The Canongate Burns (81 page)

This was not, as is generally accepted, first published by Stuart, Glasgow, 1801, but appears in
The Morning Chronicle
on 7th February, 1795, designated by the poet's initials. These lines are further proof Burns was, as promised, sending material to the Opposition press in London. Mrs Stephen Kemble (1763–1841), wife of Stephen Kemble the manager of the Edinburgh theatre, appeared at Dumfries theatre on 21st October, 1794, in the part of Yarico in the drama
Inkle and
Yarico
by George Colman. With its potent anti-slave-trade sentiments, it was a popular drama among radicals of the period. Accordingly, these lines are an indirect political statement by Burns. They were written just after the performance. Kinsley, while drawing attention to the allusion to Exod. xviii, does not mention this political context.

The election for the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, a significant part of Galloway, took place in the Spring of 1795. Burns decided to give unqualified support to his friend and new found patron Patrick Heron (1736–1803), the Whig candidate, from Kirroughtree (this is now the accepted spelling), near Newtown Stewart (then named Newtown Douglas). Burns had probably met Heron prior to this either at Edinburgh or the Caledonian Hunt races in Dumfries, but in June 1794 he was Heron's guest at Kirroughtree. The song
T
he
Banks of Cree
was written for Lady Elizabeth Heron. The Tory candidate opposing Heron was Thomas Gordon of Balmagie; he, and almost all of his local aristocratic supporters are lampooned in the four Heron ballads.

In a letter to Patrick Heron, Burns admits to circulating this and the second ballad as printed broadsides: ‘I have privately printed a good many copies of both ballads, and have sent them among friends all about the country' (Letter 660). They were written as ephemeral verse, specific to one purpose; to assist the return of Heron to Parliament. Burns boasted to Heron, his satire would:

More potent, more potentially treasonable anti-Pitt words, were not spoken by the Botany Bay bound radicals Thomas Muir, Rev. Fysche Palmer, William Skirving or Maurice Margarot. But Burns, without the protection of the influential (deceased) Lord Glencairn, saw in Heron a potential ally, a powerful friend who might be of some use to him in the future. He spells this out to Heron, wishing that one day he might gain promotion in the Excise to the level of Collector, where richer, he would have free time to pursue literary activities:

However regrettable that this wish was never fulfilled, Burns may have won one partly influential friend with his Heron Ballads, but the Whigs were in Opposition and although Burns told Richarld Oswald of Auchincruive he had lately ‘come forward with my services, as poet laureate' to the Whig Party (Letter 662), they were impotent to repay his services.

It mattered little that all of the individuals in the ballads had their names partly dashed out in the original publication, leaving only one or two letters as a hint of the satirical target. It was obvious who the individuals were, given the naming of places associated with the Tory candidate and his supporters. After the eulogy to Heron (ll. 1– 24) as a somwhat idealised independent patriot, ll. 25–32 are a biting attack on Tory Landlordism, sharper in tone than the revolutionary
A Man's A Man,
particularly the treasonable ‘For even a Lord may be a gowk, / Tho' sprung frae kings and a' that'. Giving voice to the voiceless peasant, ll. 39–42 hit on the brutal inequalities of the rural feudal system ‘We are na to the market come,/ Like nowt and naigs and a' that. —/ If we are to be knaves and fools, / And bought and sauld and a' that'. It was probably evident to many readers that Burns was the author, despite his apparent loyalty to King and country in
The Dumfries Volunteers
. The Heron Ballads represent Burns's deliberate political intervention in an election, albeit cloaked in anonymity, which would have lost him both his liberty, his job as an Excise officer and his family income if he was discovered as the author and, accordingly, found guilty on a charge of sedition.

This ballad first entered the canon with Hogg and Motherwell, 1834, then the same year, in Cunningham.

SECOND HERON BALLAD:

For the original context of this ballad, see notes to the first Heron ballad. This, the second Heron ballad, is based on an old song
The
Blythesome
Wedding
which Burns probably saw in
The Orpheus
Caledonius
(1733). Henderson and Henley record that a broadside copy of this ballad exists in the British Museum, marked ‘Printed for private distribution by James Hill, Esq., W.S., 1795' (Vol. II, p. 402). This ballad first entered the canon in 1834, printed in Hogg and Motherwell, followed the same year by Cunningham's edition.

Unlike the oblique slight at the idle gentry's ‘whoring' and squandering money playing cards, subtly interwoven in the dialogue of
The Twa Dogs
, these blatant acerbic verses probably had the effect of indiscriminate machine gun fire among Pittite Tory supporters throughout Galloway. The various personal failings, idiosyncrasies and hypocrisy of local Tory aristocrats are mocked in this broadside of biting polemical satire, which rings out not the titled but colloquial names for the landed families, thus reducing their importance to the level of local inn gossip. It exposes, then attacks the closed-shop alliance of political, economic and legal power controlled by landed families in the south west. That birth was the prerequisite to position and power in semi-feudal Scotland, profoundly irritated Burns, not primarily because he was envious of his so-called social superiors, but because it bred nepotism and corruption and allowed many people of rank into places of power their intellect or ability did not merit. This process, most radicals believed, acted as a barrier to social, economic and political progress. Political reform, though was not enough for Burns, as he commented to Deborah Duff Davies:

While the underlying egalitarian values of Burns were often his impetus to satirical verse, an apologia for the Heron Ballads might argue that his hopes for a better, more enlightened society were destroyed by the disintegration of political freedom under Pitt's oppressive government.

There is, though, no substantive evidence that Burns was widely known to be the author of these verses during his lifetime, nor is it known how widely they penetrated the local peasant or aristocratic culture of Galloway during the election. What is known is that the Rev. James Muirhead (l. 42; footnote 11) replied in verse. His reply branded Burns a ‘… shabby son of a whore' and a ‘… rhymster, gauger, pimp'. Speaking as one of the dominant Tory hierarchy then ruling Galloway, Muirhead's libel became part of the black Tory gossip that marred Burns's character
before
and after his death. The lines which probably stung Muirhead, the minister at Urr near Castle Douglas, are in the fourth Heron Ballad (ll. 29–32), where Burns compares him unfavourably to a sour crab apple. The personal and political virulence of the backlash against Burns can be gauged from The Young Ms. in Edinburgh University. Alexander Young of Harben was a student friend of James Currie and Heron's Tory lawyer. His memoir in the form of a commentary on Currie's biography is reprinted in Professor Robert Fitzhugh's
Robert Burns, his Associates and Contemporaries
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1943).