… it remains unfortunate that Burns’s run-ins with the kirk have obscured the extent to which his own political philosophy is grounded in his religious inheritance. His politics are shaped by two complimentary strands of Presbyterian thought: on the one hand, the New Light, with its subjection of all forms of authority to the tribunal of individual reason: on the other, the traditional contractarian political theory long associated with Presbyterianism. These influences are evident in Burns’s repeated avowal of ‘revolution’ principles in his support for the American Revolution and, above all, in his satirical attacks on political corruption. The whole framework of assumption on which Burns’s political satires rest recalls the contractarian principles of Presbyterian thought: that authority ascends from below; that government is a contract, and political power a trust; and that even the humblest members of society are competent to censure their governors. That Burns deplored certain aspects of Calvinism —its harsh soteriology, its emphasis on faith over works— should not blind us to his sincere identification with the Presbyterian political inheritance:
The Solemn league and Covenant
Now brings a smile, now brings a tear.
But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs;
If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.22
Burns, of course, was not the only Scotsman to embrace such radical ideals. We cannot properly understand his life and much of his poetry if we do not understand the degree to which his personal relationships and affiliations were directed towards and driven by seeking out similarly politically sympathetic groups and individuals. It was the Lodge friends and patrons who eased his path towards Edinburgh; that so politically riven city which was to prove so disastrous to him in both life and death. Without, as all his generation, fully understanding the political causes of what happened in the capital, the ever astute Edwin Muir put his finger on the events of his sensational first extended visit to the capital as the cause of Burns’s subsequent accelerating decline:
It was after his first trip to Edinburgh that his nature, strongly built and normal, disintegrated. He had hoped, in meeting the first shock of his astonishing triumph in the capital, that an escape was at last possible from the life of hardly maintained poverty which as a boy he had foreseen and feared. He left Edinburgh recognising that there was no reprieve, that hardship must sit at his elbow to the end of his days. Fame had lifted him on the point of an immediate pinnacle; now the structure had melted away and, astonished, he found himself once more in his native county, an Ayrshire peasant. Some fairy had set him for a little in the centre of a rich and foreign society; then calmly and finally, she had taken it from under his feet. There is hardly another incident in literary history to parallel this brief rise and setting of social favour, and hardly one showing the remorselessness of fortune in the world. The shock told deeply on Burns, working more for evil than the taste for dissipation which he was said to have acquired from the Edinburgh aristocracy.23
Given Muir’s lack of knowledge of the covert political forces operating on Burns, this is well said. It does, however, under-estimate the extraordinary degree to which Burns, in the midst of his Edinburgh triumph, was conscious not only of its transience but the darkness to follow. As he wrote to Robert Ainslie on 16th December 1786:
You will very probably think, my honoured friend, that a hint about the mischievous nature of intoxicated vanity may not be unreasonable, but, alas! You are wide of the mark. Various concurring circumstances have raised my fame as a poet to a height which I am absolutely certain I have not merits to support; and I look down on the future as I would into the bottomless pit.
He realised that his Edinburgh fame was largely based on the temporary social novelty of a ploughman writing poetry. He also probably realised that his Preface to the Kilmarnock Poems was, as we shall see, a brilliant confidence trick on a willingly gullible genteel Scottish audience, for which a price had to be paid. In the same month he wrote, even more particularly and precisely, to Rev William Greenfield about the consequences of Edinburgh:
Never did Saul’s armour sit so heavily on David when going to encounter Goliath, as does the encumbering robe of public notice with which the friendship and patronage of some ‘names dear to fame’ have invested me. I do not say this in the ridiculous idea of seeming self-abasement, and affected modesty. I have long studied myself and I think I know pretty exactly what ground I occupy, both as a man, & a poet; and however the world or a friend may sometimes differ from me in that particular, I stand for it, in silent resolve with all the tenaciousness of Property. I am willing to believe that my abilities deserved a better fate than the veriest shades of life; but to be dragged forth, with all my imperfections on my head, to the full glare of learned and polite observation, is what, I am afraid, I shall have bitter reason to repent I mention this to you, once for all, merely, in the Confessor style, to disburthen my conscience, and that ‘When proud Fortune’s ebbing tide recedes’ you may hear me witness, when my bubble of fame was at its highest, I stood unintoxicated, with the inebriating cup in my hand. Looking forward, with rueful resolve, to the hastening time when the stroke of envious Calumny, with all the eagerness of vengeful triumph, should dash it to the ground.
Mozarts seem inevitably to have their Salieris. The treachery that Burns so accurately predicted for himself was also to be understood as not only psychologically motivated resentment of genuine creativity, but also essentially driven by political ideology. As the 1793–4 Sedition Trials revealed, Edinburgh was a politically schismatic society. This was not so apparent in 1789 and Burns’s contacts with two utterly contrasting groups has never been fully understood in terms of the consequent conflicting politics or the terrible personal consequences for the poet of this division.
Initially, Burns was lauded by two utterly contrasting groups. He was a member of the boozy, boisterous, in many instances brilliant, radical, reformist club, The Crochallan Fencibles. He was also taken up, mildly patronised, by the aesthetically, politically and religiously conformist pro-Hanoverian group led by Henry Mackenzie and Hugh Blair. What has never been understood is not only how partisan to their own causes both groups were but, indeed, the degree to which, as the political scene darkened in the 1790s, they were sucked into active participation either towards not simply reform but insurrection on the radical side and covert anti-revolutionary activity on the government side. Of such undeclared civil war, Burns was among the chief victims.
Despite some excellent work by John Brims and Elaine MacFar-land we still fall considerably short of understanding the fraught complexity of the extent and intensity of radical protest in Scotland in the 1790s. One consequence of this, of course, has been the contextually impoverished state of Burns criticism. Most of it has been written with the political dimension quite absent. Nor does space here allow anything like the necessary explication of the complex nature of that political culture. What can be said, however, is that most Scottish history seriously underestimates certainly the quantity and, arguably, the quality of radical opposition prevalent in Scotland which became genuinely divisive due to the American War of Independence.
It was that war which created that group so essential to understanding both Burns’s political affiliations and what happened to him, The Crochallan Fencibles. The name was a deliberate parody of the loyalist militia groups springing up in opposition to the American cause. What the American war engendered in the radical, reformist side of Edinburgh can be gauged by the invited open letter of Dr Richard Price in 1784, ‘To the Secretary of the Committee of Citizens of Edinburgh’:
God grant that this spirit might increase till it has abolished all despotic governments and exterminated the slavery which debased mankind. This spirit first rose in America (it soon reached Ireland) it has diffused itself in some foreign countries, and your letter informs me that it is now animating Scotland.24