to excommunicate anyone who joined in. Nonetheless, landlords sometimes encouraged faction fights as a safety valve, to allow their laborers and tenants to vent their frustrations and anger on other members of the lower class.

Irish diets improved along with the economy, although the rising standard of living set the stage for future disaster. Laborers and the poorest farmers subsisted entirely on potatoes and water, and occasionally a bit of salt fish or meal; those who could afford a more varied diet typically added milk, then oatmeal and wheat bread. Whiskey, beer, and tobacco also were relatively inexpensive. But potatoes remained the foundation of the Irish peasantry’s diet; indeed, it was one of the main causes of the increase in population in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spanish merchants had introduced potatoes to Europe in the late sixteenth century, but widespread public resistance to their cultivation and consumption restricted their use to animal fodder for more than a century. (Some Europeans feared the ugly tubers were the fruit of the devil, while others scorned any food that grew under the soil.) By the late eighteenth century, however, physicians and government officials recognized their exceptional nutritional value (high in potassium and vitamin C), and potatoes became a staple of the Europeans’ diet, particularly among the poor. Even a child could cultivate them, and they required little effort to cook or store. No wonder that Adam Smith, the renowned Scottish philosopher and classical economist, concluded that potatoes were “particularly suitable to the health of the human constitution.”

Hence the population of Ireland embarked upon a dramatic increase, as did much of western and central Europe. Potatoes provided significantly more nutrients than the Irish peasantry’s previous grain-based diets, and since a family of five or six could subsist for a year on the potatoes grown on a few acres of land, Irish peasants began to marry earlier and produce more children. And since a potato diet mitigated the prevalence or effects of many of the diseases that afflicted the Irish peasantry—scurvy, dysentery, tuberculosis—the infant mortality rate and the overall death rate both declined.

Prosperity brought new complications in its wake, however. As the Irish population swelled, and the price of agricultural products rose, the value of land soared as well. Many landowners raised their rents accordingly; others evicted their tenants and enclosed their lands as pasture for even more profitable sheep or cattle. Tenants who found themselves unable to pay the higher rents were thrown off their land, and a steady stream of dispossessed farmers headed for the cities—by 1816, Dublin’s population had grown to about 200,000 residents—where they joined unemployed rural laborers who had lost their jobs to farm machinery or the new water-powered textile looms in the linen industry. Still, most of the unemployed remained in the countryside. And many of those who did have jobs were underemployed; in an average year, by one estimate, nearly half a million Irish were employed for six months or less.

Parliament’s recent decision to bind Ireland more tightly to Britain created additional problems. The Act of Union of 1800, which established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, disbanded the Irish Parliament and provided seats for Irish representatives in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. This removed one of the few reasons for the Protestant gentry to spend any time whatsoever in Ireland; accordingly many of them settled in England and became absentee landlords. Distance diminished their sense of responsibility for the welfare of their tenants—it was said that they traded their Irish sympathies for English prejudices—and in many cases their estates in Ireland deteriorated from neglect. For its part, Parliament preferred to ignore Irish affairs altogether whenever possible. Since their only representatives were Protestant members of the propertied class, the Irish people at large were left with no voice in their government at all.

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.”

Whenever he sought a respite from writing, Byron found congenial company at the Château de Coppet, the salon of Madame Germaine de Staël. Madame de Staël was perhaps the only woman in the world who could match Byron for notoriety in 1816. The daughter of Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who achieved fame as Louis XVI’s finance minister, Anne Louise Germaine grew up in the same sort of freethinking intellectual atmosphere as Mary Wollstonecraft. Her mother, Suzanne Curchod (a former lover of Edward Gibbon), hosted the leading salon in pre-Revolutionary Paris, a gathering place for writers, artists, scientists, and diplomats. Anne Louise Germaine’s marriage at the age of twenty to the Swedish ambassador to France, Baron de Staël von Holstein, quickly deteriorated, and Madame de Staël spent the remainder of her life studying, writing, and hosting her own salon. Her vocal support for individual liberties and a constitutional monarchy earned her the enmity of both radicals and royalists in revolutionary France; she was banished from Paris in turn by the Committee for Public Safety in 1795, by the Directory the following year, and in 1803 by Napoléon, who subsequently exiled her altogether from France.

