The Canongate Burns (84 page)

Further textual similarities occur. Having described the calculated manoeuvring of Pitt and his colleagues as ‘
invidious
powerful individuals …
under insidious pretexts
to subvert' [our italics] political opponents, in a letter of February 1789, signed John Barleycorn (Letter 311), we find this same language blaming ‘ministers endeavouring,
under insidious pretexts
[our italics], to increase the power of the Crown' in the new prose. Also in setting out his case in the first newspaper letter he signed ‘A. Briton', Burns is didactic and succinct, ‘The simple state of the case, Mr. Printer, seems to me to be this' (Letter 283) which is very like the language of the new letter which reads ‘The spirit of the British Constitution seems to consist in this: That the House of Commons are…'. While there were obviously various conventions expected in writing a letter to the press during this period, it is quite evident that his piece does contain many of the stylistic mannerisms and nuances of Burns's prose.

The essay's concluding argument contrasts anarchy and tyranny, ‘The true medium between anarchy and tyranny ought to be strictly kept in view'. This is precisely the view expressed emphatically in italics by Burns in his 1793 newspaper published poem,
On The
Commemoration Of Rodney's Victory, ‘Be Anarchy curs'd — and be
Tyranny d [amn]'d
'. A further similarity exists with the same poem, where it is argued that reform is necessary before ‘our Constitution be effaced, bring it back to those principles on which it is established:
that is, make the theory and practice tally better together'. The poem records ‘And here's the grand fabric, OUR FREE CONSTITUTION / As built on the base of THE GREAT REVOLUTION!' In both examples it is ‘our constitution', not simply ‘the consititution'. The poet's handwritten note within John Syme's copy of Jean Louis De Lolme's book on the British Consitution, indicating sarcastically that it would suffice until a better was created, is resonant in this last remark. That Burns was deeply read in Constitutional matters, as was Robert Riddell, his closest aristocratic friend during the Dumfries years, and acutely aware of political developments at this time, only makes it more plausible that he would compose such an essay.

It is now known after the appearance of
Ode for General Wash
ington's Birthday,
that Burns wrote, in controlled rage, of England as a country in the grip of political tyranny. Most radical commentators saw the suspension of Habeas Corpus as a significant shift towards futher erosion of individual rights. The possibility seemed real that unaccountable and dictatorial rule by a ‘Star Chamber' was to be the next step in Pitt's campaign of terror to crush radical dissent. The current essay asks the question whether or not England can remain a free country, answering in the negative, similar to the manner in which
The Tree of Liberty
deals with the same topic:

Between London and the river Tweed, is of course, England, not Britain. Burns does not condemn the political violence that occurred in revolutionary France in his song, nor is it condemned in the essay. Indeed, the massacres by Catherine the Great and the King of Prussia, in the name of law and order, are mentioned as greater crimes. What is seen as an equal crime to anything perpetuated by the French is the act of those British politicians who voted for the continuation of the war. They are blamed as being as unfeeling as a Roberspierre. Moreover, it would be expected that Burns would hit at Pitt's receipt of further patronage due to the war (See
A New
Song, or A Wet Day at Walmer Castle
) and his increase in despotic powers, not only over the nation's purse by additional taxation, but, driven by ambition, the deeper urge to be remembered in the pages of history. (This of course, is the theme of
Lines on Ambition
, also signed ‘A. Briton' and already ascribed to Burns in this edition.) If
The Tree of Liberty
was written during early January 1795, its reformist sentiments – its concluding prayer that ‘Auld England' may eventually plant the ‘far-famed tree' of liberty, meaning reform, is consistent with the new political essay.

General acceptance of the new prose work is of essential importance to Burnsian studies. If, as we believe it to be Burns's last public commentary on wider British politics and the European scene, it not only maps out precisely what he thought of the Pitt government, and its involvement against France, but it answers emphatically the nineteenth-and twentieth-century notion that Burns was confused on political matters. Indeed, it not only reveals his passionate democratic reformism, his intellectual involvement with current affairs, his depth of knowledge in political theory and historical allusion, in particular Roman history, but a sharp ability to argue a case cogently, and logically, with a poet's eye to penetrate acidly that somewhat intangible, hidden aspect of a nation's history, the motive and ambition of its leading politicians. One can, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, begin to see that in an unjust, socially and economically rigid hierarchical society, dominated by an oligarchy of aristocratical privilege, a critical thinking, democratic national poet, unable to accept his inferior social position, unable to keep ‘silent and obedient', was, in a sense, the ruling élite's worst nightmare.

Without manuscript authority, the provenance of the new prose cannot be proven beyond doubt, but the evidence, contextual and textual, convincingly says Burns. That he would deliver on a promise should be no surprise. If correct, we finally have his last, emphatic political statement proving beyond doubt he was a committed democratic reformer.

As an introduction to this song, the political prose essay signed ‘A. Briton' is printed first, in chronological order. Both appear in
The
Morning Chronicle
during 1795, and are signed under the same name. While it may not automatically follow that one author wrote both, evidence suggests that this is highly probable. The prose by ‘A. Briton' employs the ironic description ‘the wisest and best of Kings', while the song, written several months later, contains the lexically similar, ironic ‘And the wisest and best on a Throne!' If, as already argued, Burns is the author of the prose, then, there is a strong case to argue that the song, too, is his.

