BURNS AND THE UNION

I am left with a strong impression of a man of warm humanity, lucid intelligence, and firm nationalist convictions. This last quality is so obvious that it is surprising how little is said about it in the vast literature about him. It seems that we are still suffering from a hangover of nineteenth-century attitudes. Then the Monarch, the Empire, and the Union were all regarded as above criticism and any awkward evidence against them was simply ignored.

That is why we have had to wait for more than a century for new editions of Walter Scott's Malachi Letters and Lockhart of Carnwath's Memoirs, and why this aspect of Burns has been forgotten or even denied. It is time that we had a new look at one of the strongest feelings which inspired him, his love of Scotland and his detestation of the Union.

Burns himself tells us how he thought it began. In his famous autobiographical letter to Dr John Moore on August 2, 1787, he said: ``The story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.''

Thomas Carlyle said that it was not a prejudice but a ``deep and generous'' patriotism, for ``Certainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn with warmer glow than in that of Burns.''

If Burns placed Wallace first, no doubt because of his humbler origin, uncompromising patriotism, and dreadful end, he also held Bruce in high regard. He refers to both of them in a letter to Robert Muir on August 26, 1787, where he describes the first day of his tour to the Highlands:

This morning I knelt at the tomb of Sir John and Graham, the gallant friend of the immortal Wallace; and two hours ago I said a fervent prayer for Old Caledonia over the hole in a blue whinstone, where Robert de Bruce fixed his royal standard on the banks of Bannockburn.

Burns's diaries of his Border and Highland tours consist mostly of very brief notes, but his entry about this event is passionate. He imagines his ``heroic countrymen'' approaching ``the oppressive, insulting, bloodthirsty foe,'' and ``gloriously triumphant, exulting in their heroic royal leader and rescued liberty and independence.''

These thoughts on the field of Bannockburn immediately suggest the words of Scots Wha Hae, although the song was not written until 16 years later on about August 30, 1793. He described the circumstances in a letter to George Thomson and added after the words of the song: ``So may God ever defend the cause of Truth and Liberty, as he did that day! Amen!''

There is a further postscript to the letter: ``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.''

What were these other struggles? Burns may have been thinking generally of French revolutionary ideas, but there was another event much nearer home and of a precise coincidence of date. On the same August 30 the trial of Thomas Muir of Huntershill for sedition began in Edinburgh. Muir, who advocated parliamentary reform and Scottish independence, was sentenced to transportation.

In Scots Wha Hae therefore, Burns was drawing a parallel between Bruce's struggle for the Independence of Scotland and the situation in his own time. Murray Pittock has pointed out that the song also uses Jacobite language. ``For Scotland's King and Law'' is a Jacobite phrase, and ``chains and slaverie'' could refer to the Jacobite prisoners who had been transported as slaves to the colonies. Pittock says that ``the idea of a heroic, traditional Scotland as having to wage perpetual war against English might and gold in order to secure its very existence was one central to Jacobite images of native heroism.''

It may seem paradoxical that a man of egalitarian spirit like Burns should have looked back nostalgically, not only to Bruce, but to the entire line of the Scottish monarchy. In his ``Address to Edinburgh'', for instance:

Edina! Scotia's darling seat!

All hail thy palaces and tow'rs,

Where once, beneath a Monarch's feet,

Sat legislation's sov'reign pow'rs.

That last line is quite specific. His regret for the loss of the Scottish monarchy is regret for the loss of sovereignty and legislative power. His bitter sense of loss, and his Jacobitism, is even more apparent in the lines ``written on the Window of an Inn in Stirling'':

Here Stewarts once in glory reign'd,

And laws for Scotland's weal ordain'd;

An Idiot race, to honour lost -

Who knows them best despise them most.

These feelings for the ``injured Stewart line'', more, I think because they were Scottish than because they were royal, were no doubt an element in Burns's Jacobitism; but there were others which were probably even more compelling. George Rosie has recently drawn attention to a passage in the writings of Hugh Miller where he suggests that Burns was in a state of intellectual confusion in professing both Jacobitism and Jacobinism at the same time. In fact, this combination of ideas was not unusual and was certainly not confined to Burns. There were solid reasons for it.

Jacobitism in Scotland was largely a patriotic, nationalist attempt to overthrow the Union. Also, as Murray Pittock has argued, Jacobite and Jacobin shared the view that the Hanoverians had caused ``something rotten in the state of Scotland'' and that there was a need to defend traditional values against an oppressor for whom money was all that mattered.

In supporting Jacobitism, Burns knew exactly what he was doing. He did not imagine that a Stewart could be restored to the throne. It was an expression of his detestation of the Union and of the arrogance and corruption of wealth. Walter Scott, who had Jacobite leanings himself, wrote of Burns that ``a youth of his warm imagination and ardent patriotism'', brought up at that time could ``hardly escape'' Jacobitism. Burns wrote or adapted about 30 Jacobite songs and they include some of his best and most passionate.

