by Robert Burns
… How different was the fate of Burns compared with that of a Poet in birth, in Education, and many other circumstances like him, tho’ I do not arrogate to him so much creative genius, Allan Ramsay. He came into notice in a Station as mean as Burns, had no advantage over him in Birth, Connections, or any other circumstances independent of his own genius alas: it was the Patronage and Companionship which Burns obtained, that changed the colour of his later life: the patronage of dissipated men of high rank, and the Companionship of clever, witty, but dissipated men of lower rank. The notice of the former flattered his vanity, and in some degree unsettled his from an anecdote to be immediately mentioned he seemed to mingle with the most amiable feelings —but the levity of his Patrons and his associates Dwelt on the Surface of his Mind and prompted some of his Poetry which offended the serious, and lost him better friends than those which that poetry had acquired —Dugald Stewart who first introduced him to me, told me latterly, that his Conduct and Manners had become so degraded that decent persons could hardly take any notice of him.27
Given Fergusson’s sweet, convivial personality and the terrible nature of his incarcerated death, Mackenzie’s vicious pursuit of him beyond the grave beggars belief. In the history of poetic biographies, Ian Hamilton has remarked that Burns was the first poet to be character assassinated. Given Mackenzie’s treatment of Fergusson, however, we would have to grant Fergusson unhappy precedence. Mackenzie tainted, wrongly, both their reputations with, at best, alcoholic tendencies. This alleged addiction was then implied to lead to other forms of licence where, certainly in Burns’s case, sexual promiscuity was on the charge sheet.
This demonisation of Burns is not to be understood, however, without it being placed in its proper political context. The Mackenzie who penned these personal attacks was the same man who was writing fervid anti-revolutionary polemics in The Edinburgh Herald during 1790–1 under the pen name ‘An Old Tradesman’ and again in 1793, in The Caledonian Mercury, under the pen name ‘Brutus’ to prove that all was for the best in the best of all worn torn, economically distressed Hanoverian worlds. As spokesperson for the old regime he believed that strong government would ‘save the people from that worst enemy of purely democratic states – the people themselves’.28 The pinnacle of his loyalty is the 1792 A Review of the Principal Proceedings of the Parliament of 1784, a defense of William Pitt, when Pitt’s pro-reformist views of 1784 were being thrown back in his face by radicals. Retrospectively referring to that pamphlet Mackenzie described the ideological clash of the 1790’s as an ‘epidemic insanity … which set up certain idols, under the names of Liberty, Equality and The Rights of Man’.29 Pitt personally thanked Mackenzie for his loyal defence, and basking in such praise, he replied ‘My Opinion, Sir, of you as a Minister I hold only in common with the Millions around me.’30 (Letter 93, To William Pitt, March 1792). These ‘millions’ were not so loyal, as Mackenzie informed George Home on 26th March 1792:
There is a Spirit of Sedition gone forth, of which it is very difficult to tell the Extent, but even if not so considerable as some timid people fear, so restless, so busy, so zealous, as to be truly alarming to every considerate Man. I forget the Calculation made of the numbers of Manufactures in England, but we all know it is very great. Of these I believe I may say a Majority, but assuredly a great part, are determined enemies to the present Order of things31 …
Theatre goers, as Mackenzie records, were among this swelling radical ‘enemy’ and in one incident he tells Home, open conflict erupted between radicals and loyalists at London’s Haymarket theatre when the revolutionary song ‘Ca Ira’ was demanded by reformers, but chanted down by loyalist calls for ‘God Save the King’. Similar tensions spread to the provincial theatres, including Dumfries and an unidentified informer reported to the Excise that Burns was in the reformist mob. Mackenzie goes on in the same letter to condemn Scottish academics: ‘From my Communication with Men of Letters here, I can perceive that they are generally on the side of the Malcontents’.32 Fanatically partisan, status obsessed, politically scared, Mackenzie so hated his reforming and radical political enemies that he could not speak their names. To do so would give them a credibility he utterly sought to deny. For Mackenzie the radical was equivalent to the bestial. This is why in Mackenzie and the subsequent Tory criticism he inspired always described Burns as surrounded by destructive groups of unnamed degenerates in Edinburgh and, even worse, Dumfries.
