political ancestry and the radical Whiggism to which he was now attaching himself. But by the time Sheridan became conscious of public life, the vestiges of Jacobitism had become, paradoxically, a few stray threads in the banners of the radical Whigs. Rather paradoxically, Tory blue became the colour of Wilkes’s supporters. The Public Advertiser which published the Junius Letters also published Jacobite propaganda. Later, a number of prominent former Jacobites, including Sir Thomas Gasgoigne, Frances Plowden and Joseph Ritson, became adherents of the radical Whig, Charles James Fox. Sir Frances Burndett’s family had come out for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ’45. The apparent conservatism of Jacobitism, its hankering after an increasingly mythic utopia in the past, was not really out of tune with the language and sentiments of the radicals. As Paul Kleber Monod puts it ‘the illusion that a “golden age” might have existed at some time in the past fascinated radicals …’ The old promises of unity and moral regeneration continued to appeal to the imagination of the English radicals even after the Stuart cause collapsed.12
Against Hanoverian triumphalism, misfortune, then, made strange political bedfellows. Also, like Sheridan, Burns’s sense of Jacobitism was familial. His family were not rooted in Ayrshire; his father had come from the North-East Jacobite redoubt. Indeed, Burns claimed that in 1715 they had been ‘out’. As he wrote in 1789 to Lady Winifred Maxwell Constable:
… with your ladyship I have the honor to be connected by one of the strongest and most endearing ties in the whole Moral world —Common Sufferers in a cause where even to be unfortunate is glorious, the cause of Heroic Loyalty! Though my Fathers had not illustrious Honours and vast properties to hazard in the contest; though they left their humble cottages only to add so many units to the unnoted croud that followed their leaders; yet what they could they did, and what they had they lost; with unshaken firmness and unconcealed Political Attachments, they shook hands with Ruin for what they esteemed the cause of their King and their Country.—
This language, and the inclosed verses, are for your Ladyship’s eyes alone.— Poets are not very famous for their prudence; but as I can do nothing for a Cause which is nearly no more, I do not wish to hurt myself.
Excise officers, as part of their routine duty post-1745, were expected to compile and deliver to Edinburgh, a list of all known Jacobite sympathisers in their area. This remained true until the death of Charles Edward Stuart in Rome the year after Burns wrote his dedicatory Birthday Ode to the exiled Stuart. Though he thought Jacobitism in practical terms a spent force, Burns knew it still had enough vitality to get him into trouble with his Hanoverian masters, thus he did not sign his Jacobite songs. Also it provided for him an image of Scottish self-loyalty which he increasingly believed was lacking in the contemporary nation replete with individuals variedly on the make at home and abroad. Nor did he perceive authoritarian kingship and consequent petrified social hierarchy as a solution to the nation’s ills. What he did fear, and this in his last years brought him ever closer to the views of Charles James Fox and the Scottish Foxite Whigs, was that a massification under Pitt of Hanoverian monarchical power was taking place. Thus as early as 1787, at the very moment he was seeking to enter The Excise, he did not only diamond cut these lines on a Stirling window but subsequently published them in an Edinburgh newspaper thinly disguised with the initials R.B.
HERE Stewarts once in triumph reign’d,
And laws for Scotland’s weal ordain’d;
But now unroof’d their Palace stands,
Their sceptre’s fall’n to other hands;
Fallen indeed, and to the earth,
Whence grovelling reptiles take their birth.—
The injur’d STEWART-line are gone,
A Race outlandish fill their throne;
An idiot race, to honor lost;
Who knows them best despise them most.
Indeed, the appeal of the Stewarts to his imagination was a mixture of empathy for their suffering and displacement, as contrast gainers against the loathed Hanoverians and, not least, the aesthetic tradition they represented. They may have had something of the knight about them but, like the devil, they also had all the best tunes:
By the bye, it is singular enough that the Scottish Muses were all Jacobites. I have paid more attention to every description of Scots songs than perhaps any body living has done, I do not recollect one single stanza, or even the title of the most trifling Scots air, which has the least panegyrical reference to the families of Nassau or Brunswick; while there are hundreds satirizing them. This may be thought no panegyric on the Scots Poets, but I mean it as such. For myself, I would always take it as a compliment to have it said, that my heart ran before my head. And surely the gallant but unfortunate house of Stewart, the kings of our fathers for so many heroic ages, is a theme much more interesting than an obscure beef-witted insolent race of foreigners whom a conjuncture of circumstances kickt up into power and consequence.
If the unmerited rise of the Hanoverians excited his rage, the fall of the executed or exiled Stewarts caught his sympathy. Tudor England’s conduct towards Scotland proved as inflammatory to him as that of the contemporary Hanoverians; ‘What a rock-hearted, perfidious Succubus was that Queen Elizabeth! —Judas Iscariot was a sad dog to be sure, but still his demerits sink into insignificance, compared with the doings of infernal Bess Tudor.’ This vision of Mary Queen of Scots or Bonnie Prince Charlie is not, however, an inversion of Burns’s democratic principles. He viewed them, especially the Prince, as Shakespeare viewed Lear. As he wrote: ‘A poor, friendless wand’rer may claim a sigh,/ Still more if that Wand’rer were royal.’ If experience of Jacobite defeat and its ‘Heroic Loyalty’ created social parity between himself and Lady Winifred, it made brothers of a kind between himself and the fallen Prince who was not only an outcast but also the father of an illegitimate child. People so fallen from their proper station into obscurity and poverty constantly preoccupied his imagination and filled his poetry. In contemplating Pitt’s fall from power in 1789, he compared his plight with that of Nebuchadnezzar. Had he known what was to transpire, he might well have wished that Pitt had indeed gone out to grass. He also saw in the fate of the common supporters of the Jacobite cause a grievous expulsion not simply from their ancestral home but into Miltonic hyperspace:
… the brave but unfortunate Jacobite Clans who, as John Milton tells us, after their unhappy Culloden in Heaven, lay ‘nine times the space that measures day and night,’ in oblivious astonishment, prone-weltering on the fiery surge.
This inspired casting of the Highlanders as the fallen angels of Paradise Lost is not only a general expression of Burns’s conceited genius for creatively amalgamating diverse elements but a particular example of his constant, synergic ability to fuse not only Scottish and English poetic elements but also, with regard to radical political philosophy, to be indebted to both English and Scottish sources as means of energising his political poetry and thought. Consider, for example, this little known poem, On Johnson’s Opinion of Hampden;
FOR shame!
Let Folly and Knavery
Freedom oppose:
’Tis suicide, Genius,
To mix with her foes.
Greatly admiring of and influenced by Dr Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, wherein he saw so many of his own pains, Burns was provoked into this remark by Johnson’s acerbic Tory aside that John Hampden was ‘a zealot of rebellion’. Hampden, due to his struggles with Charles I, was an exemplary, indeed