After extensive travels through Europe—particularly Germany and Italy—Madame de Staël found refuge at her family estate at Coppet, on the northern shore of Lake Geneva. There she assembled a new coterie of scholars, politicians, and writers: English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Greek. It was “the general headquarters of European thought,” wrote the French novelist Stendhal, “the Estates General of European opinion … Voltaire never saw anything like it. Six hundred of the most distinguished people would gather on the shores of the lake: wit, wealth, the most exalted ranks came there seeking pleasure in the salon of the celebrated lady.”

Among those gathered at Coppet was Charles Victor de Bonstetten, a Swiss writer and philosopher who would subsequently publish an influential study of the effect of climate on human society—L’homme du midi et l’homme du nord: ou l’influence du climat, a topic that also interested Madame de Staël—and the economist Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi. Already famous for his multivolume history of the Italian republics, Sismondi was studying the deleterious effects of unpredictable disturbances (such as an exceptionally cold and wet summer) on the economy of Britain, increasingly vulnerable to such shocks due to its dependence on exports and the whims of international commerce.

On a Saturday afternoon in July 1816, Byron arrived at Coppet for dinner. As soon as he entered the room, all eyes turned toward him, staring “as at some outlandish beast in a raree-show. One of the ladies fainted, and the rest looked as if his Satanic Majesty had been among them.” Madame de Staël, immune to scandal and quite unperturbed, gave Byron a warm and gracious welcome. Between their discussions of literature, she peppered him with detailed questions about his personal life, and particularly his troubled marriage. Byron, who was practicing his melancholy public persona while pretending to be devoted to his estranged wife, took no offense at her intrusive queries. “I believe Madame de Staël did her utmost to bring about a reconciliation between us,” he confided to a friend. “She was the best creature in the world.”

Byron returned to Coppet frequently over the next several months. “She has made Coppet as agreeable as society and talent can make any place on earth,” he told his editor. The celebrated hostess “ventured to protect me when all London was crying out against me on the separation, and behaved courageously and kindly; indeed, Madame de S defended me when few dared to do so, and I have always remembered it.”

In late July, Shelley and Mary Godwin invited Byron to accompany them on an expedition into the Alps: to Chamonix, Mont Blanc (the highest peak in western Europe), and the immense glacier known as the Mer de Glace. Byron declined, perhaps because Claire Clairmont—who had informed him she was pregnant with his child—was also going. The company set out on July 21, and as they approached the mountains Mary noticed that the Arve River, which would become the symbol of power in Shelley’s poem, “Mont Blanc,” was so swollen by recent rains that “the cornfields on each side are covered with the inundation.”

They reached Chamonix two days later, Mary and Percy registering as man and wife when they checked into a hotel. But when they set out to get a better view of the mountains, the skies opened again. “The rain continued in torrents,” Mary noted in her journal, “—we were wetted to the skin so that when [we had] ascended more than half way we resolved to turn back—As we descended Shelley went before and tripping he fell upon his knee—this added to the weakness occasioned by a blow on his ascent” and he fainted. They did manage to view the Mer de Glace the following day. “This is the most desolate place in the world,” Mary concluded, and filed away the awe-inspiring sight to use in her “ghost” story. When the rains resumed, they decided to end their expedition prematurely.

A week later, Lake Geneva was struck by a storm which Lady Caroline Capel described as “a Hurricane of Thunder, Lightning & Wind … that beat any thing I ever heard—The scene of desolation at Vevey was dreadfull, The Lower part of the Town was entirely inundated the Lake having risen with uncommon fury to an unusual height—Many Houses washed down & Trees torn up by the roots, the poor people running about in confusion wringing their hands & crying.” As the lake rose seven feet above its normal level, nervous residents could see dead animals floating downstream on the Rhone. Situated on a mountainside, Lady Capel’s château escaped the flood, “but felt the wind most frightfully—It tore up a large tree in the Garden & threatened to bring the House about our Ears.”

*   *   *

IN Virginia, the drought persisted through July and into August. In the absence of any reliable system of artificial irrigation, Jefferson feared that his corn crop would be ruined; the United States, he told a friend, was experiencing “seasons the most adverse to agriculture which had ever been known.” At Montpelier, where President Madison spent his days and often part of his evenings reviewing official correspondence, the corn and tobacco fields were stunted.

