1816 in the United Kingdom

1816 in the United Kingdom:

Other years

1814 | 1815 | 1816 | 1817 | 1818

Events from the year 1816 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

• Monarch - George III
• Prime Minister - Lord Liverpool (Tory)

Events

• 9 January - Sir Humphry Davy tests the Davy lamp for miners at Hebburn Colliery.
• 18 March - Income tax abolished.
• May 2 – Leopold of Saxe-Coburg (later King of the Belgians) marries Princess Charlotte Augusta, daughter of the Prince Regent, but she dies the following year.
• 22 May - Littleport and Ely riots break out as a result of economic distress in East Anglia.
• 13 August - An earthquake in Aberdeen is the strongest ever in Scotland.
• 27 August - Britain and the Netherlands bombard Algiers in an attempt to suppress slavery by the North African Barbary states.
• 23–27 October - Completion of the Leeds to Liverpool canal.
• 2 December - Spa Fields riots: a mass meeting of conspirators dispersed by the police.

Unknown dates

• The Coinage Act and Great Recoinage attempt to stabilise the currency by reintroduction of a silver coinage (for transactions under forty shillings) and changing the gold coinage from the guinea valued at 21 shillings to the slightly lighter sovereign worth 20 shillings and defining the value of the pound sterling relative to gold.
• By the Pillory Abolition Act, use of the pillory is limited to punishment for perjury.
• The British found Banjul, The Gambia.
• A British expedition explores up from the mouth of the Congo River.
• The Elgin Marbles are purchased by the nation from Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, for the British Museum.
• The Nelson Monument, Edinburgh, on Calton Hill, is completed.
• Beau Brummell flees England to escape gambling debts.
• Year Without a Summer.

Publications

• Kubla Khan, poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
• On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, sonnet by John Keats.
• Glenarvon, novel by Lady Caroline Lamb.
• The Antiquary, The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality, novels by Walter Scott.
• The Prisoner of Chillon, poem by Lord Byron.

Births

• 21 April - Charlotte Brontë, English novelist (died 1855)
• 30 June - Richard Lindon, inventor (died 1887)
• 16 August - Charles John Vaughan, dean of Llandaff and co-founder of University of Wales, Cardiff (died 1897)

Deaths

• 27 January - Viscount Hood, admiral (born 1724)
• 22 February - Adam Ferguson, philosopher and historian (born 1723)
• 5 July - Dorothy Jordan, Irish actress, mistress of King William IV of the United Kingdom (born 1761)
• 7 July - Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Irish playwright (born 1751)
• 15 December - Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, statesman and scientist (born 1753)