Pride and Passion: Robert Burns, 1759-1796

by J. De Lancey Ferguson

But the strain of his new duties soon took physical toll. In the late fall of 1789, after less than two months of service, ‘a malignant squinancy and low fever’ laid him up for six weeks. His handwriting indicates that the illness was really serious; the letters written during convalescence are in a hand almost as weak and straggling as that of June and July, 1796. Nevertheless he had proved his qualifications for the job. An official report on various subordinate officers in the Excise bears after Burns’s name the notation ‘a poet—never tried—turns out well.’ He had moreover established friendly relations with his immediate superiors, Alexander Findlater, the Supervisor, and John Mitchell, the Collector, of the Dumfries district. With the latter, indeed, he was already on terms approaching intimacy, sending him gifts of new-laid eggs from Ellisland and accompanying them at least once with a poetic epistle so broadly humorous that no editor has ever printed it all. Both men testified to Burns’s fidelity by defending his character after his death and—what is far more significant—by reporting favourably on him during his life.

He was giving reason for favourable reports. His predecessor had been so slack that Burns was able to appear, at the first session of court after he began duty, with an impressive array of cases of tax evasion. In handling these he again displayed political astuteness. The minor offenders, mostly poor men who could ill afford a fine, he begged off with warnings or suspended sentences. This almost compelled the magistrates to fine the larger offenders for whom he refused to intercede, and inasmuch as Excise officers then, like American customs inspectors today, received a percentage of these penalties, Burns found his procedure remunerative in cash as well as in official credit. He soon discovered, though, that zeal had its drawbacks. Gentlemen of position, including some of the magistrates themselves, had their favourite smugglers or home-brewers, and when Burns caught one of these he started all the machinery of influence and political pressure so familiar to Americans during the prohibition era. Once he told Collector Mitchell, after a hard day’s riding in rounding up witnesses in a case, that he expected for his pains to be clapped in jail for annoying the friends of half the gentlemen in the county. The grosser temptations of bribery, however, did not touch him. The various legends, deriving from highly unreliable oral tradition, of his leniency with small offenders mean no more, even if literally true, than that Burns had learned the common sense of his profession. A customs inspector knows that his job is not to penalize every tourist who has failed to declare a dozen handkerchiefs but to catch the large-scale smuggler. The same was true of the laws Burns had to enforce, which imposed taxes on everything from whisky to candles. Not but what he made ordinary human distinctions between his public and his private capacities. William Lorimer, father of ‘Chloris’, was one of the poet’s intimate friends. He was also a bootlegger whose ways were, ‘like the grace of G—, past all comprehension’. Seemingly Lorimer maintained a moderate legal stock for inspection purposes, but once when he was absent and his wife drunk something slipped in the working of the gentlemen’s agreement, and Burns had to explain to Supervisor Findlater. Another time he helped, as revenue officer, in a series of raids on Dumfries haberdashers who had been selling smuggled French gloves. A few days later, as private citizen, he supplied Maria Riddell with similar gloves from a still unraided dealer’s stock. The problems and conditions of law enforcement are among the few immutables in human history.

After two years’ experience Burns reaffirmed that the Excise was after all the business for him. He added, ‘I find no difficulty in being an honest man in it; the work of itself, is easy; and it is a devilish different affair, managing money matters where I care not a damn whether the money is paid or not; from the long faces made to a haughty Laird or still more haughty Factor, when rents are demanded, and money, alas, not to be had!’ His position as tenant farmer was no longer an irritation; it was an obsession. Ellisland, he told Gilbert, had undone his enjoyment of himself. He looked forward with the same desperate hope as his father’s at Mount Oliphant to the ‘freedom in his lease’. The three-year period of the £50 rental ended in 1791. After that, if he chose to stay, Ellisland would cost £70 a year. Naturally, his discouragement and defeat on the farm had affected his relations with his landlord. Miller’s kindness, he said, had been just such another thing as Creech’s, and the fact that Mrs. Miller had failed to appreciate one of his poorer contributions to Johnson’s Museum did not heighten his esteem for the family. He wanted no more to do with landlords or anything that belonged to them.

His only good luck at Ellisland came at the end. The surrender of the lease did not annoy Miller as Burns had expected, for a purchaser was in the market, and Miller was glad enough to dispose of the farm which the Nith separated from the rest of his estate. After sending Jean and the children to Mauchline, Burns held an auction of his standing crops and provided the lavish drinks expected by auction-goers. One result was that the exhilarated bidders ran up the prices nearly a guinea an acre beyond the market rates; another was that house and stable-yard were strewn with helplessly drunk and retching neighbours. The sale brought ready cash for the first time in two years, and Burns used some of it to clear up a variety of small debts, including the four pounds he owed his namesake, Robert Burn of Edinburgh, for erecting Fergusson’s tombstone. He also celebrated his manumission by a brief visit to Edinburgh to say farewell to Clarinda and to try to do something for sick and penniless Jenny Clow.

