The Year Without Summer by William K. Klingaman, Nicholas P. Klingaman Page B

appearance of vegetation.” Conditions improved little in May. “Throughout
     the whole of this month,” noted a report from Midlothian, just south of Edinburgh,
     “the weather has been unusually barren, from a continued cold, sharp, dry wind, generally
     from the north.… The fields, in general, are backward and in great want of warm sun,
     especially the grass and wheat, which is near a month later than ordinary, and are
     weak and unpromising at present.”
    Across most of western and central Europe, spring was lost in the waves of cold weather
     that swept over the continent in April and May. Travelers to Calais in mid-April encountered
     a storm that brought “a considerable quantity of snow” to northern France. In the
     Abruzzo region of central Italy, farms in the higher elevations still had so much
     snow on the ground in late May that farmers could not sow their wheat, and the price
     of grain was rising. There were late frosts in Austria, and the stormy winter and
     cold spring already had created a shortage of grain and higher prices in southwestern
     Germany, as well.
    On May 12, sleet pelted English fields and towns. “Never was there such a backward
     season,” muttered the English reformer and part-time farmer William Cobbett. “The
     extreme changeableness of the weather which has prevailed so long, still continues,”
     reported the Royal Cornwall Gazette. “Every flattering prospect of genial warmth has been quickly succeeded throughout
     the spring, with the reverse of a chilling and searching, or damp atmosphere.” Particularly
     in northern England, oats had “a yellow and unhealthy appearance,” and wheat looked
     so sickly that many farmers simply ploughed up their fields and resowed their lands
     with barley. Pastures and meadows seemed barren and backward. “Such an ungenial season
     has necessarily been unfavorable to all the production of the earth,” concluded the Gazette , “giving the assurance of a late harvest, so full of risk and experience in the northern
     parts.”
    This news did not please Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, an unimaginative, no-nonsense
     Tory who had led His Majesty’s Government since the assassination of his predecessor,
     Spencer Perceval, in 1812. “Led” perhaps was too strong a word; Liverpool, whom Benjamin
     Disraeli later referred to as “the arch-mediocrity,” was the titular head only of
     the Conservative Party. His subordinates, including Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh,
     regularly took turns usurping his authority.
    Royal authority was exercised in 1816 by the Prince Regent, the eldest son of King
     George III, although the king was still alive. Beginning with a brief attack in 1765,
     George III experienced periodic bouts of madness that appear to have been the result
     of porphyria, a rare blood disorder. His symptoms included delusions, hallucinations,
     severe abdominal pains, insomnia, confusion, and muscular weakness. His physicians’
     inability to determine the cause of his illness, and their understandable reluctance
     to hazard a guess about the likelihood of any recovery, had contributed to a constitutional
     crisis when the king suffered a second, prolonged attack in 1788. Parliament waited
     more than six months for George to recover; finally the House of Commons passed a
     Regency Act to transfer authority to the Prince of Wales. But as the Lords debated
     the measure, the king suddenly and unexpectedly recovered, and remained in good health
     until the next attack in 1801. A fifth and final attack in 1810 convinced parliamentary
     leaders to approve another measure to permit the Prince of Wales to rule in place
     of the seventy-two-year-old monarch, although fleeting glimpses of sanity in the first
     year or two kept alive hopes of the king’s eventual recovery.
    By January 1816, his doctors had given up hope. “It is the opinion of the medical
     gentlemen attending him,” read their official statement to the