There's a Trevelyan mentioned in the song that has become the unofficial anthem of Irish rugby, The Fields of Athenry. The relevant lines are: "For you stole Trevelyan's corn/ So the young might see the morn." The Trevelyan in question was Charles Edward (1807-1886) and his association with Ireland was an unhappy one for this country, writes Brian Maye
As Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, this Trevelyan oversaw and more or less determined British government relief to the starving Irish during the Great Famine. Parsimony could well be described as his watchword, though he would have seen his role as ensuring that good British taxpayers' money wasn't being wasted on the feckless Irish.
In 1848 he published a book called The Irish Crisis in which he defended the export of food from Ireland. This might seem bad enough, given that the poor Irish were in dire need of the same food, but he went further. Trevelyan was a fan of Thomas Malthus, whose theories on population control were all the rage in the 19th-century Britain of his time, and he intimated that the Famine was the work of a benign Providence seeking to relieve Irish overpopulation by natural disaster.
Charles Edward was not the only member of the Trevelyan family to be associated with Ireland. His son, George Otto (1838-1928), who died 75 years ago last Saturday, was also linked with this country. Like his father, his was not a happy association, but he seems to have inflicted damage on no one but himself.
He was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire and was educated at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge. In 1865 he entered parliament as a member of the Liberal party. In William Gladstone's first government, he served as a lord of the Admiralty from 1868 to 1870.
When Gladstone returned to power in 1880, Trevelyan was given the position of parliamentary secretary to the Admiralty.
In 1882 he received his most senior posting to date when Gladstone made him Chief Secretary to Ireland, in effect the head of the British government in Ireland.
It would be interesting to speculate what his father had conveyed to him of his own dealings with this country; not a lot, perhaps, as Victorian fathers were notorious failures in communicating with their sons.
On first coming to power back in 1868, Gladstone had instituted the practice of making his Irish Chief Secretary also a member of his British cabinet. But when W.E. Forster resigned from the position in 1882 in protest over the so-called "Kilmainham treaty" with Parnell, Gladstone had to reorganise his Irish administration drastically. He made Earl Spencer his Viceroy because he had held that position before. The problem was that Spencer was a member of the cabinet while Trevelyan, whom Gladstone appointed to succeed Forster, was not.
This led to a situation which R.B. McDowell, the historian of the Irish administration from 1801 to 1914, has described as "pathetic". After 15 months' experience of what he called "this terrible office", Trevelyan begged Gladstone to admit him to the cabinet. Nobody, he said, could have any idea of what it was like to be the representative of the Westminster government in the face of the false and unscrupulous men who were forever seeking to discredit English rule in Ireland. He had to be a cabinet minister, he continued, to enable him to conduct Irish business with any semblance of authority.
Spencer supported Trevelyan and was willing to sacrifice his own seat at the cabinet table. But Gladstone could be very finicky about questions of promotion and told Trevelyan that it was dangerous if not impossible to have a Chief Secretary in the cabinet with "a working Viceroy". When he added that "those portions of our political lives in which we feel ourselves overborne and overwhelmed constitute the most telling and valuable parts of the political education we are all undergoing", he can have given the miserable holder of the Irish office little solace.
In less than a year Trevelyan, whose hair had turned white, was asking to be relieved of his position. "The life I lead," he wrote, "is not a human life at all". (A case of the sins of the father being visited on the son, perhaps?) Spencer made it known to Gladstone that if Trevelyan were not granted his request, he would have a breakdown. The Prime Minister duly moved him to the Board of Trade. He seemed to find Scotland more congenial because he was secretary for that country in 1886 and again from 1892 to 1895.
George Otto Trevelyan was a more successful historian than politician. He was a nephew of Lord Macaulay on his mother's side and in 1876 he published The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay.
In 1880 The Early History of Charles James Fox, which was intended as the first volume of a detailed study of the great Whig reformer, appeared. The book is notable for its vivid presentation of social and political life in England in the late 18th century.
Trevelyan changed his intention because his next history was The American Revolution (1899-1907). His hero Fox supported independence for the American colonies and George III and Charles Fox (1912-14) completed his study of the American fight for independence. As an historian, Trevelyan was praised for his careful research and striking narrative style.
His three sons variously pursued both sides of their father's professional life: one was a politician and two were writers. Charles Philips Trevelyan was a Liberal and then a Labour MP; George Macaulay Trevelyan was a famous historian; and Robert Calverley Trevelyan was a poet and playwright.