The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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the Despot’s proudest bearing:
Shew me that arm which, nerved with thundering fate,
Braved Usurpation’s boldest daring!
Dark-quenched as yonder sinking star,
No more that glance lightens afar;
That palsied arm no more whirls on the waste of war.
Opposed to such national pessimism, he also perceived a resurrected not morbid Scotland with himself as National Bard writing, a sort of Yeatsian precursor, a historically derived national mytho-poetry. As he wrote to Alex Cunningham in March 1791: ‘—When political combustion ceases to be the object of Princes & Patriots, it then, you know becomes the lawful prey of Historians and Poets.—’ He knew the explosively, for him, liberating forces locked up in Scottish history. Sir Walter Scott knew them, too, and was terrified of them. Burns, however, proceeded to create poetic time-bombs as in Scots Wha Hae, where the subtext is an attack on the Pittite policies of oppression against Scottish radicals in the Scots vernacular and the words of the French Revolutionaries, making the Tennis Court Oath to do or die, come from the mouths of fourteenth-century Scottish soldiers. It may be questionable history but its purpose is to detect semi-mythical antecedents in the Scottish past as precursors for the reintegrated, resurrected nation. William Wallace and, to a lesser extent, Robert Bruce were the obvious candidates:
What a poor, blighted, rickety breed and the virtues & charities when they take their birth from geometrical hypothesis & mathematical demonstration? And what a vigorous Offspring are they when they owe their origin to, and are nursed with the vital blood of a heart glowing with the noble enthusiasm of generosity, benevolence and Greatness of soul? The first may do very well for those philosophers who look on the world of man as one vast ocean and each individual as a little vortex in it whose sole business and merit is to absorb as much as it can in its own center (sic); but the last is absolutely and essentially necessary when you would make a Leonidas, a Hannibal, an Alfred, or a WALLACE.—
What Burns was attempting was a Scottish variant of the manner in which his English radical contemporaries were retrieving the English past. As Stephen C. Behrendt has remarked, ‘Oppositional Radical rhetoric frequently sought to politicise the masses by linking their interests with ancient British (Saxon) traditions of individual and collective liberty ostensibly preserved in the House of Commons but increasingly imperilled by self-serving initiatives of the aristocracy and the monarchy.’11 In an age whose rapacious entrepreneurial activities increasingly atomised society, Wallace, then, was the heroic selfless embodiment of the spirit of Scottish community. This looking to the past for virtuous political models and heroic embodiment of these models is, of course, characteristic of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century republican imagination with, of course, the virtuous pantheon to be derived from the classic republics of Greece and Rome. Like Shakespeare, with little Latin and less Greek, Burns certainly knew that central Real Whig text, Addison’s Cato and he did also draw witty parallels between the reformist Scots of his own era and their classical predecessors:
Erskine, a spunkie Norland billie;
True Campbells, Frederick and Illay;
An’ Livinstone, the bauld Sir Willie;
An’ monie ithers,
Whom auld Demosthenes or Tully
Might own for brithers.
In this discussion of republican tendencies, an immediate difficulty presents itself regarding Burns’s Jacobinism. As Hugh Miller remarked in the nineteenth century: ‘The Jacobite of one year who addressed verses to the reverend defenders of the beauteous Stuart and composed the Chevalier’s Lament had become in the next the uncompromising Jacobin who wrote A Man’s a Man for a’ That.’ In actual fact there is no chronological transition in Burns from Jacobite to Jacobin; these themes intermingle throughout. Nor are they essentially contradictory. Miller’s problem arises, as so many misunderstandings of Burns, from his belief that what he is dealing with is confusion unique to Burns. While Burns’s personal life pursued a self-aware, sometimes chaotic, zigzag course, his political ideation was not similarly eccentric. Miller, however, does not understand how radical culture as a whole integrated the apparently opposing element of Jacobitism into itself. As Fintan O’Toole has cogently remarked in dealing with a similar apparent self-contradiction in the Irish dramatist and Whig politician, R.B. Sheridan:
At first sight, there may seem to be a contradiction between the Jacobite tinge of Sheridan’s political ancestry and the radical Whiggism to which he was now attaching himself. But by the time Sheridan became conscious of public life, the vestiges of Jacobitism had become, paradoxically, a few stray threads in the banners of the radical Whigs. Rather paradoxically, Tory blue became the colour of Wilkes’s supporters. The Public Advertiser which published the Junius Letters also published Jacobite propaganda. Later, a number of prominent former Jacobites, including Sir Thomas Gasgoigne, Frances Plowden and Joseph Ritson, became adherents of the radical Whig, Charles James Fox. Sir Frances Burndett’s family had come out for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ’45. The apparent conservatism of Jacobitism, its hankering after an increasingly mythic utopia in the past, was not really out of tune with the language and sentiments of the radicals. As Paul Kleber Monod puts it ‘the illusion that a “golden age” might have existed at some time in the past fascinated radicals …’ The old promises of unity and moral regeneration continued to appeal to the imagination of the English radicals even after the Stuart cause collapsed.12
Against Hanoverian triumphalism, misfortune, then, made strange political bedfellows. Also, like Sheridan, Burns’s sense of Jacobitism was familial. His family were not rooted in Ayrshire; his father had come from the North-East Jacobite redoubt. Indeed, Burns claimed that in 1715 they had been ‘out’. As he wrote in 1789 to Lady Winifred Maxwell Constable:
… with your ladyship I have the honor to be connected by one of the strongest and most endearing ties in the whole Moral world —Common Sufferers in a cause where even to be unfortunate is glorious, the cause of Heroic Loyalty! Though my Fathers had not illustrious Honours and vast properties to hazard in the contest; though they left their humble cottages only to add so many units to the unnoted croud that followed their leaders; yet what they could they did, and what they had they lost; with unshaken firmness and unconcealed Political Attachments, they shook hands with Ruin for what they esteemed the cause of their King and their Country.—
This language, and the inclosed verses, are for your Ladyship’s eyes alone.— Poets are not very famous for their prudence; but as I can do nothing for a Cause which is nearly no more, I do not wish to hurt myself.
Excise officers, as part of their routine duty post-1745, were expected to compile and deliver to Edinburgh, a list of all known Jacobite sympathisers in their area. This remained true until the death of Charles Edward Stuart in Rome the year after Burns wrote his dedicatory Birthday Ode to the exiled Stuart. Though he thought Jacobitism in practical terms a spent force, Burns knew it still had enough vitality to get him into trouble with his Hanoverian masters, thus he did not sign his Jacobite songs. Also it provided for him an image of Scottish self-loyalty which he increasingly believed was lacking in the contemporary nation replete with individuals variedly on the make at home and abroad. Nor did he perceive authoritarian kingship and consequent petrified social hierarchy as a solution to the nation’s ills. What he did fear, and this in his last years brought him ever closer to the views of Charles James Fox and the Scottish Foxite Whigs, was that a massification under Pitt of Hanoverian monarchical power was taking place. Thus as early as 1787, at the very moment he was seeking to enter The Excise, he did not only diamond cut these lines on a Stirling window but subsequently published them in an Edinburgh newspaper thinly disguised with the initials R.B.
HERE Stewarts once in triumph reign’d,
And laws for Scotland’s weal ordain’d;
But