by Robert Burns
The essay’s concluding argument contrasts anarchy and tyranny, ‘The true medium between anarchy and tyranny ought to be strictly kept in view’. This is precisely the view expressed emphatically in italics by Burns in his 1793 newspaper published poem, On The Commemoration Of Rodney’s Victory, ‘Be Anarchy curs’d — and be Tyranny d [amn]’d’. A further similarity exists with the same poem, where it is argued that reform is necessary before ‘our Constitution be effaced, bring it back to those principles on which it is established: that is, make the theory and practice tally better together’. The poem records ‘And here’s the grand fabric, OUR FREE CONSTITUTION / As built on the base of THE GREAT REVOLUTION!’ In both examples it is ‘our constitution’, not simply ‘the consititution’. The poet’s handwritten note within John Syme’s copy of Jean Louis De Lolme’s book on the British Consitution, indicating sarcastically that it would suffice until a better was created, is resonant in this last remark. That Burns was deeply read in Constitutional matters, as was Robert Riddell, his closest aristocratic friend during the Dumfries years, and acutely aware of political developments at this time, only makes it more plausible that he would compose such an essay.
It is now known after the appearance of Ode for General Washington’s Birthday, that Burns wrote, in controlled rage, of England as a country in the grip of political tyranny. Most radical commentators saw the suspension of Habeas Corpus as a significant shift towards futher erosion of individual rights. The possibility seemed real that unaccountable and dictatorial rule by a ‘Star Chamber’ was to be the next step in Pitt’s campaign of terror to crush radical dissent. The current essay asks the question whether or not England can remain a free country, answering in the negative, similar to the manner in which The Tree of Liberty deals with the same topic:
But seek the forest round and round,
And soon ’twill be agreed, man,
That sic a tree can not be found
’Twixt London and the Tweed, man.
Between London and the river Tweed, is of course, England, not Britain. Burns does not condemn the political violence that occurred in revolutionary France in his song, nor is it condemned in the essay. Indeed, the massacres by Catherine the Great and the King of Prussia, in the name of law and order, are mentioned as greater crimes. What is seen as an equal crime to anything perpetuated by the French is the act of those British politicians who voted for the continuation of the war. They are blamed as being as unfeeling as a Roberspierre. Moreover, it would be expected that Burns would hit at Pitt’s receipt of further patronage due to the war (See A New Song, or A Wet Day at Walmer Castle) and his increase in despotic powers, not only over the nation’s purse by additional taxation, but, driven by ambition, the deeper urge to be remembered in the pages of history. (This of course, is the theme of Lines on Ambition, also signed ‘A. Briton’ and already ascribed to Burns in this edition.) If The Tree of Liberty was written during early January 1795, its reformist sentiments – its concluding prayer that ‘Auld England’ may eventually plant the ‘far-famed tree’ of liberty, meaning reform, is consistent with the new political essay.
General acceptance of the new prose work is of essential importance to Burnsian studies. If, as we believe it to be Burns’s last public commentary on wider British politics and the European scene, it not only maps out precisely what he thought of the Pitt government, and its involvement against France, but it answers emphatically the nineteenth-and twentieth-century notion that Burns was confused on political matters. Indeed, it not only reveals his passionate democratic reformism, his intellectual involvement with current affairs, his depth of knowledge in political theory and historical allusion, in particular Roman history, but a sharp ability to argue a case cogently, and logically, with a poet’s eye to penetrate acidly that somewhat intangible, hidden aspect of a nation’s history, the motive and ambition of its leading politicians. One can, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, begin to see that in an unjust, socially and economically rigid hierarchical society, dominated by an oligarchy of aristocratical privilege, a critical thinking, democratic national poet, unable to accept his inferior social position, unable to keep ‘silent and obedient’, was, in a sense, the ruling élite’s worst nightmare.
Without manuscript authority, the provenance of the new prose cannot be proven beyond doubt, but the evidence, contextual and textual, convincingly says Burns. That he would deliver on a promise should be no surprise. If correct, we finally have his last, emphatic political statement proving beyond doubt he was a committed democratic reformer.
1 French for mounted policeman. Burns knew French well and might have heard this phrase from Dr William Maxwell who spoke fluent French, or Maria Riddell.
The Cob Web – A Song
First printed in The Morning Chronicle, 22nd August, 1795.
The sweets of a blessing
Are had by possessing,
Hail! Britons! the cause is your own;
You are wonderful great,
5 You have Princes and State,
And the wisest and best on a Throne!
What a contrast is France,
Where is now the gay dance,
They are no way so happy as we;
10 We have flourishing Trade,
Plenty, beer, meat, and bread!
While madly they starve to be free!
It was once so for us,
Indeed it was thus,
15 Like them we once swore to maintain,
The blessing that God,
Sent to cheer man’s abode,
And preserve free from blemish or stain.
Thus, they might suppose,
20 To be led by the nose,
Was not for a People, like them;
That we being free,
Should with freemen agree,
Nor those who sought freedom condemn.
