The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

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СКАЧАТЬ wrongly, both their reputations with, at best, alcoholic tendencies. This alleged addiction was then implied to lead to other forms of licence where, certainly in Burns’s case, sexual promiscuity was on the charge sheet.

This demonisation of Burns is not to be understood, however, without it being placed in its proper political context. The Mackenzie who penned these personal attacks was the same man who was writing fervid anti-revolutionary polemics in The Edinburgh Herald during 1790–1 under the pen name ‘An Old Tradesman’ and again in 1793, in The Caledonian Mercury, under the pen name ‘Brutus’ to prove that all was for the best in the best of all worn torn, economically distressed Hanoverian worlds. As spokesperson for the old regime he believed that strong government would ‘save the people from that worst enemy of purely democratic states – the people themselves’.28 The pinnacle of his loyalty is the 1792 A Review of the Principal Proceedings of the Parliament of 1784, a defense of William Pitt, when Pitt’s pro-reformist views of 1784 were being thrown back in his face by radicals. Retrospectively referring to that pamphlet Mackenzie described the ideological clash of the 1790’s as an ‘epidemic insanity … which set up certain idols, under the names of Liberty, Equality and The Rights of Man’.29 Pitt personally thanked Mackenzie for his loyal defence, and basking in such praise, he replied ‘My Opinion, Sir, of you as a Minister I hold only in common with the Millions around me.’30 (Letter 93, To William Pitt, March 1792). These ‘millions’ were not so loyal, as Mackenzie informed George Home on 26th March 1792:

There is a Spirit of Sedition gone forth, of which it is very difficult to tell the Extent, but even if not so considerable as some timid people fear, so restless, so busy, so zealous, as to be truly alarming to every considerate Man. I forget the Calculation made of the numbers of Manufactures in England, but we all know it is very great. Of these I believe I may say a Majority, but assuredly a great part, are determined enemies to the present Order of things31 …

Theatre goers, as Mackenzie records, were among this swelling radical ‘enemy’ and in one incident he tells Home, open conflict erupted between radicals and loyalists at London’s Haymarket theatre when the revolutionary song ‘Ca Ira’ was demanded by reformers, but chanted down by loyalist calls for ‘God Save the King’. Similar tensions spread to the provincial theatres, including Dumfries and an unidentified informer reported to the Excise that Burns was in the reformist mob. Mackenzie goes on in the same letter to condemn Scottish academics: ‘From my Communication with Men of Letters here, I can perceive that they are generally on the side of the Malcontents’.32 Fanatically partisan, status obsessed, politically scared, Mackenzie so hated his reforming and radical political enemies that he could not speak their names. To do so would give them a credibility he utterly sought to deny. For Mackenzie the radical was equivalent to the bestial. This is why in Mackenzie and the subsequent Tory criticism he inspired always described Burns as surrounded by destructive groups of unnamed degenerates in Edinburgh and, even worse, Dumfries.

      It should further be understood that Burns was not a unique case for such treatment. The heavily subsidised, reactionary literary, magazine and newspaper culture put together by Pitt and Dundas specialised in trashing the radical literary enemy by varied forms of abuse based on the relationship of personal licentiousness to consequent political anarchy if these people were to succeed. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft with whom Burns corresponded received treatment even worse than his, as a promiscuous woman she was even more reprehensible than a randy ploughman. Engrossed in destroying the careers of any radical sympathisers, Mackenzie boasted to the ultra-loyalist George Chalmers, in March 1793:

One thing Mr Young suggests as never yet thought of, which however was thought of here, and enforced in two short Articles in the Newspapers by myself, at the very opening of this Business, namely the resolution of not employing Jacobin Tradesmen, which had a very excellent Effect in this Town.… contrary to my Expectations, the War has I think done good in this Country, given a Sort of Impulse to the good Part of the Community …33

      An ever-willing anti-reform propagandist, Mackenzie helped organise the Scottish distribution of a vicious attack, printed by the same George Chalmers, on Tom Paine as a degenerate, dangerous individual. The black art of character assassination, well established before the death of Burns, won rich patronage for the loyal Mackenzie, appointed Comptroller of Taxes in Scotland in 1799.

The degree of Mackenzie’s vindictiveness and his stress of the later Dumfries years, also alert us to one of the most pervasive and politically wilfully misconceived of myths surrounding Burns. Indeed, so pervasive that it has even penetrated the normally sceptical consciousness of Professor T.M. Devine who has recently written of ‘the public recantation of such celebrated supporters of the radical cause as Robert Burns’.34 This alleged recantation stems from one misinterpreted, truncated song, The Dumfries Volunteers. It avoids all the substantial poetic evidence of the Dumfries years to the contrary; not least Extempore [on the Loyal Natives’ Verses]:

      Ye true ‘Loyal Natives’, attend to my song,

      In uproar and riot rejoice the night long:

      From envy and hatred your corps is exempt:

      But where is your shield from the darts of contempt?

      The poem catches perfectly both Burns’s contempt for the British cause under the war-mongering Pitt and the political company he was keeping in the bitterly politically factionalised little town from which he kept sending out not only radical poems to politically sympathetic London, Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers, but, as his doctor William Maxwell had, weapons to the French. All this, of course, at ferocious risk to, at best, his Excise position as he was scrutinised by his rightly suspicious masters. This, too, accounts for his attempts in the last years to get free of the claustrophobic cockpit of Dumfries to the relatively safer, because larger Glasgow area where, even more than Edinburgh, Scottish history has still chronically underestimated the depth of a radical opposition to Pitt’s war policy so great that Burke brought it up in the House.

      If Burns had made any public recantation, Mackenzie and his ilk would have shouted it from the house-tops. That there was none accounts not only for the intensity of Mackenzie’s malice but also for what we now know about his activities not only as literary propagandist but practically on behalf of the government. The nature of Mackenzie’s key role in the government’s scrutiny of Burns and the subsequent creation of a literary, psychological context by which to sanitise the poetry we now know from the archives of Edinburgh University. Here we have discovered letters from Robert Heron requesting payments from Robert Dundas via Henry Mackenzie for espionage services rendered:

      My Lord … Five or six years since, I, too boldly introduced myself to your Lordship, by suggesting that it was requisite to counteract from the Press, the effects of those seditious associations and seditious writings which were then busily corrupting the political sentiments of the people of this country … you were pleased not to disapprove the ingenuiness and honesty of my wishes and intentions. I was, in consequence of this condescending goodness of your Lordship, noticed by the Committee of the Association for the Defence of the Constitution, which was soon after formed. Under the direction —particularly of Mr Mackenzie, Lord Glenlee and Mr Campbell, I was employed to write several little articles for the newspapers, and for other occasions, in order to oppose the malignant efforts of sedition …

… The Committee had, with sufficient liberality, already paid my petty services with the sum of thirty pounds … Your Lordship, СКАЧАТЬ