ABSTRACT
It was a frozen January in the year 1776. A storm had precipitated ‘one of the greatest falls of snow that has happened in England in the memory of man’ followed by a frost colder than the fabled winter of 1740, when the thermometer had registered 32 degrees below zero.1 Secretary of State Lord Suffolk, stranded in his cottage in the countryside, complained to his Under-Secretary, Member of Parliament William Eden:
If ever this reaches you you will learn that I am in the damn’dest scrape that ever poor Devil get into! The face of the earth is covered with snow! … I may be kept here these two months, for it snows and blows, and freezes, and teazes most abominably.2