Andrew Noble has suggested that Burns's analysis of the Scottish situation is as valid now as it was in his time. In Noble's words, Burns was concerned with ``the corrupting politics and psychology generated by the Union; the degeneration of parliament and other British civic and fiscal institutions, causing increasing disparity between rich and poor''. All of these things are at least as obvious now as they were in the eighteenth century.

There are other ways in which the ideas of Burns are still apposite to our present situation. He wrote in a letter to Mrs Dunlop on April 10, 1790: ``Alas! have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her Independence, and even her very name!'' That is precisely how many of us still feel. The same is true of:

We're bought and sold for English gold -

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.

In his autobiographical letter to John Moore, Burns said that it was after coming across Fergusson's Scotch Poems that he ``strung my wildly-sounding, rustic lyre with emulating vigour''. Both in verse and prose he paid many tributes to Ramsay and Fergusson as his models and inspiration, from the reference to them both in the Preface to the Kilmarnock edition to the inscription which he placed on Fergusson's grave: ``My elder brother in misfortune/By far my elder brother in the muse.''

Like Burns, Ramsay and Fergusson wrote in Scots and, like him again, both were strongly nationalist in feeling and wrote poems against the Union. Does this suggest that writing poetry in Scots was in itself a nationalist act of defiance against the prevailing pressures of Anglicisation?

Burns told George Thomson on September 16, 1792, that he had an ``enthusiastic attachment to the Poetry and Music of old Caledonia''. This was an enthusiasm which he often expressed in his letters and Commonplace Book. He was determined to preserve the melodies of Scottish songs by writing new words where the old ones had been lost, were inadequate, or where only the refrain survived.

It was a patriotic labour of love, for which he refused to take any payment, similar in spirit to Walter Scott's collection of Border Ballads. Burns began to contribute songs to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum in November 1787 and to Thomson's Select Collection of Scottish Airs in September 1792. He contributed 213 songs to Johnson and 114 to Thomson. With the important exception of Tam O Shanter, this meant that for the last nine years of his life Burns's writing of poetry was almost entirely devoted to songs.

Alexander Scott has suggested that there were two reason for the decline in Burns's satirical writing after the publication of the Kilmarnock edition in 1786, ``rootlessness and respectability''. Burns was rootless because he had left the community which had given him the substance for his attacks on religious orthodoxy and aristocratic privilege, and respectable because he had become an officer in the Excise. That last point is probably the main reason, and in fact the dates neatly coincide.

Burns began to collaborate seriously with the Scots Musical Museum in November 1787 and in January 1788 he wrote to Robert Graham of Fintry to solicit his patronage for an appointment in the Excise. He began work as an Excise Officer in September 1789, and was therefore a civil servant of a government that was in a state of panic over its fear of revolutionary ideas from France. Muir and the others who were sentenced to transportation in 1793 were no more revolutionary in their ideas than Burns himself and he had even attempted to send guns to France to support the Revolution.

Burns clearly understood his vulnerability. He wrote to Mrs Dunlop on December 6, 1792, about an episode in the theatre in Dumfries when God save the King had been hissed and the French revolutionary song, Ca ira, repeatedly called for: For me, I am a Placeman, you know, a very humble one indeed, Heaven knows, but still so much so as to gag me from joining in the cry. - What my private sentiments are, you will find out without an interpreter.

His caution was not sufficient to prevent a denunciation of him as a person disaffected to government, and the Board of Excise ordered an inquiry. He sent two abject and frantic letters to his patron, Robert Graham. Even dismissal from the service, without any more serious penalty, would, he wrote on December 31, 1792, turn his wife and family adrift ``without the necessary support of a miserable existence''.

In the second letter of January 5, 1793, he went through the humiliation of obligatory conformity: ``As to Reform Principles, I look upon the British Constitution, as settled at the Revolution, to be the most glorious Constitution on earth, or that perhaps the wit of man can frame.'' (The Revolution in this case is, of course, that of 1688-89, in which Scotland was still nominally independent with her own parliament.) Graham knew Burns well enough to understand how seriously to take these loyal protestations, but they were sufficient to satisfy the inquisition.

It was, no doubt, as part of the same insurance policy that Burns joined the Dumfries Volunteers on January 31, 1795, and wrote their anthem, Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat?, with the lines:

Be Britain still to Britain true,

Amang ourselves united!

There have been people who have seized on these prudent insincerities to try to represent Burns as a pillar of the establishment and the Union. These were the grounds for Hugh MacDiarmid's complaints about the Burns Clubs which he thought had done precisely that.

MacDiarmid ended his celebrated essay on the subject with a call for us to follow the lead of Burns at long last. ``We can, if we will...... We can still affirm the fearless radical spirit of the true Scotland.''

I suggest that this is the appropriate objective for the Bicentennial year.

n.After a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, Paul H Scott returned to his native Edinburgh to write books and become involved in politics. He is now a senior and high-profile member of the SNP and he has written several acclaimed books on aspects of modern Scottish history