The Canongate Burns

by Robert Burns

  They’ll aiblins no believe ye maybe not

  In that this day.

  May peace and plenty bless our isle —

  65 May placemen ne’er oppress us —

  May Grey and Erskine’s gracious smile

  O’ grievances redress us.

  May Fox and brave McLeod exert

  Their power with due attention;

  70 And never from our cause depart

  For sake o’ post or pension,

  Like some this day.

  God bless our King, lang may he reign

  Owre subjects free and happy —

  75 May ilka loyal British swain every

  Toss off his health in nappy — beer

  May War be banish’d from our land,

  Wi’ a’ its dreadfu’ thunder; —

  And may our Constitution stand

  80 The warld’s pride and wonder world’s

  Ilk coming day. each

  Ane O’ The Swine. One of

  This burlesque, in the eight-line stanza of The Holy Fair, targets Edmund Burke’s speech in the House of Commons debate on the Alien Bill in late December 1792 when he brandished a dagger, declaring that the radicals in Britain would eventually rise in bloody rebellion. Burke is reported in The Edinburgh Gazetteer, 1st January 1793, saying ‘every man in France has murder in his heart and in his face’. Even his colleagues laughed at these overwrought expostulations. The poem uses this incident to develop a brilliant satire on the wider campaign for parliamentary reform which dominated British politics during the winter of 1792–3.

  The person behind the campaign to raise a subscription for daggers to assist the French revolutionary troops was the poet’s (future) doctor, William Maxwell. Burns boasted of his friend’s radical past to Mrs Dunlop, ‘the Doctor Maxwell whom Burke mentioned in the House of Commons about the affair of the daggers’ (Letter 638). Mentioning Maxwell to George Thomson, he wrote ‘the identical Maxwell whom Burke mentioned in the House of Commons’ (Letter 637). The Sun of 8th October, 1792 included an article entitled ‘English Jacobins. No. I. Doctor Maxwell.’ Maxwell was reputed to have dipped a handkerchief in the blood of the guillotined French King. Not only does the poem mention Maxwell’s daggers, but links daggers and cannons (‘For cannons or for daggers’, l. 53) to praise those who would help the French republicans. This is a startling reference, given Burns’s own attempt covertly to send four carronade cannons captured in his semi-military customs duties from the smuggling ship The Rosamond which he subsequently purchased. Hence the full force of the line bringing his and Maxwell’s treasonable activities together. It was not public knowledge at this time that Burns had tried to get the cannons to France. So, if a poet other than Burns were to write such a line, it would be a remarkable coincidence.

  The target of ferocious radical satire and cartoon caricature for his derogatory description of the French masses as the ‘swinish multitude’, Burke’s infamous remark was well known to Burns. To Mrs Dunlop, writing on food shortages in Dumfries, Burns ironically wrote ‘How long the Swinish Multitude will be quiet, I cannot tell: they threaten daily’ (Letter 688). Burns certainly detested Burke. This is clear in his epigram:

  Oft have I wonder’d that on Irish ground

  No poisonous reptile has ever been found:

  Revealed the secret stands of great Nature’s work:

  She preserved her poison to create a Burke!

  Furturgent matterher, the ex-Glasgow University rector, Burke, had previously disputed in the letter columns of The Glasgow Journal with the poet’s intimate friend Robert Riddell, who wrote several pieces under the pen-name Cato.

  Also revealing for the context of Burns’s attitude to Burke in general and The Dagger in particular, is the fact that the Irishman had also been provoked by Dr William Maxwell’s political print activities. Burns most probably had knowledge of the advertisement Maxwell had placed in The Morning Chronicle for 7th September, 1792 in which he referred to ‘the present combination of Despots against the Rights of Human Nature’. In writing to no less than Henry Dundas on the urgent matter of charity for French loyalist refugees Burke ended thus:

  But perhaps the temper of the common people may best be seen in the event of the late advertisement by Dr. Maxwell for the support of the Jacobins, and the maintenance of a war against the allies of this country, the Emperor and the King of Prussia; whom he had at the same time the insolence to revile in the coarsest language. (The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Vol. VII, 1792–4, ed. Marshall and Woods (Cambridge University Press, 1968) p. 217).