It should further be understood that Burns was not a unique case for such treatment. The heavily subsidised, reactionary literary, magazine and newspaper culture put together by Pitt and Dundas specialised in trashing the radical literary enemy by varied forms of abuse based on the relationship of personal licentiousness to consequent political anarchy if these people were to succeed. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft with whom Burns corresponded received treatment even worse than his, as a promiscuous woman she was even more reprehensible than a randy ploughman. Engrossed in destroying the careers of any radical sympathisers, Mackenzie boasted to the ultra-loyalist George Chalmers, in March 1793:
One thing Mr Young suggests as never yet thought of, which however was thought of here, and enforced in two short Articles in the Newspapers by myself, at the very opening of this Business, namely the resolution of not employing Jacobin Tradesmen, which had a very excellent Effect in this Town.… contrary to my Expectations, the War has I think done good in this Country, given a Sort of Impulse to the good Part of the Community …33
An ever-willing anti-reform propagandist, Mackenzie helped organise the Scottish distribution of a vicious attack, printed by the same George Chalmers, on Tom Paine as a degenerate, dangerous individual. The black art of character assassination, well established before the death of Burns, won rich patronage for the loyal Mackenzie, appointed Comptroller of Taxes in Scotland in 1799.
The degree of Mackenzie’s vindictiveness and his stress of the later Dumfries years, also alert us to one of the most pervasive and politically wilfully misconceived of myths surrounding Burns. Indeed, so pervasive that it has even penetrated the normally sceptical consciousness of Professor T.M. Devine who has recently written of ‘the public recantation of such celebrated supporters of the radical cause as Robert Burns’.34 This alleged recantation stems from one misinterpreted, truncated song, The Dumfries Volunteers. It avoids all the substantial poetic evidence of the Dumfries years to the contrary; not least Extempore [on the Loyal Natives’ Verses]:
Ye true ‘Loyal Natives’, attend to my song,
In uproar and riot rejoice the night long:
From envy and hatred your corps is exempt:
But where is your shield from the darts of contempt?
The poem catches perfectly both Burns’s contempt for the British cause under the war-mongering Pitt and the political company he was keeping in the bitterly politically factionalised little town from which he kept sending out not only radical poems to politically sympathetic London, Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers, but, as his doctor William Maxwell had, weapons to the French. All this, of course, at ferocious risk to, at best, his Excise position as he was scrutinised by his rightly suspicious masters. This, too, accounts for his attempts in the last years to get free of the claustrophobic cockpit of Dumfries to the relatively safer, because larger Glasgow area where, even more than Edinburgh, Scottish history has still chronically underestimated the depth of a radical opposition to Pitt’s war policy so great that Burke brought it up in the House.
If Burns had made any public recantation, Mackenzie and his ilk would have shouted it from the house-tops. That there was none accounts not only for the intensity of Mackenzie’s malice but also for what we now know about his activities not only as literary propagandist but practically on behalf of the government. The nature of Mackenzie’s key role in the government’s scrutiny of Burns and the subsequent creation of a literary, psychological context by which to sanitise the poetry we now know from the archives of Edinburgh University. Here we have discovere
d letters from Robert Heron requesting payments from Robert Dundas via Henry Mackenzie for espionage services rendered:
My Lord … Five or six years since, I, too boldly introduced myself to your Lordship, by suggesting that it was requisite to counteract from the Press, the effects of those seditious associations and seditious writings which were then busily corrupting the political sentiments of the people of this country … you were pleased not to disapprove the ingenuiness and honesty of my wishes and intentions. I was, in consequence of this condescending goodness of your Lordship, noticed by the Committee of the Association for the Defence of the Constitution, which was soon after formed. Under the direction —particularly of Mr Mackenzie, Lord Glenlee and Mr Campbell, I was employed to write several little articles for the newspapers, and for other occasions, in order to oppose the malignant efforts of sedition …
… The Committee had, with sufficient liberality, already paid my petty services with the sum of thirty pounds … Your Lordship, within a short time, munificently sent me no less than fifty pounds.35
The core of these services involved his exploitation of a relationship built up with Burns in Edinburgh. Worse, on the poet’s death he rushed to print with a memoir of the poet which was to prove ruinously influential for both Burns and his poetry.
Heron was too talented to be a mere hack. When he was the Rev. Hugh Blair’s assistant he had met Burns in Edinburgh. Heron maintained the relationship and en route to his native Galloway made a point of visiting the poet. The often prescient Bard recorded a visit from Heron to Ellisand thus:
The ill-thief blaw the Heron south!
And never drink be near his drouth!
He tald myself, by work o’ mouth,
He’d take my letter;
I lippened to the chief in trough,
And bade nae better.—
But aiblins honest Master Heron
Had at the time some dainty Fair One,
To ware his theologic care on,
And holy study:
And tired o’ Sauls to waste his lear on,
E’en tried the Body.—
Burns got the scale of the betrayal wrong; it was infinitely in excess of a non-delivered letter to Dr Blacklock. The devil of his political enemies really had blown Heron south. Behind Heron’s black-gowned clerical front, Burns also keenly observed his capacity for chronic alcoholic and sexual dissipation. A familiar of the debtor’s prison, Heron was to die prematurely, again imprisoned for debt, in Newgate in 1807.
Along with the new factual evidence of the Mackenzie/Heron connection, it might have been deduced both from Heron’s slavish taking of Mackenzie tactics against Burns to a biographical extreme and his equally slavish eulogy to his patron’s critical prowess. This is Heron’s account of Mackenzie’s contribution, via his Lounger magazine article, to Burns’s initial Edinburgh success:
That criticism is now known to have been composed by HENRY MACKENZIE Esq, whose writings are universally admired for an Addisonian delicacy and felicity of wit and humour, by which the CLIO of the Spectator is more than rivalled; for a wildly tender pathos that excites the most exquisite vibrations of the finest chords of sympathy in the human heart, for a lofty, vehement, persuasive eloquence, by which the immortal Junius has sometimes perhaps been excelled and often almost equalled!36
Heron’s biographical memoir was not the occasion of his first writing about Burns. In 1793 he published a travel book where he created a contrast on the poet’s not so much varied talents as antipathetic ones as expressed in the difference between The Cotter’s Saturday Night and Tam o’ Shanter. The latter is initially admitted as a masterpiece but this is then significantly qualified: ‘Burns seems to have thought, with Boccacce and Prior, that some share of indelicacy was a necessary ingredient in a Tale. Pity that he should have debased so fine a piece, by any things, — having even the remotest relation to obscenity’. This kind of Mackenzie-initiated sentimentalism was the seminal language of nineteenth-century political pietism which would become, mainly though Blackwood’s, the dominant mode of Scottish Toryism. Burns had to be converted into the pietistic poet of a quiescent common people. Whether they were properly reading its concluding stanzas, The Cotter’s Saturday Night became the Ark of the Covenant for the Scottish upper and middle-classes as, increasingly anxious about the fetid, brutal potentially insurrectionary common life of the new emergent industry-based (coal, iron, tobacco, weaving) towns, they sought the politically calming notion of pastoral, god-fearing peace reigning in the Scottish countryside. Heron is a seminal figure in the concoction of this fantasy:
The whole books of the sacred scriptures are continually in the hands of almost every peasant. And it is impossible, that there should not be some souls among them, awakened to the divine emotions of genius, by that rich assemblage which these books present, of almost all that is interesting in incidents, or picturesque in imagery, or affectingly sublime or tender in sentiments and character. It is impossible that those rude rhymes, and the simple artless music with which they are accompanied, should not excite some ear to fond perception of the melody of verse. That Burns had felt these impulses will appear undeniably certain to whoever shall carefully peruse his ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’; or shall remark with nice observation, the various fragments of scripture sentiment, of scripture imagery, of scripture language, which are scattered throughout his works.37
Of course, Heron knew as well as anyone that the bulk of Burns poetry neither sociologically confirmed this view and expressed anything but personal or popular quiescence in the face of the established order. To deal with this what he did was sycophantically flesh out the bones of Mackenzie’s account of the dead poet. Apparently more in sorrow than anger, Heron constructed the myth of Burns as betrayer of his own earliest spiritual impulses because he lacked ‘that steady VIRTUE, without which even genius in all its omnipotence is soon reduced to paralytic imbecility, or to manic mischievousness’. Thus Burns’s life becomes a melodrama where he always surrendered to those elements in himself which inevitably took him into increasingly bad company.