But in New England, temperatures had moderated, reviving hopes for a bountiful harvest. After the frosts of early July, local newspapers carried stories of dangerously depleted stores of corn and grain. “On account of the extreme backwardness of the season, and severe drought, the prospects of the farmer are distressing almost beyond precedent,” claimed the Albany Argus on July 19. “The grass in many districts does not promise a quarter of a crop; corn is very poor, and it is fearful that but very little of it will come to maturity.… Some of the pastures are completely dried up, and present the appearance of a brown heath.” All in all, the Argus concluded, “the picture of distress is very much heightened by the gloomy forebodings of an increased and prolonged scarcity.” Not surprisingly, merchants responded with a bout of panic buying, forcing up the price of grain and flour.

Several newspapers in New Hampshire and Maine recommended that farmers simply give up on their stunted hay crops and replant their fields, either with grains or new grass in hopes of a better harvest in the fall. “It is acknowledged on all hands,” proclaimed the Brattleboro Reporter, “that the first crop of grass has been very light; perhaps not more than half the usual quantity. To make up for this deficiency it is recommended to farmers to plow down as much ground as convenient as soon as possible and broadcast with oats and Indian corn,” which the editor hoped would be ready for harvest by the end of September—assuming the rest of the summer remained reasonably warm. In the meantime, livestock suffered from the scarcity of fodder, and cattle were turned loose in woods or even in towns to find their own forage. Farmers improvised as best they could, substituting the dried tops of potatoes, or even straw thatch off the roofs of outbuildings to feed their stock.

By the first week of August, however, fears of a general famine had subsided. According to the optimistic forecast of the New Hampshire Patriot, “rye is said to be better than for some years past, [and] wheat and other early grains look well and are nearly ready for harvest.” While corn remained “more backward than usual,” it had recovered so rapidly after several weeks of warm weather that the Patriot’s editor hoped “there may be great crops even of the latter.”

Farmers found time to turn their attention to politics instead. By all accounts, the most controversial issue in the summer of 1816 was the size of the federal budget, and especially the Compensation Act—the pay raise that congressmen had voted themselves before adjourning in April. Now that the nation was once again at peace, critics complained that the Madison administration and Congress should have cut federal spending dramatically; instead, it remained at levels they considered extravagant and wasteful, especially for a Democratic-Republican administration ostensibly committed to a frugal government. “It would astonish the plain honest farmer to go to Washington and witness, with his own eyes, the extraordinary and unaccountable waste and profusion that prevails,” argued the editors of the pro-Federalist Maryland Gazette. “Unnumbered millions” of dollars had been wasted, claimed the Gazette, most of which had found its way into the pockets of “the inferior tribe of political pimps and panders [sic]” who infested the nation’s capital.

At a time of economic troubles, when “commerce is languishing, manufactures are at a stand, the currency embarrassed, taxes heavy, and the people in difficulties,” fiscal conservatives were stunned that congressmen had voted to double their own pay; their new salary of $1,500 per year was more than twice that of a skilled worker who worked six days a week, albeit less than the wages of some government clerks. In one state after another, Federalist and Democratic-Republican voters alike vented their outrage toward their representatives. They held public meetings to denounce the Compensation Act; grand juries condemned it; state legislatures passed resolutions censuring Congress; and in Georgia, a crowd actually burned in effigy their representatives who had voted for the pay raise.

“There has never been an instance before of so unanimous an opinion of the people, and that through every state in the Union,” concluded Thomas Jefferson. Veteran congressman Richard Johnson of Kentucky contended that the Compensation Bill had aroused more opposition than any other measure since George Washington first took office, including “the alien or sedition laws, the quasi war with France, the internal taxes of 1798, the embargo, the late war with Great Britain, the Treaty of Ghent, or any other one measure of the Government.” Critics issued dire warnings that the United States was headed down the same path of corruption and extravagance that had destroyed republican Rome. In a portent of things to come, early congressional elections held during the summer in New York State resulted in the defeat of nearly all the incumbents who ran for reelection.

No one expected similar excitement in the presidential election campaign of 1816. Each party chose its presidential candidate through a caucus of its congressional representatives; although the caucus system was increasingly viewed as a relic of an age of gentleman politicians, the first national nominating convention lay eight years in the future. The Federalists, nearly extinct outside of their New England base, selected (without noticeable enthusiasm) Senator Rufus King of New York to carry their banner. King, who had served in the Constitutional Convention and filled a variety of political and diplomatic positions with distinction, had no desire to be president, and grudgingly agreed to run only after several weeks of soul-searching. The Democratic-Republican caucus turned into a more contentious affair, as supporters of Secretary of War William Harris Crawford of Georgia attempted to pry the nomination from the heir apparent of the Virginia dynasty, Secretary of State James Monroe. President Madison, as titular head of the party, refused to publicly endorse either candidate. Eventually Monroe triumphed by the unexpectedly narrow margin of eleven votes.

James Monroe evoked a variety of reactions within his party, not all of them positive. He certainly looked the part of a president, especially compared to Madison. While Madison was short, slight, prim, and bald, Monroe was six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a rugged physique. Those who met him got the impression of great physical strength and endurance. Like Madison, Monroe was born along the Rappahannock in central Virginia; both were members of the Revolutionary generation; and both swore allegiance to Jeffersonian political principles. But even Madison’s opponents acknowledged the depth of the president’s intellect, while Monroe seemed “awkward and diffident; and without grace either in manner or appearance.”

“A mind neither rapid nor rich,” wrote Virginia attorney William Wirt of Monroe (an interesting characterization, considering that Monroe would appoint Wirt attorney general in 1817). “Madison is quick, temperate and clear,” noted a prominent New York politician. “Monroe slow, passionate and dull. Madison’s word may always be relied on … I am sorry to say I cannot bear the same testimony to Monroe.” Aaron Burr, living in exile in Europe, dismissed Monroe as “stupid and illiterate … improper, hypocritical, and indecisive.” To some critics, Monroe seemed a complete nonentity. One contemptuous Federalist journal expressed amazement that the Democratic-Republican party would nominate “this ridiculous man of straw—this thing—this nothing, as a suitable candidate, by way of insult to their fellow citizens, as if such a compound of negatives in their hands could stand up [as] the future President of this country.”

So the presidential campaign began.

*   *   *

BEGINNING in late July, clerics in English churches offered public prayers for a change in the weather. Clearly something had gone terribly wrong somewhere; the persistent rain and cold could not be explained by the normal pattern of weather variation. “A belief begins to prevail among the many in all countries that there is something more than natural in the present state of the weather,” noted the seventy-three-year-old British politician Lord Glenbervie during a tour of France in the first week of August.

New spots had appeared on the sun, reviving speculation about their responsibility for the disastrous weather. A physician in Lyon claimed to have evidence that the sun was ill and the moon was dying. On the other hand, the London Chronicle argued that the sun’s influence was waning (as evidenced by the dark spots) while the moon’s was waxing; the confluence of these developments, the editors argued, “are the conceived cause of the backwardness of the season, from its accustomed heat and vegetation; as also of continued rains, with an unusual swelling of rivers.” A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine suggested that the sunspots were actually small objects hovering between the sun and Earth. Although these objects presumably would cast a shadow of “a kind of cone of a certain length, according to the diameter of the obstructing body, and its distance from the luminary [i.e., the sun],” he claimed that they had little effect on Earth’s temperature. Since the obstruction would simply radiate whatever heat it received, instead of absorbing or consuming it, “the heat beyond, that is, toward the earth, would [still] be as great as if there were no impediment.”

Never one to miss an opportunity to mock conventional opinion, British satirist William Hone blamed Napoléon Bonaparte for the weather. In his poem, “Napoléon and the Spots in the Sun; or, The Regent’s Waltz…” Hone claimed that the former emperor had escaped from Saint Helena and invaded the sun; the spots were simply the different parts of his body. As revenge for his defeat at Waterloo, Napoléon “has occasion’d this change in the weather, / Stopp’d the sun-shine and drench’d us with rain, / And made hot and cold come together! / It is he that kept backward the Spring, / And turn’d Summer into November.” Hone proposed to thwart the plot by catapulting the Prince Regent sunward into space so he could defeat Napoléon in hand-to-hand combat.