  Already inflamed against Maxwell, the matter of the dagger utterly enraged him. There is a quite fascinating letter reprinted again in Volume VII of Burke’s correspondence for 16th January, 1793 from James Woolley of Birmingham, ‘Manufacturer of all Kinds of Swords, Sword-hilts, Bayonets, Ram-rods, Matchets &c.’, regarding both the volme (3,000) and nature of the weapons ordered. They were, in fact, to be fair to Burke, brutal foot-long blades designed for the sans culottes to eviscerate the horses of their mounted opponents. The editors conclude the letter with this fascinating footnote:

  Burke read this letter to the House of Commons on 4 March [Parliamentary History, XXX, 554]. Two days later William Maxwell wrote to him complaining of ‘Certain Slanders’ which ‘have been Countenanced by a Speech of your’s in the house of Commons’ [Ms at Sheffield]. Burke is reported to have given Maxwell an interview in which his behaviour was ‘more temperate’ than it had been in the House [Morning Post, 16 March]. Shortly afterwards Maxwell seems to have fled to France, where he had obtained an appointment in the French Army [The Despatches of Earl Gower, ed. Browning, p. 260].

  Nor were Riddell and Maxwell the only intimates of Burns to lock horns with Burke; William Roscoe of Liverpool was also centrally involved. Roscoe wrote perhaps the most famous pro-French/radical song of that decade. It haunted Hazlitt for the rest of his life as a bitter elegy rather than a celebratory anthem. Roscoe wrote ‘O’er the vinecover’d hills and gay regions of France’ in 1791. On his death a copy of the song was found in Burns’s hand among his papers. This copy was returned by Maria Riddell to Roscoe. These are the relevant lines:

  Let Burke like a bat from the splendour retire,

  A splendour too strong for his eyes;

  Let pedants and fools his effusions admire,

  Entrapt in his cobwebs like flies

  Shall insolent Sophistry hope to prevail

  When Reason opposes her weight.

  The ‘cobweb’ image of the great Irish spider was arguably to provoke Burns to one of his most complex political poems, The Cobweb, the penultimate poem in this section. (For the highly relevant conflict between Roscoe and Burke, see The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. IX, ed. R.B. McDowell, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 24–5).

  Also highly important is the fact that Burns is the only poet of the period to describe Burke on the basis of his Irish origins, as ‘Paddy Burke’, in When Guilford Good. The Dagger also describes Burke as ‘Paddy’. Also, the earlier poem rhymes ‘Burke’ with ‘Turk’ in the same fashion as The Dagger (ll. 27–9). Ll. 5–9 are echoed in Burns’s The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer:

  Dempster, a true blue Scot I’se warran

  Thee, aith detesting, chaste Kilkerran;

  An’ that glib-gabbet Highland baron,

  The Laird o Graham;

  An’ ane, a chap that’s damn’d auldfarran,

  Dundas his name.

  These old Scots words, ‘glib-gabbet’ and ‘auldfarran’ are uncommon among other Scottish radical poets of the period, a point emphasised by McGuirk in an American review of Robert Burns: The Lost Poems where she lists ‘dainty chiel’, ‘fient a hair’, ‘Demosthenes or Tully’, the rhyming of ‘happy’ with ‘nappy’, ‘rhetoric and logic’, ‘clishmaclaver’, ‘honest heart’ and the repeated image of ‘gullies’ and ‘whittles’ – daggers’ as stock-in-trade language of Burns (Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Newsletter, 1
997, Books in Review, pp. 14– 15). In fact, The Dagger is without doubt the work of a poet steeped in the úuvre of Scots song, as Burns certainly was.

  The burlesque of ‘Now Paddy be nae langer rude,/ But lay aside your storming’ (ll. 55–63) is echoed in Burns’s The Ordination:

  Now Roberston, harangue nae mair

  But steek your gab for ever;

  Or try the wicked town of Ayr,

  For there they’ll think you clever;

  Or, nae reflection on your lear,

  You may commence a shaver.

  The notion of Burke trying and failing to ‘shew the Swinish Multitude’ the ‘folly o’ reforming’ politics is similar to a line of prose written by Burns to George Thomson. Burns wrote ‘& shew the swinish multitude that they are but beasts & like beasts must be led by the nose & goaded in the backside’ (Letter 632). For this Burke too, the masses or ‘swine are ay sae damned headstrang, /They’ll aiblins no believe ye’.