While things had been going so badly on the farm his position in the Excise had been improving. After less than a year and a half in his laborious rural division he had wangled a transfer to a vacant ‘footwalk’, the ‘3d, or Tobacco, Division’, in Dumfries. This meant lighter work, and enabled him to dispense with his horse—not too soon, for his poor worn-out mare had given him several nasty falls on the bad roads, bruising him severely and once breaking his arm. In town, though, he had small opportunity for increasing his income through fines and penalties as he had done in the rural division. When at the end of 1791 he moved his family into Dumfries the best quarters he could afford were a crowded and uncomfortable half-of-a-house in the Stinking Vennel, near the river. He was still receiving only the minimum salary of £50 a year, and though Jean said long afterwards that they did not come empty-handed into Dumfries not much cash can have remained after he had discharged his debts. As early as March, 1790, he had estimated that he would be lucky if he did not lose more than £100 out of an investment of little more than £200. Such anticipatory estimates are oftener under the mark than over it; one suspects that if Burns recovered as much as £50 of the money he had put into Ellisland, he was lucky.

By comparison, his prospects in the Excise were roseate. The Port Division in Dumfries, best paid of the subordinate posts, was vacant, and Burns lobbied for it with William Corbet, general supervisor of Excise, as he had done with Graham of Fintry for his first appointment. Corbet was an old friend of Mrs. Dunlop’s, and her intercession was effectively supplemented by a warm recommendation from Findlater, the local supervisor. Burns got the job early in 1792. The salary was £70 a year with various perquisites worth another £20. It scarcely represented luxurious living, but it was a better income than most Scottish schoolmasters or even ministers received in the eighteenth century, and though ‘Robin’s temper was not cold and frugal’ he managed to be fairly comfortable. After a year in the Stinking Vennel he moved to a better house in what was then called Mill Street and is now Burns Street—the last of his numerous abodes.

Even before he left Ellisland Burns’s name had been placed on the list of those eligible for promotion to the rank of Supervisor. This was the most laborious of the Excise posts, for the supervisors did most of the real work of collection and administration. They received salaries of from £200 to £400 a year, but their duties filled most of their waking hours. So long as he was merely Port Officer Burns had time and energy for reading and song-writing. He knew, however, that when in the course of seniority he became a supervisor most of this would cease. But he was already looking beyond. The next rank above Supervisor was Collector, and the collectors held well-paid sinecures. In theory at least supervisors were appointed by merit, but collectorships admittedly went by favour, and Burns began to cultivate political friendships which might in the future secure him the necessary influence.

Not that he had any intention of soldiering on his job and trusting to influence to lift him to a better one. He was taking an intelligent interest in his work and sought the attention of his superiors by his understanding of their business. Thus he had not been long in his Port Division before he wrote to Provost Staig of Dumfries pointing out that the town was losing revenue through failure to assess a tax on imported ale, and backed his statement with an estimate of the sums involved and some shrewd advice as to the best method of getting his chiefs to enforce their collection. A year or so later he pointed out to Robert Graham that one of the Dumfries divisions could be abolished and its duties distributed among the other officers without overburdening them. There cannot be many instances on record of a government employee’s informing his superiors that he was underworked. On this occasion at least Burns took an unusual way of drawing attention to himself. He was also once more suggesting his own advancement at the expense of another man, but admitted the fact and coupled his recommendation with a plea that if the change were made the present incumbent, burdened with an expensive family, be provided for elsewhere.

He would have been the last to claim that these suggestions were free of any ulterior motive beside the general one of making himself known as a thoughtful and efficient officer. He had other and more immediate purposes. Not long after showing Provost Staig the revenue possibilities of the ‘twa pennies’ tax on ale he had a petition to make to the Burgh Council. When he first visited Dumfries in 1787 he had been made an honorary burgess; he now wanted that nominal citizenship converted into a real one so far at least as concerned the local schools. The sons of burgesses were entitled to free tuition at Dumfries Academy, and the chance of getting his boys into a first-rate school was not to be neglected. His petition set forth in detail the help he had given to the local revenues. This may not have been the reason why the Council at once granted his application, but it certainly did not hamper it. Similarly his letters to Graham were frankly motivated by a desire to get a post as acting supervisor at the earliest possible moment and thereby to secure not only some small immediate increase in income but the experience and reputation which would count in his favour when a permanent position opened.

These were reasonable and legitimate efforts to gain prestige. He indulged in others more ticklish and, in the perspective of history, more futile. Burns lacked the right temperament for cultivating politicians, but he could not help trying. He was once introduced, for instance, to that very shady character, the Duke of Queensberry, whom previously he had rated with some justice as a complete scoundrel. At their meeting the Duke proved affable, and hearing that Burns had written a song about the notorious ‘Whistle’ drinking bout mentioned that he would like a copy. Burns sent it to him with a flattering letter, no doubt hoping that at some future date the Duke’s influence might be useful. There was nothing particularly dangerous in this, for the Duke’s rank made him a public character irrespective of what party was in power. But when Burns undertook to meddle in parliamentary contests he was playing with fire. He had of course no vote himself, but he wrote ballads in support of Whig candidates and continued to do so until a few months before his death. From the viewpoint of 1792 something might have been said for this as good strategy, regardless of the poet’s actual sympathies. Except for the brief Rockingham ministry at the end of the American War the Tories had been in power for nearly a generation and a reversal was overdue. When and if the Whigs came in a man who had supported them in their time of adversity would be entitled to special favours. Neither Burns nor anyone else in Britain could foresee Napoleon and realize that Pitt’s ministry, which had already been on the verge of disaster over the Regency Bill, would, thanks to the Frenchman, remain in office until after Burns and most of his parliamentary friends were in their graves. As things turned out, silence would have been the better part for Burns, but he had no gift for silence.