25 But there they was wrong,
We have alter’d our song,
Resolv’d to have nothing to do —
With a good, full of evil,
Devis’d by the Devil,
30 That freedom for which the French rue.
Yet, lest it be thought,
We lov’d self to a fault,
We offer’d Court blessings to treat them;
Ah! could you expect
35 This they would reject,
And force us, unwilling, to beat them.
First a King, good as may be,
We made of a Baby,
Then demanded they’d fawn on the Child!
40 But, so wicked were they,
That they would not obey,
But beat us! for being so wild.
We brib’d to divide them,
Tried all arts to chide ’em,
45 To starve them, made a great fuss;
When, some Demon of Hell,
Inverting the spell,
Turn’d the picture of Famine on us!
So great is the blessing
50 We got by redressing
Each nation’s faults but our own;
To destroy them, their Trade,
We, their country invade,
While our own is cut up to the bone.
55 But courage my Friends
We may yet gain our ends,
Perhaps in a circle they’ll meet:
When, nine out of ten
They’ve kill’d of our men,
60 And the rest are left something to eat.
A. Briton
As an introduction to this song, the political prose essay signed ‘A. Briton’ is printed first, in chronological order. Both appear in The Morning Chronicle during 1795, and are signed under the same name. While it may not automatically follow that one author wrote both, evidence suggests that this is highly probable. The prose by ‘A. Briton’ employs the ironic description ‘the wisest and best of Kings’, while the song, written several months later, contains the lexically similar, ironic ‘And the wisest and best on a Throne!’ If, as already argue
d, Burns is the author of the prose, then, there is a strong case to argue that the song, too, is his.
This work was provisionally ascribed to Burns in Hogg’s The Lost Poems (1997). There are several factors which suggest it may be from Burns. He, as we have seen, promised to send radical work to The Morning Chronicle (Letter 620B). For discussion of this crucial pen-name, see notes to Lines on Ambition. As also mentioned in the case for the new radical essay, Burns wrote to The Morning Chronicle in January 1795 and emphasised that he was ‘a Briton’ (Letter 654).
The song is almost certainly by a Scot, given the rhyme of ‘trade’ and ‘bread’ (ll. 10–11) where the latter is pronounced braid. More important, the song contains a peculiar, deliberate ungrammatical use of ‘was’ (rather than were) for colloquial effect, ‘But there they was wrong’ (l. 25). After an exhaustive check of period poetry scanning the eighteenth-century Poetry Database, and printed works, only one poet appears out of the crowd who employed this language quirk, Burns. His non-grammatical ‘was’ is found, inter alia, in John Barleycorn, ‘There was three Kings unto the east’.
Textually, the song begins with ironic assent, setting up the target of attack by appearing to praise everything British, in constrast to the apparently monstrous French. In reality, the poem is a brillaintly ironic attack on the anti-French war policy of William Pitt. The notion that Britain has ‘the wisest and best’ on a ‘throne’ is absurd, given the madness of King George III and the public knowledge that Pitt and Dundas were behind almost every Royal Proclamation printed in the daily newspaper during the 1790s. In truth, King George remained a background puppet, in the shadow of Pitt’s increasingly overt abuse of power.
The theme of the song is of Britons being caught in Pitt’s political ‘cob-web’ of ambition and deceit. Burns’s favourite contemporary radical song at this period, which he copied out in his own hand and quoted to Mrs Dunlop in January 1795, The Vine Cover’d Hills and Gay Regions of France, by William Roscoe, refers to the British people ‘caught in his [Pitt’s] cob-web like flies’. This song, the Burns-copied manuscript of which was presented to Roscoe by Maria Riddell after Burns’s death, is probably the progenitor of the new song’s title. Britain was being brought to its knees. Hunger and at times, famine, occurred in parts of England and Scotland, as reported in the press during the winter of 1794–5. Ll. 47–52 allude to this, suggesting that the Pitt government’s early plan of starving the French into submission had backfired and was having such an effect at home. This point, far from being poetic fantasy, is eloquently put by the great Glasgow radical, Professor John Millar, a year later in The Scots Chronicle, September 2nd, 1796:
We thought of no less than uniting all the states of Europe, whether great or small, against the French Republic; and we expected to employ successfully the two great engines of force and famine for affecting our purposes What a dreadful reverse of fortune we have sustained!
In these years destitution and famine are omnipresent in radical writing, culminating in Coleridge’s Macbeth-derived incantational attack on Pitt, Fire, Famine and Slaughter.
While we know Burns personally experienced food shortages in the first three months of 1796, when he complained of his family going for days without food, his was not an isolated example. Dumfries witnessed food shortage problems in 1795 when this radical song was composed. David Staig wrote to Robert Dundas, Lord Advocate, on 4th February, 1795 requesting help due to extreme shortages of oatmeal in Dumfriesshire: ‘The enclosed memorial was handed to me this morning by our Magistrates … under this alarm of scarcity… it is impossible for me as Collector of the Customs, to give the wished for relief.’ (RH 2/4/78/f.25). A pamphlet by Dumfries bakers and grain dealers complains that grain from the area was being shipped out of Scotland and not enough was available to them to make a living or feed the local people (RH 2/4/78/f.27–28). Although there are no newspaper accounts of food riots in Dumfries during early 1795, there did exist a serious food problem, partly caused by exorbitant prices and exportation of grain and oatmeal from the area to London. (RH 2/4/79/f.3).
