Born in 1807, Trevelyan was the son of an Anglican archdeacon of Taunton in Somerset, and a child of a cultivated family of limited income but of broad intellectual and religious connections. In 1834, he became the devoted husband to Hannah Moore, the sister of Thomas Macaulay, the great historian, who was then a member of the Supreme Council of India. In his twenties, working as assistant to a commissioner of the East Indian Company in Delhi, Trevelyan helped to reform the Indian civil service and donated his own money to public works. He was anxious to clear barriers to trade – something that would be consistent with his behaviour in the Irish famine, when he saw trade, and not relief, as both sovereign and solution.
For nineteen years, from 1840 on, he was assistant secretary to the Treasury in Whitehall. It was in that role that he came to be responsible for what the British government devised for Irish relief and, to an extent, that he became an architect of the government’s policy. This task was merely a prelude – in the eyes of Whitehall officials and Westminster politicians – to his ultimate governorship of Madras from 1859, and the distinction he would achieve as a cabinet member of the British government of India, positions he occupied without the slightest hint of venality. He was cast in a new mould; neither a man of inherited wealth nor a nabob on the make.
Like the family of the historian Macaulay, Trevelyan was a spiritual child of William Wilberforce, the evangelical reformer who had campaigned successfully for the abolition of slavery in Britain and its possessions. But the secular influences on him came from the political economists of the day. The impact of a passage from John Stuart Mill such as the following would have coloured his view of the world and of how to deal with its ills: ‘In cases of actual scarcity,’ wrote Mill, ‘governments are often urged … to take measures of some sort for moderating the price of food.’ There remained, however, said Mill, ‘No mode of affecting it [price], unless by taking possession of all the food and serving it out in rations as in a besieged town.’
In the besieged town of Ireland, the rations were not going to be seized and served out. Adam Smith reinforced the concept: ‘A famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of a dearth.’ Famines were matters in which governments should not try to intervene or attempt to achieve some sort of false justice in food markets. The best hope of salvation was to let the market do its mysterious and beneficent work. So, in the eyes of Trevelyan and his fellow thinkers, the famine resulting from the potato blight was a catastrophe that could not be substantially interfered with.
Another major influence on Trevelyan was the Reverend Thomas Malthus, a population theorist who declared a calamity in Ireland inevitable due to over-population. In his Essay on the Principles of Population, first published in 1798, Malthus forecast the unarguable cleansing in Ireland, though he moderated the idea in his Principles of Political Economy in 1836. But he had also famously written in an 1817 article: ‘The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.’ The Malthusian view served and enhanced the principles of political economy: resignation to what could not be prevented.
One of the reasons Malthus had an impact on Trevelyan, and other officials and politicians, was the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, population growth in Britain as a whole had reached an unprecedented 11 per cent per annum, and poor relief expenditure – again in Britain as a whole – had risen to almost seven and a half million pounds per annum, compared with an annual expenditure of just over one million in 1776. Most of this expenditure, it should be said, was paid not by government but by a poor rate levied on land holders.
Combined with the two theories of inevitability, both the economic and the demographic, was the conviction that Providence had also provided for a great cleansing of Ireland. Certainly, the like-thinking cabinet of Lord John Russell, who became British prime minister in 1846, believed Trevelyan had done all he could to temper the sufferings of the Irish in the face of the severe but necessary workings of that divine dispensation. On 6 January 1847, Charles Trevelyan wrote, ‘It is hard upon the poor people that they should be deprived of knowing that they are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence.’ Since God had ordained the famine ‘to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.’
Trevelyan stuck to his views in various media – for example, in a famous letter to Lord Monteagle, a Whig politician, chancellor of the exchequer from 1835–9 and a progressive Irish landlord. Unlike many landlords, Monteagle – in between sittings of Parliament – actually lived on his land in the west of Ireland. On 9 December 1846, while a remarkably severe winter began to bring the first outbreak of famine disease to the Irish, sheltering, wild-eyed, by peat fires, Trevelyan wrote in reply to Monteagle’s appeal on behalf of the peasantry: ‘It forms no part of the functions of government to provide supplies of food or to increase the productive powers of the land. In the great institutions of the business of society, it falls to the share of government to protect the merchant and the agriculturalist in a free exercise of their respective employments … the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all wise providence in a manner as unexpected and un-thought as it is likely to be effectual. God grant that we may rightly perform our part, and not turn into a curse what was intended for a blessing.’
Again, Trevelyan was not alone in these views. The diarist (and racing aficionado and cricketer) Charles Greville said of the Irish in perhaps the darkest year of 1847 that they ‘never were so well off on the whole as they had been in this year of famine. Nobody will pay rent, and the saving banks are overflowing.’ Besides, they spent their money to buy guns with which to ‘shoot the officers who were sent over to regulate the distribution of relief’. If a subtle intelligence such as Greville’s thought such things, one can imagine the opinions of others.
There were more humane and instinctively compassionate voices in Britain. Charles Dickens later condemned Trevelyan’s view. In Bleak House (its first instalment appearing in 1852), he would mock ‘the gentle politico-economic principle that a surplus of population must and ought to starve’.