At the end of July, the price of wheat rose sharply on London markets. A British businessmen who toured the counties of Devon and Somerset to ascertain the state of the crops reported that “the wheat crop has suffered a little from the late frosts,” but he felt confident it would recover, given good weather for the remainder of the summer. “The hay crop,” on the other hand, “has certainly been greatly injured by the rain, not only that which has been cut, but that which is growing also.” Merchants and speculators, he concluded, were driving up the price of wheat by buying all the high-quality grain—both domestic and foreign—they could obtain, in expectation of an inferior harvest.

“Have you been apprehensive of a second Flood?” Lady Noel, Byron’s mother-in-law, asked her daughter, Annabella, in a letter on July 21. “Hay spoilt, Corn laid, and all the cc & cs of farming distresses.” Several days later, another severe storm lashed crops in Norfolk. “The rain descended in such torrents, accompanied by large hailstones, after a few peals of thunder, as to prostrate the heavy crops of wheat and barley in many places of this county,” reported one observer. “In some villages the ditches and lanes were so full of water, that boats might have been rowed in them.” Elsewhere in northern Britain, thunderstorms and hail produced landslides and floods that washed away more crops—at least one worker was reported killed trying to protect his hay—and left water four feet deep in the streets.

Britons who traveled to the Continent found conditions even worse there. “I thought I was to leave all grumbling behind me in England,” noted a British tourist in Amsterdam, “but here the good folks are ten times worse, for nobody is pleased: it is quite shocking—poverty prevailing, and the country drowning: rains have been dreadful; in short, we have not had one day without rain since our arrival.” In Burgundy, the rain and cold had left the vineyards “in such a state, that the vintage is expected to be wholly unproductive.” In the wine-making region of northwest Switzerland, Lake Bienne overflowed its banks, inundating a vast tract of countryside. Much of the Bernese Oberland remained under snow, forcing cattle to remain in their stables (at considerable expense to the farmers) instead of grazing in the pastures. The Rems River in southwestern Germany flooded on more than a dozen separate occasions, ruining the crops of grain and hay in the surrounding fields.

In late July, a procession of eighty young women paraded through the streets of Paris, holding lighted candles and praying to St. Genevieve—the patron saint of the city—for drier weather, but the rain did not stop. By the end of the month, the rainfall totals for July for most of France, parts of Belgium, Holland, and western Germany, southern Ireland, and southwestern England were more than three times normal.

Incessant rain and gloomy skies confined Parisians to their homes and indoor amusements. Their mood darkened further with the flocks of British visitors who swarmed into the city that summer. It was the first summer in nearly a decade that Britain and France had not been at war, and English sightseers took full advantage of the opportunity to cross the Channel; one journalist estimated there were twenty-nine thousand Englishmen in Paris in midsummer. Even though their French hosts appreciated the British willingness to spend considerable sums during their stay, a national resentment over the presence of Allied occupation troops occasionally surfaced as insults or attacks on British tourists. Parisians did enjoy an opportunity to participate in the festivities surrounding the marriage of the king’s nephew, the Duc de Berry, to Princess Caroline of Naples and Sicily, a direct descendant of Philip V of Spain, the grandson of Louis XIV. Unfortunately for the princess, married life did little to domesticate the duke, who was notorious for both his philandering and his hot temper.

King Louis XVIII spent much of the summer deciding what to do about the intractable Ultra-Royalist legislature—the Chambre introuvable—which had not met since the end of April. Allied representatives in Paris, notably the Duke of Wellington, favored a dissolution of the chamber followed by new elections, and hopefully a more moderate assembly. The Allies suspected that the current deputies would never vote enough new taxes to pay France’s war indemnities to their governments, the first installment of which was due in November 1816. They also feared that the continued heavy-handed repression of antimonarchist elements would invite a popular backlash and lead to a new round of civil strife. Louis’ minister of police, Élie Decazes, a moderate royalist, joined the Allies’ campaign to persuade the king to dismiss the legislature, in part because he felt a more conciliatory chamber would convince the Allies to end their occupation earlier. Since the restoration, Louis had grown quite dependent upon Decazes (whom he referred to as “my dear boy”) both to handle the daily administrative details of domestic policy and to keep him entertained with salacious gossip about well-known figures in Paris, which Decazes obtained through an extensive network of spies and informers. By the middle of August, Wellington and Decazes had worn down the king’s resistance, and Louis agreed to dissolve the chamber.