One critic has suggested The Cob Web might be the work of Dr Alexander Geddes, a radical Scot living in London. Granted Geddes was a prolific pro-Fox poet but he did not employ this pen-name. The entire canon of Geddes is extant in Chelmsford at the Essex County Record Office and the Scottish Catholic Archive in Edinburgh: both were examined. It is not among his papers. Not one of Geddes’s radical works is known ever to have been destroyed. His complete poetic jottings and journals are extant, and they contain many of his favourite works copied out at least twice. Textually, there is no example among his poems where he employed the colloquial, common-language usage of ‘was’ in place of ‘were’. Nor does he display the Burnsian skill of ironic assent to what he is actually attacking so evident here. Given this circumstantial and stylistic evidence, the song is attributed to Burns. Without definitive manuscript evidence, the attribution cannot be made with absolute certainty, but considering the evidence for the new political essay and its lexical similarity with The Cob Web, it appears that the same ‘A. Briton’ composed both prose and song.
Along with the poem’s comic, sophisticated dramatic inversion, there are two other elements which strongly suggest Burns. First, as in Ode on General Washington’s Birthday, the notion of a degenerate England betraying her libertarian heritage in order to destroy France. Second, his capacity for integrating on-going political events into his poetry. What ll. 37–9 refer to is the English support for solving the French crisis by returning the Dauphin to the throne as Child-King. This was mooted in 1791 when he was ten but the intended Louis XVII died on June 8, 1795 just prior to this poem’s composition. Implicit in the poem (ll. 13–18) is the promise of freedom sent by God through the true child-king, Jesus Christ, as opposed to the false, worldly child-king. Burns did, indeed, belong to that category of writers defined by Herman Melville as those ‘who breathe that unshackled democratic spirit of Christianity in all things’.
John Anderson My Joe
First printed in The Morning Chronicle, 5th December, 1795.
John Anderson my Joe, John,
I wonder what you mean,
Approving of the Bills, John
The Bills you ne’er had seen!
5 ’Twas surely very foolish, John,
And how could you do so?
Pray haud your tongue and say nae mair, hold, no more
John Anderson my Joe!
The story of the Phaeton, John, high carriage
10 Was but an auld wife’s saw, old, tale
And like another Phaeton, John,
You’ll surely have a fa’: fall
This talking will undo you, John,
And lack of truth much mo’ — more
15 You’ve neither brains nor gift o’ Gab; conversation
John Anderson my Joe!
Hogg, The Lost Poems, pp. 189–90, attributed this poem to Burns. Burns had already adapted the traditional John Anderson, My Jo in a sexually expurgated, personal version. It is characteristic of him to use a traditional song for political purposes. John Anderson is the Scottish John Bull (see New Song or A Wet Day at Walmer Castle). Simplistic and sycophantic, he toes the Tory line by paying excessive war taxes and basking in a national glory not his own. The use of ‘phaeton’ is double-edged, being in Burns’s usage, both mythological and contemporary. Ll. 9–12 allude to the fable of the son of Helios (the sun god), who rode his chariot too close to the earth, causing Zeus to strike him with a thunderbolt to prevent his incendiary danger to the planet. The contemporary meaning for ‘phaeton’, for Burns, as in his To the Hon. Mr. Wm. R. Maule of Panmure on his High Phaeton, is this sort of carriage as a sign of social vanity and fiscal iniquity.
By 1795, the vinegar on the sponge for heart-broken radicals was their inability to carry the common people with them in their programme of anti-establishment reform. Hazlitt bitterly summed it up thus.
There is something in the human mind,
which requires an object for it to repose on; and driven from all other sources of pride and pleasure, it falls in love with misery and grows enamoured of oppression. It gazes after the liberty, the happiness, the comfort, the knowledge, which have been torn from it by the unfeeling gripe of wealth and power, as the poor debtor gazes with envy and wonder at the Lord Mayor’s show. Thus is the world by degrees reduced to a spital or lazar house, where the people waste away with want and disease, and are thankful if they are only suffered to crawl forgotten to their graves. (‘The Times Newspaper. On the Connexion between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants’, The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, Vol. 4, Political Essays, ed. by Duncan Wu, Pickering & Chatto, 1998, p. 139).
PART SIX
Posthumous Works Collected 1796–2000
O Once I Lov’d a Bonie Lass
Tune: I Am a Man Unmarried
First published in 1803 in S.M.M.
O once I lov’d a bonie lass,
An’ aye I love her still,
An’ whilst that virtue warms my breast
I’ll love my handsome Nell.
5 As bonie lasses I hae seen, have
And mony full as braw many, attractive
But for a modest gracefu’ mien
The like I never saw.
