The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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sceptre’s fall’n to other hands;
Fallen indeed, and to the earth,
Whence grovelling reptiles take their birth.—
The injur’d STEWART-line are gone,
A Race outlandish fill their throne;
An idiot race, to honor lost;
Who knows them best despise them most.
Indeed, the appeal of the Stewarts to his imagination was a mixture of empathy for their suffering and displacement, as contrast gainers against the loathed Hanoverians and, not least, the aesthetic tradition they represented. They may have had something of the knight about them but, like the devil, they also had all the best tunes:
By the bye, it is singular enough that the Scottish Muses were all Jacobites. I have paid more attention to every description of Scots songs than perhaps any body living has done, I do not recollect one single stanza, or even the title of the most trifling Scots air, which has the least panegyrical reference to the families of Nassau or Brunswick; while there are hundreds satirizing them. This may be thought no panegyric on the Scots Poets, but I mean it as such. For myself, I would always take it as a compliment to have it said, that my heart ran before my head. And surely the gallant but unfortunate house of Stewart, the kings of our fathers for so many heroic ages, is a theme much more interesting than an obscure beef-witted insolent race of foreigners whom a conjuncture of circumstances kickt up into power and consequence.
If the unmerited rise of the Hanoverians excited his rage, the fall of the executed or exiled Stewarts caught his sympathy. Tudor England’s conduct towards Scotland proved as inflammatory to him as that of the contemporary Hanoverians; ‘What a rock-hearted, perfidious Succubus was that Queen Elizabeth! —Judas Iscariot was a sad dog to be sure, but still his demerits sink into insignificance, compared with the doings of infernal Bess Tudor.’ This vision of Mary Queen of Scots or Bonnie Prince Charlie is not, however, an inversion of Burns’s democratic principles. He viewed them, especially the Prince, as Shakespeare viewed Lear. As he wrote: ‘A poor, friendless wand’rer may claim a sigh,/ Still more if that Wand’rer were royal.’ If experience of Jacobite defeat and its ‘Heroic Loyalty’ created social parity between himself and Lady Winifred, it made brothers of a kind between himself and the fallen Prince who was not only an outcast but also the father of an illegitimate child. People so fallen from their proper station into obscurity and poverty constantly preoccupied his imagination and filled his poetry. In contemplating Pitt’s fall from power in 1789, he compared his plight with that of Nebuchadnezzar. Had he known what was to transpire, he might well have wished that Pitt had indeed gone out to grass. He also saw in the fate of the common supporters of the Jacobite cause a grievous expulsion not simply from their ancestral home but into Miltonic hyperspace:
… the brave but unfortunate Jacobite Clans who, as John Milton tells us, after their unhappy Culloden in Heaven, lay ‘nine times the space that measures day and night,’ in oblivious astonishment, prone-weltering on the fiery surge.
This inspired casting of the Highlanders as the fallen angels of Paradise Lost is not only a general expression of Burns’s conceited genius for creatively amalgamating diverse elements but a particular example of his constant, synergic ability to fuse not only Scottish and English poetic elements but also, with regard to radical political philosophy, to be indebted to both English and Scottish sources as means of energising his political poetry and thought. Consider, for example, this little known poem, On Johnson’s Opinion of Hampden;
FOR shame!
Let Folly and Knavery
Freedom oppose:
’Tis suicide, Genius,
To mix with her foes.
Greatly admiring of and influenced by Dr Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, wherein he saw so many of his own pains, Burns was provoked into this remark by Johnson’s acerbic Tory aside that John Hampden was ‘a zealot of rebellion’. Hampden, due to his struggles with Charles I, was an exemplary, indeed iconic figure for Scottish as well as English radicals. Indeed, not only did Burns but all radical thought, as it developed throughout the eighteenth century, was an amalgam of intermingling Scottish and English traditions. As is demonstrated in Caroline Robbins’s seminal work, The Eighteenth-Century Common-wealthmen (1957), eighteenth-century radical political philosophy was a functional construction made from diverse elements. As John Dinwiddy has cogently remarked:
The traditions or discourses on which they drew, and to some of which their conceptions of revolution were related, were numerous and diverse. They included ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘Country’ ideology, the myth of the ancient constitution, millennial religion, natural-rights theory, American republicanism, French Jacobinism, Irish insurrectionalism. Some of them were quite closely linked to one another both historically and conceptually, as American republicanism was to Country ideology. Others, such as historic rights and natural rights were theoretically more distinct; but none the less they were often treated in practise as mutually reinforcing rather than competing modes of argument, and radicals moved to and fro between them without any great regard for logical consistency.13
From what has already been said and from our consequent textual analyses of individual political poems, this description fits Burns like a glove. His ideas are absolutely in the mainstream of eighteenth-century radicalism; it is not his beliefs but, like John Milton or William Blake, the quality of his poetic genius that makes him exceptional.
Should there still be any doubt about Burns’s debt to eighteenth-century radical thought, consider, for example, these extracts from Cato’s Letters published through the early 1720s and, tellingly, jointly English and Scottish authored:
There is nothing moral in Blood or in Title, or in Place; Actions only, and the Causes that produce them are moral. He therefore is best that does best. Noble blood prevents neither Folly, nor Lunacy, nor Crimes, but frequently begets or promotes them: And Noblemen, who act infamously, derive no honour from virtuous Ancestors whom they dishonour. A Man who does base Things, is not noble or great, if he do little Things: A sober Villager is a better Man than a debauched Lord; an honest Mechanick than a Knavish Courtier.14
It is of course no accident that the poet’s closest friend during his period at Ellisland, Robert Riddell, a highly respected Whig polemicist, wrote under the pen name Cato, Or, again from Cato’s Letters, on the rapacious cupidity and the political consequences of the aristocratic and propertied classes at home and abroad:
They will be ever contriving and forming wicked and dangerous Projects, to make the People poor, and themselves rich; well knowing the Dominion follows Property; that where there are Wealth and Power, there will always be crowds of servile Dependents; and that, on the contrary, Poverty dejects the Mind, fashions it to Slavery, and renders it unequal to any generous Undertaking, and incapable of opposing any bold Usurpation. They will squander away the Publick Money in wanton Presents to Minions, and their Creatures of Pleasure or of Burthern, or in Pensions to mercenary and worthless Men and Women, for vile Ends and traiterous Purposes.
They will engage their Country in ridiculous, expensive, fantastical Wars, to keep the Minds of Men in continual Hurry and Agitation, and under constant Fears and Alarms, and, by such means, deprive them both of Leisure and Inclination to look into publick Miscarriages. Men, on the contrary, will, instead of such Inspection, be disposed to fall into all Measures offered, seemingly, for their Defence, and will agree to every wild Demand made by those who are betraying them.15
If this, as it should, sounds familiar so to is the stress that, with Lockean contractuality, power should reside not with a corrupt elite but with the people:
The first principles of Power are in the People; and all the Projects of Men in Power ought to refer to the People,