In the same year moreover in which Burns secured his Port Division the effects of the upheaval in France were stirring both Burns and Scotland. The cries of Liberty and Equality and Fraternity were echoed in the North and enlisted as in England a motley collection of supporters who ranged from poetic idealists, like Burns and Wordsworth, through professional agitators like Thomas Paine and Horne Tooke to unprincipled rabble. Burns’s first public gesture of sympathy with the French Revolution came as a by-product of the most exciting episode in his career as an Excise officer. In the early spring of 1792 a smuggling schooner named the Rosamond was caught in the Solway. The ship was heavily armed and thanks to the active co-operation of the coastwise folks, who staved in all their rowboats to keep the Excise officers from using them, she landed her cargo. The Rosamond, however, remained aground on the tidal flats and when an armed force of dragoons and Excise officers—Burns among them—waded out to attack her the crew fled after scuttling the ship. Salvaged and towed into the Nith the Rosamond with all her gear was confiscated and sold at auction. Her armament included four carronades which Burns bought for £4 and dispatched as a gift to the French Convention. Such at least is the traditional story, and every detail of it, except the actual dispatch of the carronades, is corroborated by documents found among the Abbotsford papers. The tradition continues that the guns never reached France, being seized by the customs officials at Dover; but here again confirmation is lacking. Legally there was nothing wrong in Burns’s action. France and England were still officially at peace, though their relations were steadily growing tenser. Nevertheless, from the practical viewpoint of a government employee with a dependent family it was a gesture of almost criminal recklessness. The government has never yet existed which looked benevolently upon manifestations of revolutionary sympathies among its servants, and before many months had passed Burns had good reason to be frightened.
The autumn of 1792 saw England ready to join the coalition against revolutionary France, though war was not declared until February 1, 1793. To the privileged classes in England the war had all the characteristics of a crusade except the obligation to take a personal share. The Revolution threatened the very foundations of the aristocratic social system, and the depth of the government’s fear is measured by the violence alike of official denunciations of France and of the suppression of dissenting opinion at home. Charges of sedition were pressed not only against avowed revolutionary sympathizers but against almost anyone who had advocated the slightest modification of the existing order. It was not surprising that Burns, always unguarded in speech and action, should face investigation of his conduct. The details of the charges and their outcome belong in another chapter. For a time Burns thought that all his hopes of advancement were blasted, but the storm soon blew over, and even before he advertised his loyalty by enlisting in the Dumfries Volunteers he had good reason to anticipate that promotion would come in due course.
But though he escaped the storm of persecution he did not escape the economic consequences of the war. It had the usual and inevitable results of tight money and rising prices; a wave of bankruptcies swept over Scotland; the monthly lists of failures in the Scots Magazine increased from an average of half-a-dozen a month to forty-six in July, 1793, and among the victims was Burns’s friend, Walter Auld the saddler. The poet himself was not exempt. The war cut off the greater part of the import trade and with it much of the income and perquisites of Dumfries Port Division. Burns had just begun to extend his expenditures in keeping with his increased income. The carronades and his better house were only part of the expansion. He had backed a friend’s note and had to pay it when the friend defaulted; he had lent considerable sums to another friend, the schoolmaster at Moffat, who was engaged in a long-drawn-out wrangle with the Earl of Hopetoun, patron of the school; there were other smaller loans as well. Caught thus with ready cash exhausted, income reduced, and prices rising, Burns found himself once again in the grimly familiar position of being unable to pay his landlord. That the landlord was a gentleman and a personal friend who did not dun for his money made the situation more painful. In January, 1795, Burns had actually to borrow three guineas from his friend, William Stewart, in order to pay part of his rent. Nevertheless even in these hard times he managed occasional expenditures that came in the class of luxuries—a week’s tour in Galloway with John Syme, the restoration of a Jacobite relic in form of Lord Balmerino’s dirk, even a miniature portrait of himself. He and his family never lacked for the necessaries of life, and though he was somewhat in debt the accounting of his executors is proof that the amount never passed reasonable bounds.
