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

manufactured goods. The same logic dampened the spending
     of middle-class consumers as well, which exacerbated the trade recession.
    Parliament, meanwhile, kept howling for the government to cut spending and reduce
     taxes now that the war had come to a successful conclusion. “The main root of the
     evil is in the taxes,” grumbled a typical landowner, and hundreds of petitions poured
     into Parliament to abolish the income tax which had been passed as a wartime emergency
     measure. “Economy is more the order of the day than war ever was,” complained Lord
     Castlereagh in early 1816. “Endless debates upon economy and a sour, discontented
     temper among our friends.” It was, Castlereagh informed the Duke of Wellington, “one
     of the most disagreeable political experiences through which he had ever passed.”
     The foreign secretary found it necessary to trim his European policies to fit a British
     public reluctant to spend any money in peacetime on continental affairs. As one observer
     has noted, “With Napoléon safely locked away in Saint Helena, the great majority of
     English people were completely indifferent to what went on in Europe.”
    Parliament did, however, manage to find funds for the wedding of Princess Charlotte
     of Wales, the Prince Regent’s only legitimate child (and therefore the heir apparent),
     and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who were married in London on May 2. In the spring
     of 1816, Charlotte enjoyed far more popularity with the British public than her father,
     especially after she rejected an arranged marriage with the Prince of Orange, who
     was nearly as dissolute as the Prince Regent. The House of Commons granted the couple
     an income of 60,000 pounds sterling per year, plus 40,000 pounds for furnishing their
     house, an additional 10,000 pounds for the princess’s wardrobe, and another 10,000
     pounds for her new jewelry. (One disgruntled critic pointed out that Saxe-Coburg would
     “drain the people of England of a sum more than eight times as much as the President
     of the United States of America receives from the people of that country, for attending
     to all their affairs, and presiding as the Chief Magistrate of a vast and free country,
     containing ten millions of people.”) The gifts may have compensated Charlotte for
     the enmity of her father; it was said that the Prince Regent disliked her primarily
     because she was the daughter of his wife.
    Four days later, a riot broke out in the town of Bridport, in West Dorset. Angered
     by the combination of high rural unemployment and a fifty percent increase in the
     price of wheat since January, a mob smashed the windows of several bakers and millers.
     On May 16, a similar disturbance occurred more than 200 miles away in Bury St. Edmunds,
     forcing the sheriff of Suffolk to rush to London to beg the home secretary for troops.
    Disorder quickly spread throughout East Anglia. The population of the region had swelled
     during wartime; now the return of demobilized soldiers coincided with the demise of
     the cottage spinning industry to produce widespread joblessness. In some villages,
     the unemployment rate reached 50 percent. For those fortunate enough to find work,
     wages sometimes sank to the pitifully low rate of three to four shillings per week.
     The rioters typically demanded higher wages and cheaper food—wheat at half a crown
     a bushel, and a pound of choice meat at fourpence—and often targeted labor-saving
     farm machinery, such as threshing machines, for destruction.
    One group of demonstrators in Norfolk, reportedly numbering about fifteen hundred,
     armed themselves with bludgeons studded with short iron spikes, and hoisted a flag
     with the legend “Bread or Blood” before smashing the windows of shops and the homes
     of the gentry. They wrecked farm machinery and broke into mills and carried away sacks
     of flour, some of which (in a fit of absence of mind) they dumped into the river.
     A mob in