buttering paragraphs of eulogiums on your thrice-honored & never-enough-to-be-praised MAGIS-TRACY —how they hunt down a [Shop (deleted)] house-breaker with the sanguinary perseverance of a bloodhound —how they outdo a terrier in a badger-hole, in unearthing a resettor of stolen goods —how they steal on a thoughtless troop of Night-nymphs as a spaniel winds the unsuspecting Covey— or how they riot o’er a ravaged B—dy house as a cat does o’er a plundered Mouse-nest —how they new-vamp old Churches, aiming at appearances of Piety —plan Squares and Colledges, to pass for men of taste and learning, &c. &c. &c. —while old Edinburgh, like [a (deleted)] the doting Mother of a parcel a rakehelly Prodigals, may sing ‘Hooly & fairly,’ or cry, ‘Wae’s me that e’er I saw ye,’ but still must put her hand in her pocket & pay whatever scores the young dogs think proper to contract) —I was going to say, but this damn’d Parenthesis has put me out of breath, that you should get the manufacturer of the tinselled crockery of magistratial reputations, who makes so distinguished & distinguishing a figure in the Ev: Courant, to compose or rather to compound something very clever on my remarkable frugality; that I write to one of my most esteemed friends on this wretched paper, which was originally intended for the venal fist of some drunken Exciseman, to take dirty notes in a miserable vault of an Ale-cellar.
Burns’s political thought, then, is created by his perception of political, institutional degeneration driven by individual economic rapacity and how this might be countered by alternative forms of justice-creating communality. The immediate question arising from this is, of course, the question of Burns’s fidelity to the British State of which he was not only a subject but a paid civil-servant who, as Tom Paine had also been, was bound to it by an all-encompassing oath, which cast a shadow over the rest of his life. The Excise oath is deeply revealing of the pressure the British State exerted:
I, …….., do swear that I do, from my Heart, Abhor, Detest, and Abjure, as impious and heretical, that damnable Doctrine and Position, that Princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope, or any Authority of the See of Rome, may be deposed or murdered by their Subjects, or any other whatsoever. And I do declare, that no foreign Prince, Person, Prelate, State or Potentate hath, or ought to have, any Jurisdiction, Power, Superiority, Pre-eminence or Authority, Ecclesiastical or Spiritual, within the Realm: so help me God.10
In part, Burns’s protestations of fidelity to that state were wrung out of him as his masters in the Excise grew ever more worried about his revolutionary tendencies. In protesting fidelity, however, to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Burns was not simply being hypocritically skin saving. That revolution had been acceptable, certainly as a stage to further democratic progress. What he and his fellow radicals believed, however, was that the trajectory of the British State with its Hanoverian monarchy was degenerately downwards. As he wrote to Mrs Dunlop in 1788:
What you mention of the thanksgiving day is inspirational from above. —Is it not remarkable, odiously remarkable, that tho’ manners are more civilised & the rights of mankind better understood, by an Augustan Century’s improvement, yet in this very reign of heavenly Hanoverianism, & almost in this very year, an empire beyond the Atlantic has had its REVO-LUTION too, & for the same maladministration & legislative misdemeanours in the illustrious & sapientipetent Family of H [anover] as was complained in the tyrannical & bloody house of STUART.—
The ‘Empire beyond the Atlantic’ was for Burns, as Blake, a benchmark for his ideal of Republican, democratic virtue. It was the revolution that presaged the desired revolutions to come. As he wrote in The Tree of Liberty:
My blessings ay attend the chiel,
Wha pitied Gallia’s slaves, man
And staw a branch, spite o’ the Deil
Frae ’yont the western waves, man!
The demonic forces of reaction were for Burns, however, usually more successful in hindering and, indeed, destroying the transmission of the forces of liberty. Worse, Britain which had been because of its history the initiator and prime mover in the cause of liberty was now become the chief oppressor. In poetic terms this dialectic between a self-betraying England and a self-creating democratic America achieves its most complete expression in his Ode for General Washington’s Birthday. This is a poem of extraordinary importance in terms of Burns’s political ideas but one which his conservative commentators have almost wholly ignored by conveniently drawing attention to their sense of its linguistic and formal inadequacies caused by the poet’s use of the Pindaric Ode. For Burns himself, however, the subject of the poem was ‘Liberty: you know my honoured friend, how dear the theme is to me.’ For Burns and his fellow radicals the cause of liberty was a pan-European phenomenon, nations were tested by the degree by which they had gone beyond absolutism towards democracy. Most of them, as he testifies in that brilliantly satiric tour de force and tour of Europe, To a Gentleman who had sent a Newspaper, failed the test miserably. It was, however, particularly painful to see England fallen from her pre-eminent position. As he wrote in the ‘Washington’ poem:
Alfred, on thy starry throne,
Surrounded by the tuneful choir,
The Bards that erst have struck the patriot lyre,
And roused the freeborn Briton’s soul of fire,
No more thy England own.—
Dare 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