That solved only one of the French government’s problems. The nation’s finances remained in a desperate state. Like the rest of Europe, the French economy remained primarily agricultural, and by the end of July 1816 it seemed clear that the coming harvest would be a disaster. That meant Louis’ government would be hard-pressed to collect its normal tax revenues, much less impose new taxes, and that spending on emergency relief measures would almost certainly soar. Since the national budget already was badly out of balance, the government could meet its obligations only by assuming a new foreign loan.

And the price of bread continued to climb. In late July, textile workers in the town of Castres, in southern France, rioted to demand cheaper bread. The mayor called out the national guard to suppress the demonstrations, but when many members of the guard decided to support the rioters, the authorities had no choice but to grant the workers’ demands. To prevent further outbursts of violence, King Louis issued an ordinance stating that “grain, meal of every kind, bread, and sea biscuit, may be imported free of duty, either by sea or land, till otherwise ordered.”

More than a year after Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo, the French economy was still struggling to recover from the lengthy wars. Nearly two decades of conflict had disarranged commerce, increased taxation, and consumed vast amounts of manpower. Resources that might have been used in productive enterprises had vanished on battlefields from Spain to Moscow. Nor could the French economy transform itself overnight from a wartime footing to peacetime production; the transition would need time, as businesses reallocated capital to the manufacture of civilian goods. “And the necessary consequence,” noted one contemporary observer, “is that many of the labourers, to whom these capitals had given employment [during wartime], are thrown out of work, and wander idle in our streets, because no man hath hired them.”

French ports that had been crippled by the British blockade sank into depression. French manufactures—which had flourished during the war in the absence of British competition—could not survive the flood of cheap British imports once peace returned. The French linen industry, a major supplement to the income of farm families who spun the flax and wove the fabric in their homes, collapsed under a wave of inexpensive Irish linens and British cotton goods. (In 1810, Napoléon reportedly had offered a reward of a million francs to anyone who could invent a mechanical loom to produce linen, but no one did.)

Belgium, the German states, Switzerland, and the Netherlands faced similar difficulties. Both the Belgian cotton industry, based in Ghent, and its Swiss counterpart succumbed to British textile imports woven on machines that reduced production costs far below those of their continental competitors. As European textile firms laid off workers, demand for manufactured goods declined further. The rising price of bread added to the distress, especially among working families who spent half their income on bread in normal times. No wonder a crowd of Belgian workingmen made a public display of burning a mountain of English textiles, particularly shawls and handkerchiefs, at the corn market in Ghent in late July.

Even though the importation of inexpensive British goods exacerbated the unemployment problem on the Continent, the British economy was suffering its own travails in the summer of 1816. The resumption of trade between Britain and the Continent in 1815 led British manufacturers to produce more than European consumers—impoverished by war and taxation—could purchase, and so a glut of British goods sat on the docks for months. They were sold only at a substantial loss; so while they undercut continental manufactures, and forced layoffs in the French and German textile industries, they brought no profit to British firms and led those employers, too, to reduce their workforce.

In short, Britain had too many workers and not enough work. “Instead of crowding our ports with ships and goods, and filling our streets with the bustle of trade,” noted one perceptive observer, peace had produced “a calm, a stillness, as to trade, truly gloomy.” The Bank of England’s decision to sharply contract the amount of money in circulation only deepened the slump in trade. By the summer of 1816, employment on the London docks had fallen from 1,500 men to a mere 500 as commerce slowed to a trickle. On one particularly quiet day, the Customs House recorded no entry for either import or export, “a circumstance without parallel in the annals of that extensive establishment.”

Iron prices plunged by more than half; artisans sold their tools to buy bread. Up to 10,000 servants reportedly lacked employment. For months, members of the opposition had been complaining in Parliament about the numbers of beggars tramping throughout Britain—over 30,000 in London alone. “Scarcely a day passes without bringing one, and generally more, beggars to my door,” declared William Cobbett, a leading advocate of parliamentary reform. “They swarm over the country like vermin upon their own bodies; and are produced by causes nearly similar.”

Small wonder that investors displayed a marked lack of enthusiasm to buy British government securities, but The Times of London feared “something peculiar” was at work in the financial markets. “When no other sufficient cause can be assigned for low spirits in individuals,” The Times noted, “it is generally thought to be unpleasant weather that produces them: but … we apprehend it is the low spirits of the nation that occasion the depressed state of the funds.” Or perhaps the unpleasant weather played upon the spirits of investors, as well.