  The pantheon of contemporary radical icons, Colonel McLeod, Thomas Erskine, Charles James Fox and Charles Grey are praised in Burns’s Here’s A Health tae Them That’s Awa. While any radical lyricists might applaud these Scottish and English politicians, close reading of the newspaper and printed songs of the period rarely, if ever, mention classical radical icons Demosthenes and Tully (Ci-cero), as mentioned in The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer, ‘Whom auld Demosthenes or Tully,/ Might own for brithers’. Burns, having previously and singularly grouped these radicals together, classical and modern, appears to have done so again.

  The final burlesque on Burke is that no matter how loud the public laughs at his extremism, the more he rants, oblivious to ‘Common Sense’, which, in The Holy Fair was off and up the ‘Cowgate’, but here, is simply lost to Burke. Not only does the poem end with such Burns-like rhymes as ‘nappy’ and ‘happy’, but its closing sentiment dovetails with his known sentiments concerning the British constitution: he inscribed a copy of De Lolme’s The British Constitution, ‘Mr Burns presents this book to the Library, & begs they will take it as a creed of British Liberty – untill they find a better’. Ll. 83–5 of The Dagger reads ‘And may our Constitution stand / The warld’s pride and wonder, / Ilk coming day’. The final point which convinced McGuirk of the poem’s provenance is Burns’s peculiar skill, clear in the final stanza, of ‘providing ironic assent to a position he really is attacking’. (See McGuirk, op cit, p. 15.) Daiches too, in conversation with the editors, emphasised this characteristic poetic device evident in The Dagger.

  Robert Burns and Robert the Bruce

  Of the following cluster of three ‘Bruce’ poems now presented, the middle and long-known one was anonymously published in The Morning Chronicle on 8thMay, 1794 though froma letter of Burns to George Thomson of late August 1793 we know it was composed around that date. Burns’s explanation of the creative impulsion for that poemis also wholly relevant to the other two poems, published pseudonymously in The Edinburgh Gazetteer, despite the fact that their resonance is not that of Scottish vernacular poetry but of Miltonic blank verse:

  I do not know if the old Air, ‘Hey, tuttie taitie’, may rank among this number; but well I know that … it has often filled my eyes with tears. There is a tradition … that it was Robert Bruce’s March at the Battle of Bannockburn. This thought in my yesternight’s evening walk, warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of Liberty & Independence which I threw into a kind of Scots Ode … that one might suppose to be the gallant ROYAL SCOT’S address to his heroic followers on that eventful morning …

  … I had no idea of giving myself any trouble on the Subject, till the accidental recollection of that glorious struggle for Freedom, associated with the glowing ideas of some other struggles of the same nature, not quite so ancient, roused my Rhyming Mania (Letter 582).

  After quoting the poem, Burns adds: ‘So may God ever defend the cause of TRUTH and LIBERTY, as he did that day!—Amen!’ The other two blank verse poems are, literally, the answer to this prayer as the solder/saint victor, rather than the martyred Wallace, returns as visionary upholder of Scotland’s endangered freedom. How endangered it was can be gauged that these poems were written at the nadir of reformist, radical fortunes with the terrible impact of the Sedition Trials and Braxfield running fast and loose with a Scottish legal system inherently inadequate in itself regarding the definition of treason.

  While Bruce never quite occupied the place of Wallace in Burns’s soul, the seeds of his devotion to him were early sown in this self-dramatising account of an early visit to Bannockburn:

  … two hours ago, I said a fervent prayer for old Caledonia over the hole in a blue-whin-stone where Robert de Bruce fixed his Royal Standard on the banks of Bannockburn (Letter 131).

  Further, the intrusion of spiritual aid at a moment of a dark night for the national soul had also appeared in The Vision. As McGuirk (p. 208) suggests, Burns derived this from a Ramsay forgery also titled The Vision which deals with the national crisis caused by John Balliol’s appeasement of the English king. If Ramsay’s lines influenced The Vision, they resonate even more deeply in the two Bruce poems:

  Quhilk held a thistle in his paw,

  And round his collar graift I saw

  This poesie pat and plain,

  Nemo me impune lacess

  –et: —In Scots Nane sall oppress

  Me, unpunist with pain.

  Still schaking, I durst naithing say,

  Till he with kynd accent

  Sayd, ‘Fere let nocht thy hairt affray,

  I cum to hier thy plaint;

  Thy graining and maining

  Hath laitlie reikd myne eir,

  Debar then affar then

  All eiryness or feir.’