The bucks of Edinburgh accomplished, in regard to BURNS, that in which the boors of Ayrshire had failed. After residing some months in Edinburgh, he began to estrange himself … from the society of his graver friends. Too many of his hours were now spent at the tables of persons who delighted to urge conviviality to drunkenness, in the tavern, in the brothel, on the lap of the woman of pleasure. He suffered himself to be surrounded by a race of miserable beings who were proud to tell that they had been in company with BURNS, and had seen Burns as loose and as foolish as themselves. He was not yet irrecoverably lost to temperance and moderation, but he was already almost too much captivated with their wanton rivals, to be ever more won back to a faithful attachment to their more sober charms. He now began to contract something of new arrogance in conversation. Accustomed to be among his favourite associates … the cock of the company, he could scarcely refrain from indulging in similar freedom and dictatorial decision of talk, even in presence of persons who could less patiently endure his presumption.38
Here the suppressed rage of sentimental, genteel Edinburgh wells up. The people’s poet had no right to his creative superiority of language. Hence is evolved the fiction of the unstable genius who falls away from his prudent, real friends and into evil company and, by his sinful depravity, betrays not only his better self but the sanctified common people whom he represents. In Burke’s great shadow, a Scottish conservatism is forged which converts the dialectic of opposing secular political systems to one which, on the conservative side, has divine sanction as embodying the inherent nature of reality. By definition, opposition to this is implicitly evil. Burns is a sinner (he suffers but for the wrong things), with even a hint of anti-Christ. As with Mackenzie’s account, the speed of Burns’s descent accelerates in Dumfries. He has crosses to bear, admittedly, but they are not properly borne:
In the neighbourhood were other gentlemen occasionally a
ddicted, like Burns, to convivial excess, who, while they admired the poet’s talents, and were charmed with his licentious wit, forgot the care of his real interests in the pleasure in which they found in his company, and in the gratification which the plenty and festivity of their tables appeared evidently to afford him. With these gentlemen, while disappointments and disgusts continued to multiply upon him in his present situation, he persisted to associate every day more and more eagerly. His crosses and disappointments drove him every day more into dissipation, and his dissipation tended to enhance whatever was disagreeable and by degrees, into the boon companion of mere excisemen, spend his money lavishly in the ale house, could easily command the company of BURNS. The care of his farm was thus neglected, Waste and losses wholly consumed his little capital.39
As with Edinburgh and The Crochallan Fencibles, the political nature of Burns’s affiliations in Dumfries, is not identified. What Heron is mainly referring to here is that Real Whig bibulous bear of a man, Robert Riddell. As we now know, Burns was the middle-man responsible for Riddell’s political essays being published under the pen-name Cato. What, of course, Heron does not narrate is the story of the collapse of Burns’s political hopes under ferocious governmental pressure but a moral fable whereby, in its terminal stage, the sinner is driven to misanthropic blackness. The peculiar fevered tearing apart of Burns’s body, the agony of night sweats and pain wracked joints, is seen as both a consequence of his heavy drinking where, in fact, his rapidly deteriorating health made his tolerance to alcohol ever less. Or, psychosomatically, his bodily agony is seen as a punishing consequence of his sins. In actual fact, a convincing case has been made that medically what was tearing Burns’s body apart in these last terrible months was brucellosis caught from infected milk, although it is generally thought he died of rheumatic heart disorder.40 That alcoholic fornicator Heron, has a quite different ‘spiritual’ diagnosis:
