The Canongate Burns (114 page)

Whether or not the rival groups were on the verge of more traditional forms of violence to settle party disputes is hard to know. Certainly, Burns uses it both to denigrate Queensberry for his cowardice and turn the squalid seeking for votes into a glorious mock-epic battle. While theoretically (see introduction) Burns always held Right Whig reformist, prodemocratic beliefs this is not to say that he saw the Whig (aristocratic) stablishment as manifesting these beliefs in practice. He disliked Captain iller. Burns had met Queensberry and been on that occasion well treated by him (Letter 471) and sent him a copy of
The Whistle
. Queensberry had, however, the reputation of a selfish, even degenerate dilettante and is here so presented. Though Glenriddel, his close political intimate is mentioned, the poem is not sympathetic to the Whig cause nor, indeed, as in ll. 79–84, to the bloody foundling act of that cause. For a man undismayed by forthcoming French executions, these lines have a dark, ironic ring:

This is followed by a deeply sympathetic celebration of these archetypal Jacobite heroes Dundee and Montrose (ll. 115–20). Returning to the contemporary world, he hyperbolically laments a Tory loss which cannot even be saved by the fact that its candidate's brother is married into the family of William Pulteney, Earl of Bath (d.1764) who was reputed to be one of the richest men in the Empire.

Burns then analyses the impact on Westminster. First of Pitt and his fellow Tories Thurlow and Melville. Edward, Baron Thurlow (1731–1806) had been compelled to retire as Lord Chancellor by the North–Fox coalition but had been brought back by Pitt. His was a terrifying presence, able to instil apprehension and fear into characters as disparate as Dr Johnson and Horne Tooke. Melville, of course, is Henry Dundas (1742–1811), whom Pitt was to appoint Home Secretary in 1791 and who was to cast such a terrible shadow over the last years of Burns's life. Fox's Whig friends were the two extraordinary Irishmen Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) and Edmund Burke (1729–97), who held such rhetorical sway over the house; Burns, of course, being deeply ironic in that these reformist Whigs were up to their ears in royal intrigue to gain governmental power by way of the Prince of Wales during the King's madness. As so often with Burns, the sting comes in the tail of the poem. It is
really an enraged cry of a plague on both Tory and Whig party politics carried out against Scottish national interests.

The subject here is the poet's affair with Anne Park, a relation of William Hyslop, Globe Tavern, Dumfries. It is believed to have occurred during a period when Jean Burns visited relatives in Ayrshire. The result was a daughter born to Anne at Leith, Edinburgh, on 31st March, 1791, and eventually reared by Mrs Burns in Dumfries. Anne Park went on to marry in Edinburgh but vanishes from the Burns story after this incident. The final dissident stanza, written as a postscript, is not included by Kinsley.

A manuscript copy of this was sold in May 1862 in London at the Puttock and Simpson auction of almost 200 pages of Burns's holograph (
Autograph Poems of Robert Burns
, a sales catalogue printed by E. C. Bigmore, p. 18. Mitchell Library collection). It did not appear in public until the book by H. Bright, based on the Gledriddell manuscripts, was printed in 1874.

It is an important poem because it reveals further the friendship between Burns and one of the age's leading radical Whig polemicists, Robert Riddell. Recent research has revealed that in
The
Glasgow Journal
during 1790 and 1791 a feud erupted between Riddell and Edmund Burke. Riddell, employing the pen-name Cato, locked horns with Burke on the constitutional issue. In one essay, quoted in
The Glasgow Advertiser
by Burke, it is clear the Tory minister was struggling for credibility against an opponent he praised as a learned expert on the constitution. One essay of January 1791, in
The Glasgow Advertiser
, titled ‘To The Citizens of Glasgow', blasts Pitt's government for practising ‘tyranny, by the grossest abuse of power and the most shocking perversion of law … [of] the most intolerable kind, under the guise of a free government'. Riddell's forceful remarks in defence of Hastings who was persecuted by Burke, help to explain the description, ‘The staunchest Whig Glenriddel was, /Quite frantic in his country's cause'. Henry Mackenzie and others who tarred Burns as a drunkard in his Dumfries years remarked that this was due to the company Burns kept, implying that Riddell was one of the degenerate influences over Burns (See Introduction). The denial of Riddell as a major Whig polemicist in the Burns story is merely another part of the suppression of the counter-radical culture of the period.

Riddell's radical prose, particularly the essay posted to
The
Edinburgh Gazetteer
by Burns in December 1792, signed under the pen-name Cato is an important document. Due to the closeness of their friendship (see notes to
The Whistle
) Burns may have had a hand in its composition. If not, he probably agreed wholeheartedly with its sentiments. If he did have a hand in writing it – although he distanced himself from the essay when pleading with Graham of Fintry not to lose his Excise job – then having Riddell's signature on
the letter was an ideal escape if anti-radical spies wanted to trace the author. How compatible Riddell's is with Burns's own political values can be seen from the following:

This foresighted democratic statement sets goals far in advance of the reforms achieved by the so-called Great Reform Act of 1832. It appears, in light of the recovered writings of Riddell, that he was a far more important radical figure in the Burns equation than has hitherto been thought.

It is also, of course, a fact that the poem brilliantly keeps a sceptical detachment of the
Foxy
poet from his slightly pompous, Right Whig instructor. Burns was never absolutely certain that such ideological Whigs ever quite lived up to their own perhaps somewhat self-indulged ideals. This is particularly true of his complex relationship to the Riddells. Crawford's (p. 242) commendation of the quality of the English poetry in this satire, especially ll. 1–12, is absolutely correct.