Jean Armour’s case was different, though it commenced, like Betty’s, in purely physical attraction. To begin with, the status of the girls was different, even though both were red-knuckled, barefooted country lasses. Betty was merely a farm servant whose family ties, whatever they were, were already broken. Jean was the eighteen-year-old daughter of James Armour, a well-to-do master-mason and contractor in Mauchline. She was educated to the extent of being able to read the Bible and write her own name. The story of her first meeting with Burns is probably legend, yet in spirit the anecdote is at least partly true. Burns at a village dance, embarrassed by a too-faithful collie which followed him about the floor, remarked as he expelled the animal that he wished he could find a lass to love him as well as his dog did. Whether or not Jean actually asked him a few days later, when he found her bleaching linen on the green, if he had yet found such a lass, the fact was that he had. From that moment until his death Jean lavished upon him a docile and much-enduring devotion which leaves nothing derogatory in the comparison. She was playing with fire and must have known it. The scandal of Betty Paton was still fresh; Burns was a notorious man, glorying in the reputation of village Lothario and writing verses to warn the Mauchline belles how devastating he was. Experience had convinced him that all women are sisters under the skin—a dangerous half-truth which made trouble for him when he met women of another social level. They may all be sisters under the skin, but not on it or outside it. The fascination exerted so successfully over girls of his own class was in fact disastrous training for subsequent encounters with ladies. A lady may yield to a lover like any peasant lass, but she expects some finesse in his approach. But in the summer and autumn of 1785 Burns seemed as likely to enter Edinburgh drawing-rooms as to enter Parliament. He was merely an unsuccessful tenant-farmer with a dangerous talent for writing satirical verse and a dangerous light in his eye when an attractive young woman was in sight.
Between the tradition of his first meeting with Jean in 1785 and the beginning of surviving references to the affair in February, 1786, its history is a blank. On the surface Jean’s experience merely repeated Betty Paton’s. She surrendered to Burns and in due course endured the consequences. Yet on Burns’s side the cases were not alike. However brazenly he may have begun his courtship he soon found that Jean roused deeper emotions than Betty ever had. His first extant reference to the affair, apart from verses in praise of Jean’s charms, was on February 17th, 1786, when he told John Richmond—who after a similar scrape had fled to Edinburgh—that he had important news ‘not of the most agreable’ with respect to himself. In other words, Jean had told him she was pregnant. Entirely on his own initiative Burns undertook to do the right thing he had successfully avoided, or been dissuaded from, doing for Betty Paton. Sometime in March he gave Jean, if not marriage lines, at least some written acknowledgement that she was or would be his wife. That he acted in a certain glow of self-righteousness is a fair deduction from the violence of his subsequent reaction. Rab Mossgiel, the village Lothario, had behaved like a man of honour and expected due recognition of his conduct.
The recognition he got was humiliating in the extreme. The details can be reconstructed only by inference from the result. Apparently Jean’s parents, suspecting her condition, began to question her. She produced Burns’s written pledge. A domestic storm burst, not so much because Jean was to bear Burns’s child as because he expected Jean to bear his name. To James Armour an illegitimate grandchild was preferable to such a son-in-law as Robert Burns. Jean meekly surrendered her lines to her father—throughout her life she was usually passive in the hands of male authority—and Armour carried the document to Burns’s patron and friend, Robert Aiken, whom he persuaded to cut out the names. Not the least extraordinary element in the affair is the apparent belief of a successful lawyer that a contract could be voided merely by mutilating the written evidence. Armour’s desire publicly to humiliate Burns was greater than his desire to protect his daughter. He succeeded admirably. In the same letter in which the poet told Gavin Hamilton that the document was mutilated he declared he ‘had not a hope or even a wish to make her mine after her damnable conduct’, yet amid his execrations he paused to invoke a blessing on his ‘poor once-dear misguided girl’. The letter was the first of a series of denunciations and repudiations of Jean much too loud and too shrill to be convincing. They suggest that Burns had to talk at the top of his voice to maintain the degree of indifference which he felt self-respect called for.
Perhaps nothing in Burns’s whole life more completely demonstrates the impossibility of judging him and the society in which he was reared by the standards of nineteenth-century middle-class respectability. When James Armour learned that the subscription for the Kilmarnock Poems was a success he showed that, though unwilling that his daughter should bear Burns’s name, he was quite willing she should share Burns’s money. Accordingly he sued out a writ in meditatione fugae to require Burns to guarantee the support of Jean’s expected child. The news reached Burns, probably from Jean herself, and he acted promptly. By formal deed of assignment he conveyed to Gilbert not only his share in Mossgiel, but also the entire proceeds of his forthcoming poems in consideration of Gilbert’s undertaking to provide for Betty Paton’s child. Burns had checkmated James Armour, and so doing had almost evened the honours for ungenerous conduct. By nineteenth-century standards his conduct was caddish, but by the same standards Armour could have done only one of two things—either expel his daughter from his home, or protect her technical good name by insisting upon marriage however distasteful the prospective son-in-law was. But even by his own standards Burns was acting ignobly. The man who had written
‘But devil take the lousy loon
Denies the bairn he got
Or leaves the merry lass he lov’d
To wear a ragged coat,’
and who less than six weeks after the deed of assignment eloquently reproached John Richmond for neglecting his late mistress and future wife and her baby daughter, was allowing spite to degrade him below the standards of the class to which he belonged by birth, and much further below the standards he had consciously set for himself. This was not acting according to the example of Harley the Man of Feeling. If the episode stood by itself it might be easier to condone. Unfortunately it is merely the first conspicuous incident in a series which includes his remarks about Jean to Clarinda and Bob Ainslie, his neglect of Jenny Clow, his attack upon dead Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive, and his lampoons of Maria Riddell, and which justifies Henley’s phrase that such things ‘roused the cad’ in Burns. Where women were concerned, it was always too easy for him to drop the thin cloak of acquired culture and revert to his peasanthood.
Alongside the Armour quarrel runs the mystery of Mary Campbell. Burns himself began the mystery by his curiously veiled allusions to the affair, but the real work of obfuscation was done by biographers who erected upon exiguous foundations of fact an ornate superstructure of legend.