  (Ever Green, 1724; reprinted in Longer Scottish Poems, Vol. 2, ed. Crawford, Hewitt, and Law, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987, p. 33.)

  The Ghost of Bruce

  First printed in The Edinburgh Gazetteer, 16th July, 1793.

  As late I stroll’d through Bannockburn’s proud field,

  At midnight hour, close by the Bore Stene stood

  A Form Divine illumin’d round with fire,

  In ancient armour spendidly array’d:

  5 ‘Stop passenger,’ he said; ‘art thou a Scot?

  Does Caledonian blood flow in thy veins?

  Art thou a friend or foe to Freedom’s cause?’

  A friend, aghast I said of Scottish blood.

  ‘Then fear not,’ he said; ‘the Ghost of Bruce

  10 Four hundred years and more, in quiet rest,

  The shade of Bruce has silent kept the tomb,

  But rest no longer can his Spirit have:

  His country is in danger; chains anew

  Are forging fast t’ enslave his Native Land.

  15 Go forth, my Son, for every Scot is mine

  Whom brave unconquer’d Caledonia owns;

  Go tell my Country that the Shade of Bruce

  Is risen to protect her injur’d Rights; —

  To reinstate in splendour, as before,

  20 Her Liberty near lost — bid her not fear —

  The time approaches fast when Brucian fire

  Shall slash destruction on her perjur’d foes.

  My Broad Egeant Shield shall guard my Sons,

  My Arm shall bring them Victory and Peace,

  25 And Happiness shall crown their honest toils.’

  Thus spake the Ghost — and in a flame flew south:

  Night seiz’d her mantle — and I heard no more.

  Agrestis: April 16th 1793. Banks of Bannockburn.

  Given that (see To Robert Graham of Fintry) Burns had under severe Excise scrutiny lied about his connection to Captain Johnston’s Edinburgh Gazetteer, there is no reason to disbelieve that he would not subsequently pursue a course of pseudonymous publication in that newspaper. He continued such activity in The Morning Chronicle. See, for example, the following key 1794 poem Bruce’s Address to His Troops at Bannockburn. The name
‘Agrestis’ is hardly a heavy disguise given its farming allusion and its obvious connection to the ‘Agricola’ pseudonym which he had used in Ode on The Departed Regency Bill and Epitaph for Dr. Adam Smith.

  Burns’s use of Miltonic resonant blank verse is ambivalent. On the one hand, it is a medium with which he would not be normally associated. His use of the medium was desultory and insignificant. Like his poetic generation, however, Burns was haunted by the shadow of the great republican poet. Leaving historical accuracy aside, if a Scottish King is to become manifest, it should be within a democratic, heightened tone and form. There is, given spiritual intrusion into the political realm, another distinctly Miltonic touch, to be echoed in the other poem, in the fact that the work is deliberately dated 16th April, 1793 which was Easter Sunday. The resurrected Christ/Bruce is to rise in an act of desperately needed national salvation. There are in the text several other Burnsian ‘fingerprints’.

  The question ‘Art thou a Scot?’ is taken from William Hamilton’s The Life and Heroic Actions of Sir William Wallace, a work Burns not only knew but adapted two lines from for Scots Wha Hae. Abbreviating the world ‘to’ to merely the ‘t” is common in the poetry of Burns but is exceptionally rare in the general poetry of this era, as in the above example, ‘Are forging fast t’ enslave his Native Land’. In Bruce’s personal description of ‘brave unconquer’d Caledonia’ there is a remarkable echo of Burns’s earlier song Caledonia which reads ‘Bold, independent, unconquer’d and free’. The fact that Scotland was ‘unconquered’ under Bruce was evidently a key historical point for Burns and this point is stressed from the mouth of Bruce himself. If we add to this accumulative evidence the somewhat minor observation that the final ‘e’ from ‘uncon-quer’d’ is dropped by Burns in his song and is dropped from pronunciation in The Ghost of Bruce, this type of consistency is surely expected if Burns is the author. Such practice was not commonplace typography among newspaper printers. The powerful image of historical Scottish martial resistence to tyranny, evoked here by the return of Bruce’s ‘Shade’ to address the poet, is reminiscent in tone and language of the lines Burns wrote in Prologue Spoken by Mr. Woods: