Pride and Passion: Robert Burns, 1759-1796

by J. De Lancey Ferguson

SCOTLAND

A Scot in the eighteenth century was a poor relation, subject to the slights and scorns of more prosperous kinfolk, and reared amid poverty, theology, and filth. When Robert Burns was born, on January 25, 1759, his native land was almost at the nadir of its independent existence. Proud and warlike and desperately poor, Scotland had been still an essentially feudal nation when King James VI was called from amid the bickerings of his jealous nobles and intransigent clergy to become James I of England. The permanent removal of the court to London left the country more than ever the prey of contention among its nobles and fanaticism among its ecclesiastics; governed by a parliament without authority; torn at intervals by rebellion and civil strife; denied commercial parity with England, and cut off from the old-time free intercourse with France.

The Act of Union of 1707, by admitting Scotland to commercial privileges formerly restricted to England, started the country on the road to material prosperity, but promised to destroy the last vestiges of national pride. It was ‘the end of an old song’. Thenceforward the affairs of Scotland were entrusted to a handful of representatives at Westminster, too small, in those days of patronage and pocket-boroughs, to have enabled even a Scottish Parnell, had there been one, to sway the balance of power. Scotland was no longer Scotland; it was North Britain. And when the House of Hanover succeeded to the English throne, the last vestige of Scottish influence in the government seemed to have vanished. Ruled no longer by the Stuarts—her own kings, even though absentee—but by ‘an insolent, beef-witted race of foreigners’, Scotland turned more and more to the things of the flesh. The last flicker of the ancient loyalties in the ’45 shed only light enough to reveal their death. The Lowlands, though they could not stomach the double treason of a man like Murray of Broughton, acquiesced in the brutal destruction of the Highland clans. Most of the comfortable merchants and landed gentry had viewed the uprising with an apprehension even livelier than that felt by the German court four hundred miles away; when the Highlands were crushed they rejoiced in their own increased security, and showed their loyalty to the reigning House by christening their daughters Charlotte and Wilhelmina, and their new streets and squares Hanover and Brunswick and George.

By the middle of the century Scottish affairs had settled into an order which might alter in degree, but would not alter in kind, for two generations at least. Politically, the country was little more than a conquered province. Economically it was beginning to emerge from age-old poverty, but the new prosperity of the lucky few was widening the gap between them and the poor and still further depressing the latter. Religiously it was awakening from the nightmare of Calvinism which had paralysed free thought and free action for two centuries. Intellectually its literary life was being overwhelmed by the fashions and standards of England, and its educated citizens were suffering from an inferiority complex of national scope.

When Warren Hastings was impeached, Burns was angry because it was done in the name of the Commons of England and not of Great Britain. Had he expressed his opinion in public, instead of in a private letter, it would have roused little sympathy among his more influential countrymen. Most would have dismissed it as the rant of a fanatic; a few would have held it downright treason. There was no money in being a Scottish patriot. As in England, all things political went by favour. The only difference was that in Scotland they went by favour of one man—the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Bute, or Henry Dundas, as the case might be. All power concentrated at last in the hands of the national boss. He ‘suggested’ the choice of the sixteen Scottish peers who were to represent their country in the House of Lords; he controlled the election of the forty-five members of the Commons; his word was law as to all appointive offices. Fifteen members of the Commons were chosen by the burgh councils—self-perpetuating groups which in ‘the taciturn regularity of ancient affairs’ allowed no outsider to intrude on their privileges and their graft. The other thirty were chosen by the counties, and in all Scotland there were fewer than three thousand qualified electors, every man of whom was ticketed as to party allegiance and family connection. Most of them also had their prices plainly marked on their tickets. Of course the price need be nothing so crude as cash. Every job, from a cadetship with the East India Company to the governorship of a province, was obtainable by influence, and by influence only; hence there were plenty of ways of swaying a man’s vote, especially if he had a rising family of hungry younger sons, without soiling his fingers with gold.

Everyone played the game, and took the rules for granted. Why wait for merited promotion, if you could get it quicker by pulling wires? The only man Sir Walter Scott ever deliberately cut was the one who publicly criticized him for securing his brother’s appointment to a post which he knew was soon to be abolished—with a pension for the ousted incumbent. It was a comfortable system for those on the inside. As for the others, they were expected to do their duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call them.

