The Canongate Burns (6 page)

Burns, of course, was not the only Scotsman to embrace such radical ideals. We cannot properly understand his life and much of his poetry if we do not understand the degree to which his personal relationships and affiliations were directed towards and driven by seeking out similarly politically sympathetic groups and individuals. It was the Lodge friends and patrons who eased his path towards Edinburgh; that so politically riven city which was to prove so disastrous to him in both life and death. Without, as all his generation, fully understanding the political causes of what happened in the capital, the ever astute Edwin Muir put his finger on the events of his sensational first extended visit to the capital as the cause of Burns's subsequent accelerating decline:

Given Muir's lack of knowledge of the covert political forces operating on Burns, this is well said. It does, however, under-estimate the extraordinary degree to which Burns, in the midst of his Edinburgh triumph, was conscious not only of its transience but the darkness to follow. As he wrote to Robert Ainslie on 16th December 1786:

He realised that his Edinburgh fame was largely based on the temporary social novelty of a ploughman writing poetry. He also probably realised that his Preface to the Kilmarnock Poems was, as we shall see, a brilliant confidence trick on a willingly gullible genteel Scottish audience, for which a price had to be paid. In the same month he wrote, even more particularly and precisely, to Rev William Greenfield about the consequences of Edinburgh:

Mozarts seem inevitably to have their Salieris. The treachery that Burns so accurately predicted for himself was also to be understood as not only psychologically motivated resentment of genuine creativity, but also essentially driven by political ideology. As the 1793–4 Sedition Trials revealed, Edinburgh was a politically schismatic society. This was not so apparent in 1789 and Burns's contacts with two utterly contrasting groups has never been fully understood in terms of the consequent conflicting politics or the terrible personal consequences for the poet of this division.

Initially, Burns was lauded by two utterly contrasting groups. He was a member of the boozy, boisterous, in many instances brilliant, radical, reformist club, The Crochallan Fencibles. He was also taken up, mildly patronised, by the aesthetically, politically and religiously conformist pro-Hanoverian group led by Henry Mackenzie and Hugh Blair. What has never been understood is not only how partisan to their own causes both groups were but, indeed, the degree to which, as the political scene darkened in the 1790s, they were sucked into active participation either towards not simply reform but insurrection on the radical side and covert anti-revolutionary activity on the government side. Of such undeclared civil war, Burns was among the chief victims.

Despite some excellent work by John Brims and Elaine MacFar-land we still fall considerably short of understanding the fraught complexity of the extent and intensity of radical protest in Scotland
in the 1790s. One consequence of this, of course, has been the contextually impoverished state of Burns criticism. Most of it has been written with the political dimension quite absent. Nor does space here allow anything like the necessary explication of the complex nature of that political culture. What can be said, however, is that most Scottish history seriously underestimates certainly the quantity and, arguably, the quality of radical opposition prevalent in Scotland which became genuinely divisive due to the American War of Independence.

It was that war which created that group so essential to understanding both Burns's political affiliations and what happened to him, The Crochallan Fencibles. The name was a deliberate parody of the loyalist militia groups springing up in opposition to the American cause. What the American war engendered in the radical, reformist side of Edinburgh can be gauged by the invited open letter of Dr Richard Price in 1784, ‘To the Secretary of the Committee of Citizens of Edinburgh':

Ingenuously, late eighteenth-century radicals had a kind of millennial vision of history as an American initiated domino game of collapsing crowns. For a time the reform of a particularly undemocratic Scotland seemed a distinct possibility. The bumpers, bawdy songs and personal badinage which Burns enlisted for with the Fencibles in their howff in Anchor Close was part of what must have seemed the initial stages of an ill-disguised victory celebration. The Fencibles were of course typically a heavy drinking culture. It was not, however, the most erotically inflamed of Scotland's men's clubs. Public masturbation was not on the agenda. Certainly, as camouflage, it was this side of the club's activities to which Burns confessed. He did not always publicly make the connection between libidinal energy and radical politics. Thus he wrote to Mrs Dunlop:

