In other words, he was asking Smith—who had not lived in Mauchline for two years—to testify, but not on oath, that Burns had acknowledged the marriage in his presence. Armed with Smith’s letter, and another, he then presented himself again before the minister, who overlooked the doubtful legality of the evidence as two years before he had allowed Burns’s doubtful status as a bachelor. On August 5th Burns and Jean made their formal appearance before the Kirk Session, avowed their marriage as of 1786, and were readmitted to the communion after ‘Mr. Burns gave a Guinea note for the behoof of the Poor.’
All this time Burns was alternating between Mauchline and Ellisland, to the detriment of his interests in each place. A man absent from his farm every other fortnight could scarcely expect work to go forward quickly, but there were no living accommodations for Jean and young Robert until in October a neighbour, moving into Dumfries for the winter, offered Burns the use of his house. But the periods of absence roused Burns once more to lyric fervour for Jean, and the man who six months earlier had pledged undying devotion to Clarinda composed ‘Of a’ the airts’ in tribute to his wife.
But it was the last song that can with complete certainty be connected with Jean. She sank before long to the status of a hard-working, child-bearing domestic fixture, losing her good looks—at first sight of her in 1790 John Syme concluded that Burns’s lyrics in her praise were poetic licence—but keeping her equable temper and her devotion to her husband. Of all the women who had loved Burns more or less, and whom he, more or less, had loved, she alone had to live with him. And yet she continued to love him, not weighing his merits, but pardoning his offences. She had things to pardon, though when he married her Burns thought he had shaken himself ‘loose of a very bad failing.’ Eighteen months after this announcement of reformation, Jean went home to Ayrshire for a visit, and her husband strayed into the arms of Anne Park at the Globe Inn. When the blonde barmaid in due course bore him a child, and died in doing it, Jean took in the little girl and reared her with ‘no distinction shown between that and the rest of their children.’ Maria Riddell, whose words are just quoted, added that Burns told her the story ‘with much sensibility’.
Burns could not take Jean into the society to which he was himself admitted, so she remained unnoticed at home, tending the children and keeping the house in slatternly Scots fashion, but with a sober Scots thrift which probably accounted for her husband’s living within his income and at last dying with little more than the debts incurred during his final illness. Burns seldom spoke of her in his last years, but when he did so it was ‘with a high tribute of respect and esteem’. Maria Riddell—perhaps a prejudiced witness—states that ‘he did not love her, but he was far from insensible to the indulgence and patience, “the meekness with which she bore her faculties” on many occasions very trying to the tempers of most individuals of our sex.’ One suspects, sometimes, that Burns would never have continued to love any woman after he had won her; that no matter who she was, he might still have summed up his marriage as he did to John Beugo:
‘Depend upon it, if you do not make some damned foolish choice, [marriage] will be a very great improvement on the Dish of Life.—I can speak from Experience, tho’ God knows my choice was random as Blind-man’s buff. I like the idea of an honest country Rake of my acquaintance, who, like myself, married lately.—Speaking to me of his late step, “L—d, man,” says he, “a body’s baith cheaper and better sair’t!”’—
Maria Riddell may have been one reason for Burns’s abrupt closure of the correspondence with Clarinda in 1793. After Clarinda had refused to continue it as an emotional communion he no longer needed it as an intellectual one. He had found a woman friend who surpassed Clarinda as much in intellect as she did in social position, and the only occasion on which he reopened communications with Agnes M’Lehose was during his subsequent estrangement from Mrs. Riddell—when he used the opportunity to send Clarinda copies of the crude lampoons he had composed upon Maria.
Walter Riddell, younger brother of Burns’s friend at Friars Carse, had compressed a good deal of experience into the first twenty-eight years of his life. After a short period in the army he had married an heiress who within a year made him a widower and the owner of an estate in Antigua. In 1790 he met at St. Kitts Maria Banks Woodley, youngest daughter of the governor of the Leeward Islands, and after a brief courtship married her when she still lacked two months of being eighteen. Though Maria’s mother was a native of St. Kitts, the girl had been born and educated in England and soon after their marriage the young couple returned there.
According to one interpretation of a letter from Francis Grose to Burns in January, 1791, they must have proceeded at once to an autumn visit at Friars Carse, where Grose was also a guest. Grose told Burns that ‘after the Scene between Mrs. Riddell Junr and your humble Servant, to which you was witness, it is impossible I can ever come under her Roof again.’ The letter also refers to the Governor—‘a spoilt Child with a Number of good Qualities’—whom its editor identifies as Walter Riddell, Mrs. Riddell Junior being Maria. But there was also an extremely senior Mrs. Riddell at Friars Carse, for Robert’s grandmother lived with him. Hence the Junior may equally well have been Mrs. Robert Riddell, and inasmuch as Maria had no roof of her own in Scotland until 1792, it is hard to see how any misconduct of hers could have shut Friars Carse to Grose.
If this was really Maria’s first meeting with Burns it was an inauspicious start. But the early stages of the friendship are obscure. The extant correspondence does not begin until February, 1792, and by that time Maria’s life was so truly invaluable to Burns that to lose her would leave a vacuum in his enjoyments that nothing could fill up. By this time, too, she was the mother of a daughter, born in England in August, 1791. Her husband was again in Dumfries, negotiating for an estate, and Maria had gone to Edinburgh with the double purpose of seeking expert medical advice and finding a printer for her narrative of her voyage to the West Indies. To this latter end Burns introduced her to his old friend Smellie in a letter which paid the highest compliments to her intellectual and literary accomplishments—if it can be called a high compliment to say that her verses ‘always correct, and often elegant’, were ‘very much beyond the common run of Lady Poetesses of the day’. The introduction resulted in a friendship between Smellie and Maria of which the written records, being more decorous than Burns’s own letters to the printer, were published by the latter’s biographer. Maria liked to collect curios, and her interest in Smellie might perhaps be thus explained. But the gruff and erudite printer’s continued interest in Maria is further evidence that she had brains as well as charm, though her letters are evidence enough.
In the spring of 1792 Walter Riddell purchased the estate of Goldielea near Dumfries, renamed it Woodley Park in Maria’s honour, and set up as a country gentleman. More accurately, he paid a small deposit on the purchase price without knowing how he would raise the main sum. Burns visited frequently at Woodley Park, though its master bored him. Walter Riddell apparently shared his brother’s convivial habits without his brother’s modicum of literary and intellectual interests, and the poet’s attitude towards him is more clearly shown by the almost total absence of Walter’s name from his letters to Walter’s wife than even by the crude epitaph which described the man as empty-headed and poisonous-hearted.