‘Man, Mr. Printer, is a strange, weak inconsistent being.—Who would believe, Sir, that in this our Augustan age of liberality and refinement, ... a certain people, under our national protection, should complain, not against a Monarch and a few favourite advisers, but against our whole legislative body, of the very same imposition and oppression, the Romish religion not excepted, and almost in the very same terms as our forefathers did against the family of Stuart! I will not, I cannot, enter into the merits of the cause; but I dare say, the American Congress, in 1776, will be allowed to have been as able and enlightened, and, a whole empire will say, as honest, as the English Convention in 1688; and that the fourth of July will be as sacred to their posterity as the fifth of November is to us.’
The concluding sentence of that peroration is paraphrased from a speech John Wilkes had delivered in the House of Commons ten years before. Manifestly Burns followed, closely and sympathetically, the utterances of the English radicals and reformers; it is well known that ‘A Man’s a Man’ is ‘two or three pretty good prose thoughts inverted into rhyme’ from the writings of a former Excise officer named Thomas Paine. Like most European liberals, Burns admired the leaders of the American Revolution—one of the toasts which gave offence in Dumfries is said to have been his proposal of the health of George Washington as ‘a better man’ than William Pitt—and his admiration would be intensified by obvious parallels between the grievances of the Americans and the Scots. His Jacobite sympathies were wholly emotional, and in part conditioned by the fact that the Jacobites had written all the good songs. One suspects that he would just as readily have taken the Catholic view of the Reformation if Scottish Catholics had embalmed their lost cause in poetry. When he looked at current affairs, his reason backed his feelings. Politically, Scotland had almost as much to complain of as the American colonies had had. In some respects, indeed, she had more. American towns had been free to manage their local affairs by a system of representative government; in Scotland the municipalities, like the country’s representation in Parliament, were self-perpetuating oligarchies. Burns, in common with thousands of men of higher rank, had no vote even in the government of his own burgh. Yet his dislike of the system and his contempt for most of its leaders would probably have expressed itself only in occasional satires had it not been for the outbreak of the French Revolution.
A movement for reform of both burgh and parliamentary government was under way in Scotland. George Dempster, one of the few men of independent mind among the Scottish representatives at Westminster, advocated such measures of reform as would allow ‘the industrious farmer and manufacturer [to] share at least in a privilege now engrossed by the great lord, the drunken laird, and the drunkener baillie.’ Country gentlemen of unimpeachable character took up the agitation, and Burns’s letters to men like William Robertson of Lude, John Francis Erskine of Mar, and Richard Oswald of Auchencruive, show that he looked to such leadership as the hope of the country. When his conduct was under inquiry Burns declared that he had, as a government employee, taken no active part, either personally or as an author, in the movement for reform, but that as a man he ‘would say that there existed a system of corruption between the Executive Power & the Representative part of the Legislature, which boded no good to our glorious Constitution; & which every patriotic Briton must wish to see amended.’
The early stages of the French Revolution roused the enthusiasm of the more liberal-minded men of all classes in Scotland. A dinner in Edinburgh to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was attended by a group of university students which included John Allen, stepson of the poet’s friend Robert Cleghorn, by numerous country gentlemen like his friend Robert Riddell and his acquaintance Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch, and by Lord Daer. It seemed to men like Craigdarroch and Daer that the popular interest in the principles of the Revolution might be harnessed for the benefit of Scotland in speeding measures for burgh and parliamentary reform. Actually the brief alliance with French sympathizers delayed reform for forty years. All the vested interests of Great Britain rallied to support Burke’s condemnation of the revolutionary principles, and the counter-attack swept away every attempt to alter in the slightest degree the existing scheme of things.
The full weight of the counter-attack was not felt at once. Indeed, it was a Scotsman, James Mackintosh, who published the fullest and best-reasoned of the numerous replies to Burke. Besides seeking to confute Burke, Mackintosh tried to rally his countrymen to the cause of reform by citing their medieval reputation as lovers of liberty who would die rather than surrender their freedom. Certain passages in Mackintosh were probably as directly responsible for the composition of ‘Scots wha hae’ as The Rights of Man was for ‘A Man’s a Man’. But as the Revolution swept on with increasing bloodshed to the execution of Louis XVI and as mobs in various parts of Scotland, including Edinburgh itself, celebrated King George’s birthday by burning Henry Dundas in effigy, the authorities became panicky. Scotland felt the heaviest force of their fright. Long latent memories of the ’45 revived at Whitehall, and to the dread of Scotland as a focal point for rebellion was added the practical detail that repressive measures could be better organized there than in England. England had a few constituencies, like London and Westminster, in which enough people were enfranchised to give a really popular vote, and a few members of Parliament whom neither fear nor bribes could silence. Scotland had neither. Hence the counter-revolutionary reign of terror struck first and hardest at Scotland.
