The Canongate Burns (70 page)

Robert Riddell (1755–94), died on 20th April, 1794, aged 39 years. The sonnet which appeared under the poet's name in
The Dumfries
Journal
was also sent to the London Star, and printed on 30th April, then subsequently copied by the
Morning Chronicle, 5th May
, and in the May issue of
The Gentleman's Magazine.
The newspaper obituary on Riddell is also thought to be by Burns, although it has never been formally credited. Burns commented on Robert Riddell of Glenriddell, who lived at Friars Carse, near Ellisland farm, that ‘At their fire-side I have enjoyed more pleasant evenings than at all the houses of fashionable people in this country put together … many of the happiest hours of my life' (Cromek, p. 269, from the
I.S.M.M)
. He is, therefore, a crucial, but still not fully-known player in the Burns story.

Kinsley omits the most important factor about Riddell, that he was a leading radical Whig, known throughout Britain (Vol. III, p. 1274). As we have seen, he wrote the pro-reform essay printed under the pen-name ‘Cato' which Burns posted to
The Edinburgh
Gazetteer
(Letter 530). Several of his essays feature in
The Glasgow
Journal
; they fiercely debate with Edmund Burke the question of imported manufactures and the India question relating to the trial of Warren Hastings. Riddell was thus a key radical Whig of the period (See our notes to
On Glenriddell's Fox Breaking its Chain
). Professor Werkmeister cogently remarks that Burns's allowing his name to be associated with Riddell was: ‘… a courageous resolve, for, since Riddell was no friend of Government, a “tribute” to him had to be regarded as political and hence publishable only in an Opposition newspaper' (
Robert Burns and the London Daily Press, Modern
Philology
, LXIII, 1966, p. 326).

The sonnet sets a deliberate parallel between Burns and Riddell and the profound loss felt by Milton when his friend Edward King was drowned, as lamented in
Lycidas
, hence the quote (l. 11).

This appears first in the London Whig Opposition paper
The
Morning Chronicle
, two days after the unsigned publication of
Scots
Wha Hae
. It was signed as the work of Burns. It is not a controversial work, so there was no problem about his name being printed. Most editors assume the heroine of the song is Janet Miller, daughter of the poet's former landlord at Ellisland, Patrick Miller of Dalswinton. This is not known for certain. Both Kinsley and Mackay err in their notes to this work by going on to assert that Patrick Miller offered Burns a job with
The Morning Chronicle
in April 1794, when in fact it is known that the offer of removal for full time journalistic work in London was rejected by Burns in mid-March, 1794. Miller merely conveyed the offer from James Perry, the paper's editor.

Burns started this work when snow-bound in the village of Ecclefechan on the evening of 7th February, 1795. It was finished and sent to Thomson in April (Letter 661). It is a modification of the poet's own song
I'll Ay Ca' in by Yon Town
which had been sent to Johnson.

After publication in
The Edinburgh Evening Courant
on 4th May 1795 this song appeared in
The Dumfries Journal
on 5th May,
The
Caledonian Mercury
on 7th May and was copied in
The Northern
Star
, Belfast, 29th October–2nd November 1795 issue. It was printed by Currie in 1800 and features in S.M.M., no. 546, 1803.

A first draught, which has not survived and was probably destroyed, contained a satirical attack on a ‘ci-devant Commodore' which the poet later omitted. The reason Burns dropped the satirical lines is explained to Mrs Dunlop: ‘Miss Keith will see that I have omitted the four lines on the ci-devant Commodore which gave her so much offence. Had I known that he stood in no less connection than the Godfather of my lovely young Friend, I would have spared him for her sake' (
Robert Burns and Mrs Dunlop
, edited by W. Wallace, London, 1898, p. 419). The fact that this song originally contained a satirical attack on a high ranking military officer is missed by previous editors who distort the song into a statement of the poet's loyalty to the Pitt government and hence, a cessation of his radical values. This is far from the case. Indeed, the message of the song is unequivocally in
support
of reform, that is, placing the practice of politics back on a footing according to the principles of the Constitution, a sentiment clearly echoed in the lines:

A cleverly balanced criticism of the Pitt government hints that there are indeed problems that should be addressed and resolved. Extremes are exposed as no solution in themselves – the ‘tyrant' and ‘mob' – echoes his earlier line, ‘Be Anarchy cursed and Tyranny damned'. It would be naïve to read the reference to singing ‘God Save the King' as a statement of loyalism, given that it is Burns, as he does on many occasions, giving ironic assent to what he is actually attacking and preparing the song to end on a final and loudly emphasised phrase ‘We'll ne'er forget THE PEOPLE!' The appearance of ‘loyalty' is, in reality, a sleight of hand that refers more to an abstract loyalism to the higher ideal of reforming politics and placing into practice the ideals of the British constitution. By early 1795 the radical French leader Marat had been assassinated and the French Revolution had strayed far from its original ideals and was at this time in the hands of an oligarchy hell-bent on Empire building and the reactionary imperial cult of the young officer, Napoleon Bonaparte. It is therefore no contradiction and entirely consistent with the radical views of Burns that he would oppose a French invasion of Britain, given that their revolution had metamorphosed to being a tyrannical power. Hence, Burns could oppose a French invasion but at the same time still agree with the original principles of the French Revolution. Moreover, this song allowed him the breathing space of
appearing
to be a loyal subject, but one who actually opposed the political leadership of Pitt and Dundas. As he remarked to Mrs Dunlop in mid-January 1795, he looked forward to the day when a person might be able to criticise ‘Billy Pitt' without being judged an enemy (all reformers were branded Jacobins at this time) of his country.

Given Burn's expurgation of the poem's specific satirical target combined with an understandably, fear-induced political tracks-disguising over-subtlety, Burns's legion of conservative enemies, from the outset, seized upon this poem as absolute, final evidence, despite the overwhelming mass of his politically contrary poetry, of his loyal, wholly anti-revolutionary, pro-Hanoverian stance. Fearfully living throughout the nineteenth century in the shadow of the French Revolution, almost all institutionalized,
published
Burns criticism followed this line. The radical Burns of the Chartist Movement and subsequent proto-socialism existed at a working class, oral level. (See William Power, ‘The Song of Friendship', in
Robert Burns and Other Essays and Sketches
(London & Glasgow, 1926, p. 48). In the economically fraught, politically turbulent Scotland of the aftermath of the First World War, this political division became more extreme. Burns was, albeit simplistically, the poet-prophet of Red Clydeside and the ILP. The opposing bourgeois
populism of the Burns Federation was of a decidedly reactionary, pro-Unionist order. Hence, for example, Duncan McNaught's account of Burns's politics as expressed in
The Dum
fries Volunteers
in B.C. (No. 34, 1925), pp. 61–5:

Sadly, however, misinterpretation was not exlusively the prerogative of wilful reactionaries. The publication of
The Dumfries
Volunteers
led to a back-lash against Burns by his erstwhile Ulster supporters who saw it as an act of apostasy akin, as Liam McIlvanney has pertinently pointed out (‘Robert Burns and the Ulster-Scots Literary Revival of the 1790s',
Bullán: An Irish Studies
Journal
, Vol. IV, No. 2, pp. 124–44), to the betrayal that the younger English radicals felt for Wordsworth. This led to the publication of this
Song
in the republican
Northern
Star (29 October–2 November, 1795):

That this specific charge was untrue has to be set against the general truth that Scotland did fail Ireland at its hour of need. See John Brims's very fine ‘Scottish Radicalism and the United Irishman' in
The United Irishmen, Republicanism, Radicalism and Re
bellion
(Dublin: 1993), pp. 151–66.