injured nations form the great design,
To make detested tyrants bleed?
Thy England execrates the glorious deed!
Beneath her hostile banners waving,
Every pang of honor braving,
England in thunder calls— ‘The Tyrant’s cause is mine!’
That hour accurst, how did the fiends rejoice,
And hell thro’ all her confines raise the exulting voice,
That hour which saw the generous the English name
Linkt with such damned deeds of everlasting shame!
For Burns an England so fallen, inevitably dragged Scotland down with her. On occasion he could be defiantly nationalistic:
You know my national prejudices. —I have often read & admired the Spectator, Adventurer, Rambler, & World, but still with certain regret that they were so thoroughly and entirely English.— Alas! Have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from a certain Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence, & even her very Name! …
Unlike many of his educated compatriots, the Anglo-British empire did not look to Burns a good deal for Scotland. He saw Scots sucked into the deadly wars of empire. He also saw the degeneration of Scottish leadership with Scots as sycophantic Westminster politicians and bullies back home among their countrymen with Henry Dundas, the quintessence of these vices, as his enemy incarnate. At his bleakest, as in Ode on General Washington’s Birthday, Burns’s perceived Scotland, despite her heroic history of asserting her freedom, lost beyond resurrection:
Thee, Caledonia, thy wild heaths among,
Famed for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song,
To thee, I turn with swimming eyes.—
Where is that soul of Freedom fled?
Immingled with the mighty Dead!
Beneath the hallowed turf where WALLACE lies!
Hear it not, Wallace, in thy bed of death!
Ye babbling winds in silence sweep;
Disturb not ye the hero’s sleep,
Nor give the coward secret breath.—
Is this the ancient Caledonian form,
Firm as her rock, resistless as her storm?
Shew me that eye which shot immortal hate,
Blasting the Despot’s proudest bearing:
Shew me that arm which, nerved with thundering fate,
Braved Usurpation’s boldest daring!
Dark-quenched as yonder sinking star,
No more that glance lightens afar;
That palsied arm no more whirls on the waste of war.
Opposed to such national pessimism, he also perceived a resurrected not morbid Scotland with himself as National Bard writing, a sort of Yeatsian precursor, a historically derived national mytho-poetry. As he wrote to Alex Cunningham in March 1791: ‘—When political combustion ceases to be the object of Princes & Patriots, it then, you know becomes the lawful prey of Historians and Poets.—’ He knew the explosively, for him, liberating forces locked up in Scottish history. Sir Walter Scott knew them, too, and was terrified of them. Burns, however, proceeded to create poetic time-bombs as in Scots Wha Hae, where the subtext is an attack on the Pittite policies of oppression against Scottish radicals in the Scots vernacular and the words of the French Revolutionaries, making the Tennis Court Oath to do or die, come from the mouths of fourteenth-century Scottish soldiers. It may be questionable history but its purpose is to detect semi-mythical antecedents in the Scottish past as precursors for the reintegrated, resurrected nation. William Wallace and, to a lesser extent, Robert Bruce were the obvious candidates:
What a poor, blighted, rickety breed and the virtues & charities when they take their birth from geometrical hypothesis & mathematical demonstration? And what a vigorous Offspring are they when they owe their origin to, and are nursed with the vital blood of a heart glowing with the noble enthusiasm of generosity, benevolence and Greatness of soul? The first may do very well for those philosophers who look on the world of man as one vast ocean and each individual as a little vortex in it whose sole business and merit is to absorb as much as it can in its own center (sic); but the last is absolutely and essentially necessary when you would make a Leonidas, a Hannibal, an Alfred, or a WALLACE.—
What Burns was attempting was a Scottish variant of the manner in which his English radical contemporaries were retrieving the English past. As Stephen C. Behrendt has remarked, ‘Oppositional Radical rhetoric frequently sought to politicise the masses by linking their interests with ancient British (Saxon) traditions of individual and collective liberty ostensibly preserved in the House of Commons but increasingly imperilled by self-serving initiatives of the aristocracy and the monarchy.’11 In an age whose rapacious entrepreneurial activities increasingly atomised society, Wallace, then, was the heroic selfless embodiment of the spirit of Scottish community. This looking to the past for virtuous political models and heroic embodiment of these models is, of course, characteristic of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century republican imagination with, of course, the virtuous pantheon to be derived from the classic republics of Greece and Rome. Like Shakespeare, with little Latin and less Greek, Burns certainly knew that central Real Whig text, Addison’s Cato and he did also draw witty parallels between the reformist Scots of his own era and their classical predecessors:
Erskine, a spunkie Norland billie;
True Campbells, Frederick and Illay;
An’ Livinstone, the bauld Sir Willie;
An’ monie ithers,
Whom auld Demosthenes or Tully
Might own for brithers.
In this discussion of republican tendencies, an immediate difficulty presents itself regarding Burns’s Jacobinism. As Hugh Miller remarked in the nineteenth century: ‘The Jacobite of one year who addressed verses to the reverend defenders of the beauteous Stuart and composed the Chevalier’s Lament had become in the next the uncompromising Jacobin who wrote A Man’s a Man for a’ That.’ In actual fact there is no chronological transition in Burns from Jacobite to Jacobin; these themes intermingle throughout. Nor are they essentially contradictory. Miller’s problem arises, as so many misunderstandings of Burns, from his belief that what he is dealing with is confusion unique to Burns. While Burns’s personal life pursued a self-aware, sometimes chaotic, zigzag course, his political ideation was not similarly eccentric. Miller, however, does not understand how radical culture as a whole integrated the apparently opposing element of Jacobitism into itself. As Fintan O’Toole has cogently remarked in dealing with a similar apparent self-contradiction in the Irish dramatist and Whig politician, R.B. Sheridan:
At