As soon as the excitement over the sedition charges subsided his prospects in the Excise brightened steadily. Friends in Edinburgh were secretly trying to get him transferred to a more lucrative position, but even in Dumfries things looked hopeful. At the end of December, 1794, Supervisor Findlater fell ill, and Burns took over his duties. The work lasted three months or more, and though it is uncertain if Burns received any extra pay for his labour he at least gained valuable experience and competently handled his complex duties. The only adverse criticism of his conduct related to a technical irregularity in his final report, and this was the fault not of Burns himself but of one of his subordinates. The passage of each year brought him higher on the list of candidates for supervisor’s posts. Had he lived another year or two he would automatically have been appointed even if his Edinburgh friends had failed in their efforts to hasten the process.
The prospect of promotion was becoming very real—so real that during the very months when he was acting as supervisor Burns devoted some of his scanty leisure to composing a group of political ballads. Patrick Heron of Heron—the same Heron whose bank failure had once ruined half Ayrshire—was the Whig candidate in a by-election at Kirkcudbright. In return for the support of Burns’s pen Heron asked if he could do anything for the poet. Burns’s reply showed his mind at its coldest level of realism. Nothing could be done, he said, for two or three years, until he reached the head of the supervisors’ list. Then a political friend could be of service in getting him appointed in some agreeable part of the kingdom and of still more service in hastening his next step in rank. Collectorships went by favour, and the time he must spend in the drudgery of a supervisorship would therefore depend on the amount of influence his friends could exert. The letter is graphic proof of Burns’s open-eyed acceptance of the system in which he worked; it is also proof of his irrepressible lack of discretion. From the viewpoint of mere self-interest he would have done better to hold aloof from all political contests and, when the time came, to base his appeal for influence upon his standing as a poet instead of identifying himself with any party. But such calm calculation was not in his nature.
In any case his hopes were vain. His disease was gaining on him; he experienced sharp twinges of pain which he and his doctors called rheumatism, but which were probably angina pectoris. In June and again in December, 1795, he had serious illnesses which left him weak and shaken. In the face of his increasing weakness he had taken on additional labour by enlisting in a volunteer company organized in Dumfries in the early spring. The manual of arms and frequent drills were dangerous medicine for a diseased heart, and to this physical labour Burns added active participation in all the business affairs of the corps. His final breakdown could not in any circumstances have been long delayed, but the Dumfries Volunteers undoubtedly hastened it.
The winter of 1795-6 was a time of famine. Crops had been bad; trade was dislocated by the war. Nearly one-fourth of the inhabitants of Edinburgh were being fed by charity, and flour was so scarce that even those who could afford it were asked to ration themselves to one loaf of bread per capita a week. Conditions in the smaller towns were as bad or worse; there were serious food riots in Dumfries in February and March. With his health steadily declining Burns was exposed to constant worry for the welfare of his family. Excise officers who were unable over long periods to perform their duties because of illness were reduced to half-pay, and as matters stood in the spring of 1796 half-pay would have meant almost starvation for his children. That things did not come to this pass for Burns was due to the generosity of Adam Stobbie, who handled his work for him and refused compensation for the service. This relieved some of his immediate anxiety, but did little to answer the main question of what would become of Jean and the children if he died.
The problem of livelihood, never long absent from his mind, occupied it during his last weeks almost to the exclusion of other thoughts. The only prescriptions the doctors could offer in his illness involved expenditures he could not afford, and his enlistment in the Volunteers now returned to plague him. The tailor who had made his uniform began to dun for payment, and to the poet’s fevered imagination it seemed that his life was going to close as his father’s had, under the shadow of a debtors’ prison. He spent some of his last days of consciousness in writing frantic letters begging the friends to whom he had lent money to repay their loans and asking others like George Thomson and James Burness to advance him money. Thomson was the only one who gave grudgingly. The others willingly and promptly sent what he asked, but too late to lift the cloud from his dying mind. His last articulate words were an imprecation against the tailor who had threatened him, and he died without the comfort of knowing that his death would awaken the generosity he had never experienced in his life, and that the admirers of his poetry would make it possible for Jean to keep her home together and for his children to be decently educated and launched on respectable careers.
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