Walter Raleigh Trevelyan (6 July 1923 – 23 October 2014) was a British author, editor, and publisher and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Childhood

Raleigh Trevelyan was born in the Andaman Islands, India, to Colonel Walter Raleigh Fetherstonhaugh Trevelyan, commander of the British Indian Army garrison at the penal settlement of Port Blair, and Olive Beatrice Frost Trevelyan. The family moved to Punjab, and then when he was six, the family trekked on horseback for three weeks to his father's new assignment in Gilgit, where Colonel Trevelyan was posted as military adviser to the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. At the age of eight, like many children of the British Raj, Raleigh was packed off to a boarding prep school in England and rarely saw his parents after that.

Professional life and works

After leaving Winchester College in 1942, Trevelyan served in the Second World War in the Rifle Brigade and was sent first to Algiers and then to Italy. On 23 May 1944, during the breakout from Anzio, the Green Howards battalion to which he was attached lost 230 men, some of whose deaths he blamed on himself. Towards the end of 1944, back with the Rifle Brigade, Trevelyan got a job in the British military mission in Rome, where he remained for two years, falling in love with central Italy. His participation in the bloody Battle of Anzio, in which he was wounded twice, was the subject of two memoirs. The Fortress: A Diary of Anzio and After (1957), was recognized for his painfully honest account of how a soldier responds to the terror of being under fire. Later, with the help of German and Italian friends, Trevelyan wrote Rome '44: The Battle for the Eternal City (1981), which provided a vivid account of what it had been like for soldiers and civilians on the other side of the conflict. Some of Trevelyan's early popular books were about Italy. Princes Under the Volcano: Two Hundred Years of a British Dynasty in Sicily (1973), an account of the British role on that island, particularly the Whitaker family, who started out exporting Marsala wine and ended up entertaining European royalty. The Shadow of Vesuvius (1976) is about the discovery of the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century. A 1978 book, A Pre-Raphaelite Circle, viewed the major painters of the early Victorian avant-garde movement of the title through the prism of correspondence he found in the papers of Pauline Trevelyan, a distant relation by marriage who was a confidante and patron of the art critic and artist John Ruskin.

Trevelyan spent ten years retracing Walter Raleigh's footsteps for his best-known work, the acclaimed biography Sir Walter Raleigh (2002). The volume argued for the elevation of his distant ancestor and namesake to the upper reaches of the pantheon of British greats, based on Raleigh's achievements as an explorer, courtier, poet, American colonizer and early purveyor of tobacco to England and potatoes to Ireland. The book waded deep into the nuances of British, French and Spanish foreign policy to explain Raleigh's various acts of naval heroism and piracy; verified Raleigh's claims about silver and gold deposits in The Guianas (thought at the time to be wild fabrications); and brought Elizabethan court intrigues into focus to trace the events that led to Raleigh's years in the Tower of London and his beheading for treason in 1618.

Publications

  • The Fortress: A Diary of Anzio and After, 1956
  • A Hermit Disclosed, 1960,
  • The Big Tomato, 1966
  • Princes Under the Volcano: Two Hundred Years of a British Dynasty in Sicily, 1972
  • The Shadow of Vesuvius, 1976,
  • A Pre-Raphaelite Circle, 1978,
  • Rome '44: The Battle for the Eternal City, 1981,
  • Shades of the Alhambra, 1984
  • The Golden Oriole: Childhood, Family and Friends in India, 1987,
  • Grand Dukes and Diamonds: The Wernhers of Luton Hoo, 1991,
  • Wallington, Northumberland (National Trust Guidebooks), 1994,
  • The Companion Guide to Sicily, 1999,
  • Sir Walter Raleigh, 2002,
  • Parliamentary and legal questions, 1832, 2010,
  • Elegy on the Death of the Princess Charlotte with Lines on the Death of J. Tweddell, 2011,

References

  • A. M. Heath Literary Agents author page