But it was not merely in political jobs that the influential classes were doing well for themselves. The Act of Union had admitted Scottish merchants to the privileges of the colonial trade formerly open only to the English. Throughout the eighteenth century the south of Scotland experienced a whole series of industrial and real estate booms. Though by twentieth-century standards of bankruptcy the booms were small and local, they had all the familiar characteristics. Glasgow and its neighbourhood, for instance, when once it had recovered from the losses of the crazy Darien Expedition—as wild a speculation as the later Mississippi Bubble in France and the South Sea madness in England—throve soberly on its steadily increasing commerce with the West Indies and the American Colonies. The passerby today, between the Trongate and the Broomielaw, may read in Union Street and George Square how mercantile Scotland felt towards the loss of its parliament, and find Jamaica and Virginia Streets underscoring the reason; further west, St. Vincent Street, Nile Street, Pitt Street, and Wellington Street show the direction of Glaswegian sympathies in the long struggle with Napoleon. And since commerce is by definition two-sided the ships which brought back American cotton and tobacco and sugar took out Scottish linens and woolens and shoes from steadily growing centres of manufacture.

On the east coast, Edinburgh was not merely expanding; it was on the way to transforming itself. Unable by its location to share directly in the overseas trade, it throve on the legal business which grew out of that trade, on the increasing demand for education which benefited both the university and the printers and booksellers, and on the invested profits of Scotsmen who had made money in the East or West Indies and who settled in the capital when they retired. Until after the ’45 the city was still packed along the ridge from Holyrood to the Castle, its population crowded into the tall tenements which shut out the low northern sun from the narrow wynds. Its first expansion was to the south, in a development, near the present site of the University, on which Burns’s father and uncle found work when they struck out for themselves in 1750. To the north of the Old Town all was then open country. At the foot of the Castle Rock, where the railway tracks now run, the marshy Nor Loch still received whatever of the city’s garbage did not remain in the streets. Burns was four years old when the real growth of the modern city began with the building of the North Bridge to connect the Old Town with the ridge which paralleled it to northward. Each year thereafter saw new houses or new squares added, but as late as 1800 the New Town still consisted only of Princes, George, and Queen Streets from St. Andrew Square to Charlotte Square.

Until after Burns’s death the whole area, despite the Georgian dignity and charm of its houses, retained many of the features of a new and raw development. In particular, the valley was half choked by the hideous Mound formed of the earth excavated in grading the New Town. The laying out of the Princes Street Gardens and the crowning of the Mound with the Scottish National Gallery were still far in the future—there was even talk of a row of buildings on the south side of Princes Street which would have blinded one of the finest city vistas in the world, and have made the Gardens forever impossible. By 1786, when Burns first saw Edinburgh, wealth and fashion had already deserted the Old Town, and middle-class respectability was beginning to follow, but the business life of the city still centred in the shops and taverns which lined the High Street, crammed the narrow Luckenbooths which congested traffic beside disfigured St. Giles’s, and overflowed into all the adjacent courts and closes. Professional men transacted their business in taverns in preference to their crowded living-quarters; all Edinburgh was accustomed to gather at midday in the neighbourhood of the Cross to arrange business and social appointments.

Sanitation did not exist. Water for cooking and such exiguous washing as was done was carried by porters from the public wells to the various flats in the tall ‘lands’; the day’s filth of the household was collected in a tub on the landing of the stairs and at bedtime the barefoot maid-servants emptied it out of the windows—theoretically to be gathered up by the scavengers; actually, too often, to lie where it fell until a rain washed it away. Even the hardy nostrils of Londoners quailed before the marshalled stenches of Edinburgh, and travelling Scotsmen gauged the smells of foreign cities like Lisbon by their nasal memories of home. That children should die like flies was inevitable; the marvel is that any survived. Deficiency diseases were as rife as filth diseases. Rickets was taken for granted—a simile, humorous in intent but ghastly in effect in one of Scott’s letters, gives a glimpse of nurse-maids in Princes Street trying to compel unhappy rachitic children to walk. Human life has always been Scotland’s cheapest commodity. That a high degree of social and intellectual culture should flourish amid this filth is merely another proof of human capacity for ignoring what it is too indolent to correct.