Read Online The Year Without Summer by William K. Klingaman, Nicholas P. Klingaman - Free Book Online

public, “that nothing
     far short of a miracle can bring about a recovery from his afflicting malady.” For
     the remainder of his life, George III resided in a suite of thirteen rooms in Windsor
     Castle. Although the king initially enjoyed walking on the terrace around the castle,
     by 1816 he was virtually blind and no longer ventured outside, although his coterie
     of attendants still dressed him every day for dinner (roast beef on Sundays) at 1:30
     in the afternoon.
    The Prince Regent, meanwhile, had achieved a well-deserved reputation as an indolent
     gambler and womanizer who ran up immense debts. One newspaper estimated that by March
     1815, the Prince Regent had accumulated debts worth 1,480,600 pounds sterling during
     his lifetime. He also was known as a heavy drinker in an age when London gentlemen
     routinely consumed four or five bottles of port in a single evening. Not surprisingly,
     he suffered severely from gout. Whenever he wished to ride a horse, the Prince Regent
     sat in a special chair fitted with rollers, which was wheeled up a ramp to a platform;
     then a horse was passed underneath, and the prince was lowered gently into the saddle.
    Partly to assuage parliamentary anxieties about his numerous illicit liaisons, and
     partly as the price of a deal with Parliament to pay off part of his debts, the prince
     had married Princess Caroline of Brunswick in 1795. They took an instant dislike to
     each other, and separated soon after the birth of their only child, Charlotte, a year
     later.
    Before he assumed his father’s authority, the prince had befriended Whig politicians,
     largely because they were not his father’s friends. Once he became the Prince Regent,
     however, he aligned himself firmly with the Tory party, and with Liverpool’s ministry
     from 1812. If that did not make the government more popular, the successful prosecution
     of the war against Napoléon did.
    Nevertheless, Liverpool entered 1816 facing a host of problems as Britain made the
     transition from war to a peacetime economy. A trade recession caused in part by the
     termination of wartime contracts forced numerous businesses to cut wages or lay off
     workers, and others to declare bankruptcy. The ranks of the unemployed swelled further
     as the government rapidly demobilized the army, throwing more than a third of a million
     more men into the labor market. “The nation,” wrote one observer, “was in the condition
     of a man who, after struggling with some deadly fever, has crept out of the contest,
     bankrupt of energy.”
    Although British farmers enjoyed a bountiful harvest in 1815, grain prices remained
     relatively high due to the Corn Laws which Parliament had passed at the end of the
     year. (In the early nineteenth century, the British used corn as a generic term for grain.) These measures, hotly debated and greatly resented
     by English liberals at the time, prohibited the importation of foreign wheat unless
     the price of domestic grain fell below a specified price. They were intended to protect
     English landowners, especially those who had brought marginal lands under cultivation
     during the recent war, when Napoléon denied Britain its normal sources of supply on
     the continent. The government feared that if it removed these price supports, grain
     prices would plummet and landowners, tenant farmers, and rural laborers alike would
     suffer ruin. Given that most English voters—and even more certainly most Members of
     Parliament—belonged to the landowning class, repeal of the Corn Laws seemed unlikely
     for the foreseeable future.
    Yet a high price for wheat wrought great hardship on the urban working classes. In
     normal times, a poor laboring family might spend half its meager income on food, primarily
     bread. When harvests failed or other disasters caused the price of grain to rise,
     workers found themselves hard-pressed to purchase enough food to survive, never mind
     spending on clothes or other