Charles Trevelyan
Charles Trevelyan was the assistant secretary to the Treasury who ran the British government's response to the Irish famine from London, believed that the market would feed Ireland if the government did not interfere and that the famine was a judgement of God on a people who needed the lesson, and wrote both things down; he was knighted for the work in 1848 and is the name Irish memory attaches to a million dead. He was born in 1807 into an evangelical Cornish family, went out to India at nineteen in the Company's service, exposed his own superior for corruption at twenty-one, married Macaulay's sister, and came home in 1840 to the Treasury, which he ran as its permanent head for nineteen years. When the potato failed in 1845 Peel bought Indian corn in secret and set up public works, and Trevelyan administered them. When the blight came back in 1846 and Peel fell, the Whig government under Russell let him decide, and he decided that the corn should not be given away, that the works should pay wages below the price of food so as not to distort the labour market, and that the landlords of Ireland should bear the cost, which they could not. Seven hundred thousand people were on the works in the winter of 1846, dying on them. In 1847 the works were closed and soup kitchens fed three million for six months, which worked, and were then closed too, and the poor law was left to do the rest. He published The Irish Crisis in 1848 explaining that a great evil had been dealt with by the wisdom of Providence, which the Times praised. He was not a monster in his own view or his colleagues'. He worked himself ill, sent his own money, and applied the political economy every educated man of the decade believed. He wrote the report with Northcote in 1854 that gave Britain a civil service recruited by examination, which is his other monument, was governor of Madras, and finance member in India, and died in 1886. The song about the fields of Athenry has his name in the first verse.
- Lived: 1807 CE – 1886 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: civil_servant, administrator