Early in 1793 several leaders of the Friends of the People, a society organized to agitate for parliamentary reform, were arrested on charges of treason. Lord Daer was a member of the society, too, but the authorities, doubtless afraid that not even a packed jury could be trusted to convict the son of a popular earl, made no move to seize him. They contented themselves with lesser, but still conspicuous, victims, and before the series of trials—conducted with such disregard of justice as in Henry Cockburn’s opinion had not been seen in Britain since Jeffreys’s Bloody Assizes—was over Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer, and several other reform leaders had been condemned to long terms of penal transportation. All opposition was crushed in Scotland for a generation. Henry Erskine, the one man who dared to raise his voice in defence of justice and common sense, paid for his temerity by being voted out of his office as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates. One of the last of Burns’s satirical ballads commemorates the event, in which a young man just admitted to the bar, Walter Scott by name, voted with the majority to punish Erskine for having the courage of his convictions.
Such was the background against which Burns undertook to display himself as a Friend of the People. He never, so far as can be learned, actually joined any of the reforming organizations, but it was not in Burns’s nature to conceal his opinions. From the time when he appeared in Edinburgh drawing-rooms wearing a waistcoat of Foxite blue and buff, and inscribed on a window-pane at Stirling verses about the successors to the Stuarts being ‘an idiot race, to honor lost’, he was marked as a character who would bear watching. The wonder is not so much that he came near to losing his job in the Excise as that he ever succeeded in getting it. If William Corbet and Graham of Fintry had not been the generous and friendly souls they were, the poet’s service career would have ended in 1793, and he might even have shared the fate of Muir and Palmer.
To note some of Burns’s words and deeds during 1791 and 1792, and realize that for every reckless phrase that reached paper there were doubtless a score uttered over the punchbowl, is to marvel at the poet’s escape. His phrase about the House of Hanover, already quoted, was written in the privacy of Robert Riddell’s library, but it is hard to believe that he did not say equally sharp things in more public places. His most intimate friends in Dumfries were avowed sympathizers with the Revolution. Dr. James Maxwell had witnessed the execution of the king, cherished the handkerchief he had dipped in the royal blood, and was well enough known to the authorities to have his revolutionary connexions violently denounced by Burke on the floor of the House of Commons. John Lewars was tainted with ‘D-m-cratic heresy’; Syme, after enrolling, like Burns, in the Dumfries Volunteers, became heartily disgusted with the whole wretched business; Maria Riddell was a parlour revolutionist who on her visits to London associated ‘with a very pleasant set of Sans-culottes’. Throughout 1792 Burns had let slip few opportunities of proclaiming his own sympathies. In the spring he bought the Rosamond’s carronades and dispatched them as a present to the French Convention; in the autumn, when Maria Riddell asked him to suggest a programme for a benefit night in Dumfries theatre, he chose from the repertory of the local company Mrs. Centlivre’s The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret because it contained some platitudinous lines about British liberty which could be given political significance by well-timed applause. Either on this occasion or another the crowd carried the matter further than Burns had anticipated.
When ‘God Save the King’ was called for, a group in the pit which included some of Burns’s friends shouted for ‘Ça Ira’ instead. The ensuing clamour came to the verge of a free-for-all fight. In his defence Burns avowed that he never opened his lips ‘to hiss, or huzza, that, or any other Political tune whatever’ because he looked on himself ‘as far too obscure a man to have any weight in quelling a Riot; at the same time as a character of higher respectability, than to yell in the howlings of a rabble.’ In other words, by sitting still and not applauding the national anthem he made himself just as conspicuous as if he had joined in the call for ‘Ça Ira’. He was anything but the obscure individual he claimed to be, and it was apparently his public conduct on this occasion that led to his being reported to his superiors as a disaffected person.
Seemingly the idea that his opinions might get him into trouble had never occurred to Burns. The threat of an official investigation threw him into a humiliating panic, and must also have alarmed his friends in the higher ranks of the Excise. It is difficult otherwise to account for Supervisor Corbet’s coming in person to Dumfries to look into the charges. An accusation brought against a minor officer in the service was scarcely in ordinary routine a serious enough affair to call in one of the highest officials; the inference is that Corbet was rightly fearful of the results if Burns were investigated by an unfriendly agent. Accordingly the Supervisor examined the poet across a dinner-table in company with Findlater and Syme, and in that mellow atmosphere found no ground for the charges ‘save some witty sayings’. But even so, Corbet, in the name of the Board, had to admonish Burns—so the poet reported to Erskine of Mar—‘that my business was to act, not to think; & that whatever might be Men or Measures, it was for me to be silent and obedient.’