The Canongate Burns (71 page)

These anti-Hanoverian lines were inscribed anonymously on a window in Stirling by Burns during his first tour into the Highlands in August 1787. They reappeared in
The Edinburgh Evening
Courant
, 5th October 1787, thinly disguised by the poet's initials ‘R. B.' If the author's identity was not patently obvious at this point, it was made public knowledge by James Maxwell, an elderly mediocre Paisley poet, deeply envious of the young bard's success who published the lines and named Burns as the author. Maxwell used the opportunity to attack the poet in a pamphlet,
Animadver
sions on Some Poets and Poetasters
(Paisley, 1788). While accustomed to a degree of notoriety, at least in Ayrshire, this episode proved to be a mini-rehearsal of the graver trouble waiting ahead for Burns due to his bent for controversy. He wrote to Mrs McLehose on 27th January 1788: ‘I have almost given up the Excise idea. I have been just now to wait on a great Person … Why will Great people not only deafen us with the din of their equipage, and dazzle us with their fastidious pomp, but they must also be so very dictatorially wise? I have been question'd like a child about my matters, and blamed and schooled for my Inscription on Stirling window' (Letter 189).

During the early nineteenth century Motherwell tried to omit
these controversial lines from the canon by suggesting they were written by the bard's touring companion, William Nicol. The poet's somewhat vague title in the Glenriddell manuscript,
Written by
Somebody in the Window of an Inn at Stirling
gave some credence to those who wished to deny his authorship. By 1834, as McGuirk remarks, Cunningham was too timid to publish the final anti-Hanoverian couplet. Acting as censor, Cunningham justifed his action thus: ‘What was improper in the days of Burns is not proper now' (McGuirk, p. 245). Ll. 5–6 were added in the Glenriddell Manuscript and were probably not inscribed on the Stirling window.

This was written on 1st January, 1789 and published in
The
Caledonian Mercury
, January 1789, under the pen-name, Thomas A. Linn (probably taken from the song
Tam Linn
). It was also printed anonymously in
Lloyd's Evening Post
, on 12th–14th January, 1789, where it may have been copied, as was common practice, by that paper.

This is politically a wickedly reductive little poem, salted with sexual slyness. A panorama of 1788, where ‘great' events (the death of Charles III of Spain (l. 9) and the Regency Bill Crisis) are brought down to the vernacular earth of Burns's farmyard animals. Ll. 11–16 allude not only to the intensity of the quarrel between the still-favoured Pitt and Fox over the regency question but their utterly disparate sexuality. L. 30 alludes to the restriction of Edinburgh's water supply due to the severe frost of the winter of 1788–9. Even by the standards of Burns's anti-Hanoverianism, ll. 31–39 are stunning in that they brilliantly transpose the image of the metaphorically shackled Prince of Wales into the actual physical restraints now restraining his temporarily insane father.

This parodic, pacey Pindaric ode satirises the clashing rhetoric of manoeuvring politicians as they vied for position during the constitutional Regency crisis of 178°–9. When he sent the first complete version of the poem to Mrs Dunlop, Burns knew the risk he was taking: ‘I have this moment finished the following political Squib, and I cannot resist the temptation of sending you a copy of it – the only copy indeed that I will send to anybody except perhaps anonymously to some London Newspaper. — Politics is dangerous ground for me to tread on, and yet I cannot for the soul of me resist an impulse of anything like Wit' (Letter 326). Thurlow (l. 27) refers to Edward Lord Thurlow (1731–1806). Portland (l. 54) is the Duke of Portland, who led an exodus of influencial Whigs to the Conserva-tives when Britain went to war with France in 1793. Dundas (l. 63) refers to Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville (1742–1811) whose power over Scottish affairs during this period was near total. Burns here displays his dislike of Dundas in a similar style to that which Shelley later used so well to satirise Lord Castlereagh. Charles (l. 51) is Charles James Fox, leader of the Whigs, who supported the Prince of Wales taking the throne from his father after George III was declared insane in late 1788. William Pitt favoured severe restrictions on the monarchy, fearing that the Prince, who supported the Whigs, would be placed on the throne. The King eventually recovered and continued his reign, bar certain aberrations, such as his speech about unparalleled peace and tranquillity in December 1792 when in reality the government tightened the sedition laws and declared Martial Law in a panic at the rise of reform societies throughout Britain. In a chaotic mixture of ambition and vanity, this episode provoked Burns burlesques from the supposed loyal subjects of George III as they clashed over who would benefit by the Prince's succession.

The consequence of London publication is explained in Professor Lucylle Werkmeister's
Robert Burns and the London Newspapers
, in the
Bulletin of the New York Public Library
(Oct. 1961, Vol. 65, no. 8). Werkmeister quotes the Star's editor Stuart's introductory note:

The same issue of Stuart's Star boasted in notes ‘TOCORRESPONDENTS' they would print a ‘Love Sonnet by Mr. Burns, the Darling Poet of Caledonia, tomorrow'. Werkmeister goes on to quote Burns who was, at this juncture, unaware that Stuart had meddled with the poem to suit his own political views:

As Werkmeister remarks, the ‘damned star' was the editor himself. Differing in politics from Burns, Stuart re-wrote some passages he did not agree with and deleted other passages. What Burns did not know was that the Portland Whigs were subsidising Stuart so that he amended the poem to serve their cause. Thus, for example, in ll. 51–4 Fox became Pitt and the Portland Band became the Tories. To hide his deceit, he stopped Burns from receiving a copy for 17th April. This was, as Werkmeister explains, the same newspaper that printed the ridiculous verse on the Duchess of Gordon's dancing and attributed them to Burns, knowing full well they were not his composition. (Werkmeister totally discredits the notion that they were written by the semi-literate Henry Dundas and suggests that they were the work of someone on Stuart's staff in order to ridicule Dundas.) Stuart managed to stay on the right side of Burns by accident, since a friend of Burns misled him into believing that the guilty newspaper was the
London Gazetteer
, which innocently copied the nonsense from Stuart's Star. Burns eventually found out that the Ode had been considerably changed (‘mangled', Letter 379) from the text he sent to London. While the image ‘Daughter of Chaos' derives from Pope's
The Dunciad
, I, ll. 11–16, the language and sentiment is influenced more by Milton's
Paradise Lost
, II, ll. 894–7.

The pen-name ‘Agricola', revealingly and perhaps deliberately so, means a farmer. Burns may have also picked this name given that the Roman general Agricola is supposed to have encamped a few miles to the north of Ellisland prior to the building of Hadrian's wall. The poem, on publication, was printed as a work sent from an Edinburgh poet, not a Dumfries one.