As well as his philosophic conditioning, Trevelyan brought to the famine some impressive, though not abnormal, prejudices against the Irish. First of all, the peasantry clung to Catholicism, with its debilitating irrationalities, its superstitions, its hostility to progress in thought, and the brake on inventiveness and adaptability it was seen to impose on people. Trevelyan believed the Irish too indolent to farm like civilised people, and in that regard the potato-growing term ‘lazy row’ seemed to confirm some of his prejudices. A lazy row or lazy bed was, in fact, quite a rational method, in which the potatoes were planted in a mound as a result of the planter shovelling out a row of sod and piling it on the planting mound after breaking any of its grass roots in the sod with a mallet. This was the best method for the Irish, who dug up the potatoes as they needed them and left the rest in the ground. It was true that growing potatoes did not require as much effort as growing oats, but the image of Irish laziness must be surely alleviated by that of the hundreds of thousands of Irish males who looked for harvest work during the summer, frequently travelling to England as deck cargo to do so.
For Trevelyan and many others, the devilish laziness of the race ran hand in hand with the unrest of the Irish in the face of God’s will. This unrest manifested itself in ‘rural outrages’. Landlords and their agents, and tithe proctors who collected tithes for the Established (non-Catholic) Church, were threatened by notices hammered to doors and trees demanding improved and more compassionate treatment. If their behaviour did not improve, they were subject to physical attack, so
metimes being ambushed and killed. The secret societies of peasants guilty of these assaults were called Ribbon Societies, and their members Ribbonmen, on the basis of their having early in their history worn ribbons during their assaults. These primitive acts of rebellion were seen as merely an index of the intractability, the unteachability, the malice of the Irish, rather than as an outfall from the grievous land situation under which most inhabitants of that fateful island lived.
A clinical psychologist, Deborah Peck, identifies the mental tendencies of those in power over the mass of the starving. The powerful perceive themselves to be loyal citizens, virtuous, industrious and thrifty, while the victims are disloyal, disreputable, lazy and improvident. The powerful, in their view, behave with sexual appropriateness; the victims are sexually profligate and, in their lust, breed recklessly. The powerful have rational religious beliefs. The victims’ brains are perverted with multifarious superstitions. Trevelyan and others in power in Britain certainly accepted as givens these distinctions between themselves and the Irish.
In terms of sexual inappropriateness, the general belief had it that the Irish were guilty of early marriage and headlong child-begetting, and this perception was partially fuelled by the fact that the Irish considered they would always be able to feed themselves with potatoes and thus had no inhibitions about founding a family. Yet, as twentieth-century research would show, the average age for marriage among males in Ireland in 1840 was nearly 28 years (Trevelyan married, in England, at 27 years) and for women, 24.4 years – well above the averages for many other parts of Europe.
Trevelyan also blamed Irish landlords for their laziness and its influence on the backwardness of Irish society and agriculture. The Devon Commission, appointed to inquire into the state of law and the practice of land-holding in Ireland, having published its report in February 1845, just before the famine, attributed the apparent apathy of Irish proprietors to their lack of ready money. Many Irish landlords had inherited ‘encumbered estates’, estates on which their forebears had borrowed large sums in the golden days of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when prices for agricultural goods were high – in part because Britain was at war with the French and, from 1812, with the Americans.
Trevelyan took up the theme of landlord incompetence and venality full-scale, blaming both landlords who lived on their estates and those who were absentees in England or the Continent for their major share of Irish backwardness.
The religiously devout Trevelyan considered murder a great wrong. It is sobering, then, to think that the deployment of convinced, virtuous intent – a belief in the most elevated philosophic principles of the day – and an intense belief in a providential deity, could be almost as destructive as the malignity of a dictator such as Mengistu Haile Mariam.
In the spring of 1848, following his declaration that the famine was finished – although it still had several years to run its course – Charles Trevelyan was granted a knighthood by Prime Minister Russell, a government sanction of all he had done, and a sign of the gulf between Irish and British perceptions of what was still happening. Indeed, his ultimate reputation would be that of reformer of the British civil service, as governor of Madras at the time of the Indian Mutiny, and as minister of finance in the British government of India. He devoted his later years to charity and work on army reform, and died in 1886.
The British prime minister at the time of the famine’s birth, Sir Robert Peel, bears only a fraction of the scale of blame attached to Trevelyan’s name.
When the potato blight had first struck in the autumn of 1845, destroying a considerable and often irreplaceable part of people’s food supply, the gifted Tory prime minister (called by the Irish ‘Orange Peel’ because of his initial opposition to Catholic emancipation – the granting of full civil rights to Catholics) was moved by pragmatism rather than by belief in steely and immutable principles.
‘There is such a tendency,’ said Prime Minister Peel, ‘to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable.’
