The Canongate Burns (4 page)
Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
Alfred, on thy starry throne,
Surrounded by the tuneful choir,
The Bards that erst have struck the patriot lyre,
And roused the freeborn Briton's soul of fire,
No more thy England own.â
Dare injured nations form the great design,
To make detested tyrants bleed?
Thy England execrates the glorious deed!
Beneath her hostile banners waving,
Every pang of honor braving,
England in thunder callsâ âThe Tyrant's cause is mine!'
That hour accurst, how did the fiends rejoice,
And hell thro' all her confines raise the exulting voice,
That hour which saw the generous the English name
Linkt with such damned deeds of everlasting shame!
For Burns an England so fallen, inevitably dragged Scotland down with her. On occasion he could be defiantly nationalistic:
You know my national prejudices. âI have often read & admired the
Spectator, Adventurer, Rambler, & World
, but still with certain regret that they were so thoroughly and entirely English.â Alas! Have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from a certain Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence, & even her very Name! â¦
Unlike many of his educated compatriots, the Anglo-British empire did not look to Burns a good deal for Scotland. He saw Scots sucked into the deadly wars of empire. He also saw the degeneration of Scottish leadership with Scots as sycophantic Westminster politicians
and bullies back home among their countrymen with Henry Dundas, the quintessence of these vices, as his enemy incarnate. At his bleakest, as in
Ode on General Washington's Birthday
, Burns's perceived Scotland, despite her heroic history of asserting her freedom, lost beyond resurrection:
Thee, Caledonia, thy wild heaths among,
Famed for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song,
   To thee, I turn with swimming eyes.â
   Where is that soul of Freedom fled?
   Immingled with the mighty Dead!
Beneath the hallowed turf where WALLACE lies!
Hear it not, Wallace, in thy bed of death!
   Ye babbling winds in silence sweep;
   Disturb not ye the hero's sleep,
   Nor give the coward secret breath.â
Is this the ancient Caledonian form,
Firm as her rock, resistless as her storm?
Shew me that eye which shot immortal hate,
   Blasting 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: ââWhen political combustion ceases to be the object of Princes & Patriots, it then, you know becomes the lawful prey of Historians and Poets.â' 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.â
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, âOppositional 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.'
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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: âThe
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 âthe illusion that a “golden age” might have existed at some time in the past fascinated radicals â¦' The old promises of unity and moral regeneration continued to appeal to the imagination of the English radicals even after the Stuart cause collapsed.
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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 âout'. 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 âCommon 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.â
This language, and the inclosed verses, are for your Ladyship's eyes alone.â 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 now unroof'd their Palace stands,
Their sceptre's fall'n to other hands;
Fallen indeed, and to the earth,
Whence grovelling reptiles take their birth.â
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; âWhat a rock-hearted, perfidious Succubus was that Queen Elizabeth! âJudas 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: âA poor, friendless wand'rer may claim a sigh,/ Still more if that Wand'rer were royal.' If experience of Jacobite defeat and its âHeroic 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 ânine times the space that measures day and night,' in oblivious astonishment, prone-weltering on the fiery surge.