This work was provisionally ascribed to Burns in Hogg's
The
Lost Poems
(1997). There are several factors which suggest it may be from Burns. He, as we have seen, promised to send radical work to
The Morning Chronicle
(Letter 620B). For discussion of this crucial pen-name, see notes to
Lines on Ambition
. As also mentioned in the case for the new radical essay, Burns wrote to
The Morning Chronicle
in January 1795 and emphasised that he was ‘a Briton' (Letter 654).

The song is almost certainly by a Scot, given the rhyme of ‘trade' and ‘bread' (ll. 10–11) where the latter is pronounced
braid
. More
important, the song contains a peculiar, deliberate ungrammatical use of ‘was' (rather than were) for colloquial effect, ‘But there they was wrong' (l. 25). After an exhaustive check of period poetry scanning the eighteenth-century Poetry Database, and printed works, only one poet appears out of the crowd who employed this language quirk, Burns. His non-grammatical ‘was' is found, inter alia, in
John Barleycorn
, ‘There was three Kings unto the east'.

Textually, the song begins with ironic assent, setting up the target of attack by appearing to praise everything British, in constrast to the apparently monstrous French. In reality, the poem is a brillaintly ironic attack on the anti-French war policy of William Pitt. The notion that Britain has ‘the wisest and best' on a ‘throne' is absurd, given the madness of King George III and the public knowledge that Pitt and Dundas were behind almost every Royal Proclamation printed in the daily newspaper during the 1790s. In truth, King George remained a background puppet, in the shadow of Pitt's increasingly overt abuse of power.

The theme of the song is of Britons being caught in Pitt's political ‘cob-web' of ambition and deceit. Burns's favourite contemporary radical song at this period, which he copied out in his own hand and quoted to Mrs Dunlop in January 1795, The Vine
Cover'd Hills and Gay Regions of France,
by William Roscoe, refers to the British people ‘caught in his [Pitt's] cob-web like flies'. This song, the Burns-copied manuscript of which was presented to Roscoe by Maria Riddell after Burns's death, is probably the progenitor of the new song's title. Britain was being brought to its knees. Hunger and at times, famine, occurred in parts of England and Scotland, as reported in the press during the winter of 1794–5. Ll. 47–52 allude to this, suggesting that the Pitt government's early plan of starving the French into submission had backfired and was having such an effect at home. This point, far from being poetic fantasy, is eloquently put by the great Glasgow radical, Professor John Millar, a year later in
The Scots
Chronicle
, September 2nd, 1796:

In these years destitution and famine are omnipresent in radical writing, culminating in Coleridge's Macbeth-derived incantational attack on Pitt,
Fire, Famine and Slaughter.

While we know Burns personally experienced food shortages in the first three months of 1796, when he complained of his family going for days without food, his was not an isolated example. Dumfries witnessed food shortage problems in 1795 when this radical song was composed. David Staig wrote to Robert Dundas, Lord Advocate, on 4th February, 1795 requesting help due to extreme shortages of oatmeal in Dumfriesshire: ‘The enclosed memorial was handed to me this morning by our Magistrates … under this alarm of scarcity… it is impossible for me as Collector of the Customs, to give the wished for relief.' (RH 2/4/78/f.25). A pamphlet by Dumfries bakers and grain dealers complains that grain from the area was being shipped out of Scotland and not enough was available to them to make a living or feed the local people (RH 2/4/78/f.27–28). Although there are no newspaper accounts of food riots in Dumfries during early 1795, there did exist a serious food problem, partly caused by exorbitant prices and exportation of grain and oatmeal from the area to London. (RH 2/4/79/f.3).

One critic has suggested
The Cob
Web
might be the work of Dr Alexander Geddes, a radical Scot living in London. Granted Geddes was a prolific pro-Fox poet but he did not employ this pen-name. The entire canon of Geddes is extant in Chelmsford at the Essex County Record Office and the Scottish Catholic Archive in Edinburgh: both were examined. It is not among his papers. Not one of Geddes's radical works is known ever to have been destroyed. His complete poetic jottings and journals are extant, and they contain many of his favourite works copied out at least twice. Textually, there is no example among his poems where he employed the colloquial, common-language usage of ‘was' in place of ‘were'. Nor does he display the Burnsian skill of ironic assent to what he is actually attacking so evident here. Given this circumstantial and stylistic evidence, the song is attributed to Burns. Without definitive manuscript evidence, the attribution cannot be made with absolute certainty, but considering the evidence for the new political essay and its lexical similarity with
The Cob Web,
it appears that the same ‘A. Briton' composed both prose and song.

Along with the poem's comic, sophisticated dramatic inversion, there are two other elements which strongly suggest Burns. First, as in
Ode on General Washington's Birthday
, the notion of a degenerate England betraying her libertarian heritage in order to destroy France. Second, his capacity for integrating on-going political events into his poetry. What ll. 37–9 refer to is the English support for solving the French crisis by returning the Dauphin to the throne
as Child-King. This was mooted in 1791 when he was ten but the intended Louis XVII died on June 8, 1795 just prior to this poem's composition. Implicit in the poem (ll. 13–18) is the promise of freedom sent by God through the true child-king, Jesus Christ, as opposed to the false, worldly child-king. Burns did, indeed, belong to that category of writers defined by Herman Melville as those ‘who breathe that unshackled democratic spirit of Christianity in all things'.