Or, as he wrote in conclusion to a brilliant extended parody of
The
Revelation of St John the Divine
in a letter to William Chalmers in December, 1786, that he had never seen ‘as many wild beasts as I have seen since I came to Edinburgh.' Burns's own stressing of the social wildness of the Fencibles may have been a deliberate camouflage for the actual reality of their political beliefs and activities. Intellectually, they were an astonishing bunch. William Smellie, commissioned as ‘Hangman', not only edited the first
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
but had written much of it. Of all Burns's lost letters, those to Smellie would possibly have been of the most profound political importance. They were destroyed by Smellie's biographer, Robert Kerr, with an insouciance that we chillingly recognise as seminal for the manner in which Burns's texts were to be treated not only in the hyper-respectable nineteenth century: ‘Many letters of Burns to Mr. Smellie which remained being totally unfit for publication, and several of them containing severe reflections on many respectable people still in life, have been burnt.' Smellie was also the author of a
Philosophy of Natural History
which postulated that the most highly refined, developed human consciousness was incompatible with the world. James ‘Balloon' Tytler was an even more extraordinary polymath. As Burns wrote in November 1788 to Mrs Dunlop:

Poet, song-writer, polymath, Scotland's first balloonist and eventually so politically active that he fled Scotland in 1793 to Belfast and then volunteered to return to Scotland to promote insurrection:

To Tytler's extreme irritation, this mission did not take place. Like many others of his creed and generation, his journey was to be westwards to American safety. An almost equally irascible, restless
spirit was Dr Gilbert Stuart who had so upset genteel Edinburgh with his writings in Smellie's
Edinburgh Magazine and Review
that he had to seek employment in London thus initiating the long tradition of Scots radicals forced South. Obviously extremely important in the Fencibles was the legal profession. Of a considerable number of lawyers, the most prominent was Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates and brother of the even greater radical lawyer Thomas. It was Henry Erskine's fall at the hands of the Robert Dundas faction in the election for Dean of Faculty in 1795 that Burns turned into, in January 1796, a bitterly witty song about the loss of the men of merit and worth to the reactionary loyalists.

This, then, was the intimate company Burns was keeping. Nor did he only wholly share their politics but was an active participant not only in terms of his contributions to the radical press, but in actually attempting to send carronades, captured from the smuggling brig
Rosamund
as part of his excise duties, to the French revolutionaries. It is little wonder that even during his first Edinburgh visit his relationships with genteel, conformist, pro-Hanoverian society were strained. How strained we can see, for example, in the fury of his riposte to Mrs McLehose when a Mrs Stewart had checked him over his seditious anti-Hanoverian lines on the Stirling window:

Yet he needed his enemy's patronage. He did join the Excise. Blair and Mackenzie, with their mixture of lachrymose and evangelical
values, expressed a faith not so much of a suffering Christ as a quiescently accepting Christ as exemplar to a politically similarly quiescent, hence an apolitical, common people. As Blake wrote: ‘Pity would be no more, if we did not make someone poor.' They were, however, able to open doors to publishing connections and offer mainly ill-received poetic advice. In the name of rules and decency, they were always trying to get Burns to tidy up his, to them, unruly act. This had almost no effect other than to irritate the Bard. As he wrote to Greenfield:

These tensions were also not confined to matters aesthetic and linguistic. Unlike Heathcliff, Burns was not the brute, sub-literate, threat, that dark erotic stranger, which haunted the bourgeois imagination of the period. They were faced with someone hyper-literate, fecundly allusive to a degree far beyond their powers in canonical literary and biblical tradition, who could not only talk their pants off but, it was feared, those of their wives and daughters too. Command of language was directly related to a fixed hierarchical social order; Burns threatened social anarchy by the very nature of his poetic, rhetorical potency. It offered them some security to classify him as a class-bound ‘heaven-taught ploughman' rather than great poet.