His basis for saying so was that he had served under Prime Minister Lord Liverpool as Irish chief secretary in 1811-17, residing in Dublin, and then as home secretary of Great Britain in 1822, and in both those years there were food shortages in Ireland because of poor potato crops. An equally poor grain harvest reduced the amount of flour milled and drove up its price beyond the reach of the poor. In Mayo in 1822, discarded fish heads from the east coast, the Irish Sea, had been shipped in, and the Mayo starving ate them and the bodies of occasional porpoises washed ashore. But Peel and his cabinet believed these conditions in the always-hungry west of Ireland were far from being a general famine.
So, during late 1845, when the blight did not strike everywhere, Peel was wary, but at least he sought daily reports from the London-appointed executive who served under Ireland’s lord lieutenant, and he set up a scientific commission consisting of a Scots chemist, Dr Lyon Playfair, and an English botanist, Dr John Lindley, and sent them to Ireland to report on the situation. They toured stricken parts of what were normally the more prosperous eastern counties – Dublin, Westmeath to the near north, Louth to the coastal north of Dublin, Meath, which was north-west of the capital, and Kildare to the south-west. In a private letter to Peel, Dr Lindley said the situation was ‘melancholy’ and argued that reports of the situation were not exaggerated but understated. Yet Peel was still locked in his earlier experience and believed what he believed. Indeed, in all three of these famines, scepticism – willed or chosen – would prove fatal.
In Ireland, the Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell had a more reliable view of what was happening. He was a Catholic landlord, member of the House of Commons in Westminster and leader of the Irish Party, whose object was the repeal of the union with Britain. He had received news of ‘the visitation’ – the blight – from repeal branches throughout the country. Hence, in late October 1845, he went with a delegation to visit Lord Lieutenant Heytesbury in Dublin Castle. (Later the following year O’Connell would say memorably that this was ‘a death-dealing famine’.) But for now, he pleaded for a suspension of the export of the annual grain harvest, which, he claimed, was close to 1.6 million tons. He asked in particular for a prohibition on distilling and brewing using grain. While Heytesbury thought the demand about the harvest premature, he did counsel Peel to open Irish ports to the importation of foreign grain – an option that was contrary to British government protection policies. He also sought permission to stop the use of grain in distilling. His advice and requests were ignored.
However, in the bitter winter of 1845–6, when the starving had begun, Peel decided to make an urgent purchase through a London brokerage of £100,000 worth of Indian corn or maize from the United States. He intended to keep it a secret so that the grain prices in the markets of Britain and Ireland were not influenced downwards. He did dare hope, however, that once the secret was out and the corn began to be sold at cost to the Irish, it would bring down high grain prices in a reasonable way.
Indian maize was harsher than the corn grown in England and Ireland, and was unaccustomed foodstuff to the citizens of the British Isles. Thus it had the advantage that the Irish would eat it only if they needed it. The Indian maize, or ‘yellow male’ as the Irish called it, probably saved lives, even if the Irish cursed it. Improperly ground, it generated another name based on its influence on the gastric system: ‘Peel’s brimstone’.
Peel’s interference in the market did not sit so well with believers in political economy, and aggrieved many among his Tories. But it was part of a broader plan. From October 1845 onwards, Peel struggled with his party to abolish the Corn Laws. These import tariffs had been originally introduced after the Napoleonic Wars to compensate British farmers for the post-war fall in prices, and had kept grain prices throughout Britain high. Peel argued that not only Ireland, but the condition of England as well, required the repeal of the Corn Laws. He did so as a proponent of enlig
htened Toryism. He told his party that he foresaw an English revolution and the shadow of the scaffold falling over the privileged if grain prices were not reduced.
The resistance in Parliament was immense. As the Duke of Wellington, one of Peel’s party, said, ‘Rotten potatoes have done it all. They put Peel in his damned fright.’ The Corn Laws were in fact repealed, but Peel’s government was so divided by the process that it fell in June 1846. Yet, in reality, the reduction in the duty that supported grain-growers was abolished only gradually, which did not much help the poor of Britain in general, let alone the ordinary Irish. When – to the astonishment of the populace – the potato crop failed again in the autumn of 1846, there was still a duty of four shillings per quarter on corn.
Now the talented Lord John Russell was prime minister, and under his administration the famine would take on its full, deadly exorbitance. Trevelyan’s new master was of a pragmatic mind, rather as Peel had been. He was intelligent, sometimes strangely shy, and he had been a notable champion of the Reform Bill of 1832, without which it was believed Britain’s unrest, inequalities and ridiculous electoral system would have dragged it down into chaos. As prime minister, he was surrounded in Parliament by free-trade radicals of the kind who had been subject to the same influences, and believed the same principles, as Trevelyan. Charles Wood, Trevelyan’s immediate superior as chancellor of the exchequer in Russell’s government, subscribed absolutely to the principles Trevelyan brought to famine relief. Yet his name – like Russell’s – is barely known to Irish nationalists and to laymen interested in the famine. It did not appear in aggrieved folksongs, nor was it repeated bitterly to the young at Irish hearthsides, nor is it nowadays tunefully denounced in pubs before Irish international rugby test matches.