Aside from a few minor disturbances in the Midlands and northern England, workers still hesitated to engage in violent protest. But the ruling class could see trouble ahead. On July 29, a distinguished company gathered at the City of London Tavern for a public meeting to revive the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor, a society originally founded in 1812 by a group of philanthropists including William Wilberforce, the evangelical politician best known for his campaign to end Britain’s participation in the international slave trade. The July 29 meeting was chaired by the Duke of York, the king’s fourth son and commander in chief of the British army; others present included two of York’s younger brothers, the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Cambridge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of London.

The purpose of the association was to encourage “conservative philanthropy”—private donations to alleviate the plight of the poor while rejecting any government responsibility for their condition. The organizers planned to spend the evening in a dignified discussion of “the present distressed state of the lower classes, and the most effectual means of extending relief to them,” but almost as soon as the meeting commenced, radicals among the audience (led by Lord Cochrane, a famous British admiral and vocal proponent of parliamentary reform) began calling for stronger measures by the government. York could not maintain order long enough to conclude a rational discussion of the issues, and the meeting soon deteriorated into disorganized squabbling. “No newspaper can describe the meeting at the City of London Tavern last Monday,” wrote reformer Francis Place to a friend. “Many years have passed since I witnessed anything so exhilirating.” As York slipped out of the tavern under a shower of catcalls, the group concluded its business by proclaiming that while “it be impossible for any Association to attempt the general relief of such difficulties”—nor would the government attempt to do so—it expected that “those who are able to afford the means of relief will contribute their utmost endeavours to alleviate these sufferings.”

It would be a daunting task, especially as the cold, wet weather threw more agricultural laborers out of work. In the town of Barnet, just north of London, scores of unemployed haymakers gathered day after day in the marketplace. “It is impossible to conceive the distress in which these poor people (a majority of them itinerant strangers) have been reduced by the late incessant rains,” wrote one witness; many of them were “literally starving.” When a passing gentleman saw about 140 of the desperate men standing together, he ordered them all to be supplied with bread, and told them to come back tomorrow for more. The next day, more than three hundred appeared, all of whom he fed. The third day there were nearly eight hundred; they, too, received bread, and a quarter pound of cheese from the parish.

Londoners who assembled outside St. James’s Palace on the evening of July 23 received cake instead. In the season’s second royal wedding, William Frederick, the Duke of Gloucester, a nephew of the king, married his cousin Princess Mary, one of the king’s daughters. (Contemporaries noted that it seemed a suitable union, since both parties had been born in the same year—1776.) King George did not attend his daughter’s wedding, of course, although Queen Charlotte appeared near the end of the festivities. The ceremony featured an altar adorned with a spectacular display of gold plate, including chalices made of solid gold. After the bride and groom rode away in a carriage, the crowd—according to custom—was treated to pieces of wedding cake.

The wedding may have cheered Englishmen still saddened by the death on July 7 of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the greatest playwright of his age. While still in his twenties, Sheridan authored two brilliant comedies, The Rivals and The School for Scandal, and then wrote very little for the rest of his life, perhaps fearful he could not replicate his early success. He served in Parliament as a leading member of the Whig Party, earning a reputation as a remarkably persuasive speaker and an incorruptible politician (although his private moral standards were not as strict). Sheridan also managed and owned London’s most famous playhouse, the Drury Lane Theatre, until it was destroyed in 1809 by fire, despite a curtain made of iron and a large reservoir of water on the roof for just such emergencies. Sheridan, who calmly watched his theater burn (“A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside,” he reportedly remarked to a bystander), never recovered from the financial loss. He subsequently quarreled with his patron and longtime crony, the Prince Regent, began drinking heavily, and died deeply in debt.

Wrote Byron:

A mighty Spirit is eclipsed—a Power

Hath pass’d from day to darkness—to whose hour

Of light no likeness is bequeath’d—no name,

Focus at once of all the rays of Fame!

The flash of Wit—the bright Intelligence,

The beam of Song,—the blaze of Eloquence,

Set with their Sun—but still have left behind

The enduring produce of immortal Mind …