The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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supporters of the radical cause as Robert Burns’.34 This alleged recantation stems from one misinterpreted, truncated song, The Dumfries Volunteers. It avoids all the substantial poetic evidence of the Dumfries years to the contrary; not least Extempore [on the Loyal Natives’ Verses]:
Ye true ‘Loyal Natives’, attend to my song,
In uproar and riot rejoice the night long:
From envy and hatred your corps is exempt:
But where is your shield from the darts of contempt?
The poem catches perfectly both Burns’s contempt for the British cause under the war-mongering Pitt and the political company he was keeping in the bitterly politically factionalised little town from which he kept sending out not only radical poems to politically sympathetic London, Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers, but, as his doctor William Maxwell had, weapons to the French. All this, of course, at ferocious risk to, at best, his Excise position as he was scrutinised by his rightly suspicious masters. This, too, accounts for his attempts in the last years to get free of the claustrophobic cockpit of Dumfries to the relatively safer, because larger Glasgow area where, even more than Edinburgh, Scottish history has still chronically underestimated the depth of a radical opposition to Pitt’s war policy so great that Burke brought it up in the House.
If Burns had made any public recantation, Mackenzie and his ilk would have shouted it from the house-tops. That there was none accounts not only for the intensity of Mackenzie’s malice but also for what we now know about his activities not only as literary propagandist but practically on behalf of the government. The nature of Mackenzie’s key role in the government’s scrutiny of Burns and the subsequent creation of a literary, psychological context by which to sanitise the poetry we now know from the archives of Edinburgh University. Here we have discovered letters from Robert Heron requesting payments from Robert Dundas via Henry Mackenzie for espionage services rendered:
My Lord … Five or six years since, I, too boldly introduced myself to your Lordship, by suggesting that it was requisite to counteract from the Press, the effects of those seditious associations and seditious writings which were then busily corrupting the political sentiments of the people of this country … you were pleased not to disapprove the ingenuiness and honesty of my wishes and intentions. I was, in consequence of this condescending goodness of your Lordship, noticed by the Committee of the Association for the Defence of the Constitution, which was soon after formed. Under the direction —particularly of Mr Mackenzie, Lord Glenlee and Mr Campbell, I was employed to write several little articles for the newspapers, and for other occasions, in order to oppose the malignant efforts of sedition …
… The Committee had, with sufficient liberality, already paid my petty services with the sum of thirty pounds … Your Lordship, within a short time, munificently sent me no less than fifty pounds.35
The core of these services involved his exploitation of a relationship built up with Burns in Edinburgh. Worse, on the poet’s death he rushed to print with a memoir of the poet which was to prove ruinously influential for both Burns and his poetry.
Heron was too talented to be a mere hack. When he was the Rev. Hugh Blair’s assistant he had met Burns in Edinburgh. Heron maintained the relationship and en route to his native Galloway made a point of visiting the poet. The often prescient Bard recorded a visit from Heron to Ellisand thus:
The ill-thief blaw the Heron south!
And never drink be near his drouth!
He tald myself, by work o’ mouth,
He’d take my letter;
I lippened to the chief in trough,
And bade nae better.—
But aiblins honest Master Heron
Had at the time some dainty Fair One,
To ware his theologic care on,
And holy study:
And tired o’ Sauls to waste his lear on,
E’en tried the Body.—
Burns got the scale of the betrayal wrong; it was infinitely in excess of a non-delivered letter to Dr Blacklock. The devil of his political enemies really had blown Heron south. Behind Heron’s black-gowned clerical front, Burns also keenly observed his capacity for chronic alcoholic and sexual dissipation. A familiar of the debtor’s prison, Heron was to die prematurely, again imprisoned for debt, in Newgate in 1807.
Along with the new factual evidence of the Mackenzie/Heron connection, it might have been deduced both from Heron’s slavish taking of Mackenzie tactics against Burns to a biographical extreme and his equally slavish eulogy to his patron’s critical prowess. This is Heron’s account of Mackenzie’s contribution, via his Lounger magazine article, to Burns’s initial Edinburgh success:
That criticism is now known to have been composed by HENRY MACKENZIE Esq, whose writings are universally admired for an Addisonian delicacy and felicity of wit and humour, by which the CLIO of the Spectator is more than rivalled; for a wildly tender pathos that excites the most exquisite vibrations of the finest chords of sympathy in the human heart, for a lofty, vehement, persuasive eloquence, by which the immortal Junius has sometimes perhaps been excelled and often almost equalled!36
Heron’s biographical memoir was not the occasion of his first writing about Burns. In 1793 he published a travel book where he created a contrast on the poet’s not so much varied talents as antipathetic ones as expressed in the difference between The Cotter’s Saturday Night and Tam o’ Shanter. The latter is initially admitted as a masterpiece but this is then significantly qualified: ‘Burns seems to have thought, with Boccacce and Prior, that some share of indelicacy was a necessary ingredient in a Tale. Pity that he should have debased so fine a piece, by any things, — having even the remotest relation to obscenity’. This kind of Mackenzie-initiated sentimentalism was the seminal language of nineteenth-century political pietism which would become, mainly though Blackwood’s, the dominant mode of Scottish Toryism. Burns had to be converted into the pietistic poet of a quiescent common people. Whether they were properly reading its concluding stanzas, The Cotter’s Saturday Night became the Ark of the Covenant for the Scottish upper and middle-classes as, increasingly anxious about the fetid, brutal potentially insurrectionary common life of the new emergent industry-based (coal, iron, tobacco, weaving) towns, they sought the politically calming notion of pastoral, god-fearing peace reigning in the Scottish countryside. Heron is a seminal figure in the concoction of this fantasy:
The whole books of the sacred scriptures are continually in the hands of almost every peasant. And it is impossible, that there should not be some souls among them, awakened to the divine emotions of genius, by that rich assemblage which these books present, of almost all that is interesting in incidents, or picturesque in imagery, or affectingly sublime or tender in sentiments and character. It is impossible that those rude rhymes, and the simple artless music with which they are accompanied, should not excite some ear to fond perception of the melody of verse. That Burns had felt these impulses will appear undeniably certain to whoever shall carefully peruse his ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’; or shall remark with nice observation, the various fragments of scripture sentiment, of scripture imagery, of scripture language, which are scattered throughout his works.37
Of course, Heron knew as well as anyone that the bulk of Burns poetry neither sociologically confirmed this view and expressed anything but personal or popular quiescence in the face of the established order. To deal with this what he did was sycophantically flesh out the bones of Mackenzie’s account of the dead poet. Apparently more in sorrow than anger, Heron constructed the myth of Burns as betrayer of his own earliest