The Canongate Burns (75 page)

Friday last, being the Anniversary of the late Admiral Rodney's glorious victory, a party of gentlemen desirous to commemorate the day, dined together in the King's Arms, Dumfries. Many loyal and suitable toasts were drunk on the occasion, and several naval songs were sung: the following EXTEMPORE by BURNS, when it was his turn to sing, ought not to be omitted:

Admiral George Brydges Rodney (1718–92) won a victory over the French navy at Dominica on 12th April, 1782, securing British control of the Atlantic. It was a major naval engagement, the ‘Battle of the Saints', where 36 British engaged 34 French ships.

The headnote is taken from
The Edinburgh Advertiser
where the verse was first printed. Given that there is no extant manuscript, this newspaper entry is the only evidence of the poet's authorship. Despite J.W. Egerer's dismissal of the poem as ‘doggerel' Burns did not write (See Kinsley, Vol. III, p. 1425), it is obviously authentic. Kinsley accepts it into the canon, recording that it appears in the
Advertiser
, although he does not specify which
Advertiser
and clearly did not check the original source. The use of italics and capitals, not given in most editions, is vividly that of Burns in the newspaper copy, as printed above. The poem is not printed in the usual poetry section of the newspaper but presented as a news item.

Burns had a very good reason for seeing it printed in
The
Edinburgh Advertiser
, Scotland's most loyal, governmental newspaper. He had been instructed formally by the Excise to keep out of radical politics. So, the introduction to the fragment suggests it was sent to the newspaper by someone
other
than Burns. The habitual stylistic stressing of the poem in the newspaper version could only have been copied from a manuscript. A manuscript could only have come from Burns himself, or someone to whom he gave a copy. If Burns acted with complicity in seeing the poem deliberately printed in a pro-government newspaper, then we are probably looking at a precursor to
The Dumfries Volunteers
, where Burns's verse appears in public to present him as a loyal subject of the King. If this is a correct assumption, it was intended to delight critics of the poet's radical politics who probably thought he had changed his views. While Burns might have set out deliberately to appease his Edinburgh Excise masters who would certainly have seen this song, it is apparent from his emphatic use of capitals that the Great Revolution, the Constitution and particularly Liberty (for radicals this meant reform) were still uppermost in his mind. The irony here is that most of the loyalist government supporters were avowed enemies of ‘Liberty', seen at this time as the key principle of French Republicanism. Hence, in these few lines the politically chastened Burns disarms his critics by toasting the King, then drinks a toast to Liberty, declaring that those who would betray ‘Liberty' should be hung by their own offspring. Admiral Rodney's victory was a convenient opportunity to do so. Indeed, it may have been sent to the loyalist newspaper to parry further accusations of being the author of works such as
The Dagger
. If questioned or accused of writing further radical work Burns could refer his employers to this ‘loyal' song in
The Edinburgh Advertiser
. Werkmeister preceded us in identifying the ‘decoy' strategy.

Kinsley's view that the lines were given in 1793 at a meeting of the Dumfries Volunteers is incorrect for the simple reason that the Volunteers were not yet established. Kinsley guesses that differences in printed texts suggest that a manuscript must have been seen by some editors, but he was unaware that Scott Douglas meddled with the text. The original was probably lost among the papers of
The Edinburgh Advertiser
.

This burlesque, in the eight-line stanza of
The Holy Fair
, targets Edmund Burke's speech in the House of Commons debate on the Alien Bill in late December 1792 when he brandished a dagger, declaring that the radicals in Britain would eventually rise in bloody rebellion. Burke is reported in
The Edinburgh Gazetteer
, 1st January 1793, saying ‘every man in France has murder in his heart and in his face'. Even his colleagues laughed at these overwrought expostulations. The poem uses this incident to develop a brilliant satire on the wider campaign for parliamentary reform which dominated British politics during the winter of 1792–3.

The person behind the campaign to raise a subscription for daggers to assist the French revolutionary troops was the poet's (future) doctor, William Maxwell. Burns boasted of his friend's radical past to Mrs Dunlop, ‘the Doctor Maxwell whom Burke mentioned in the House of Commons about the affair of the daggers' (Letter 638). Mentioning Maxwell to George Thomson, he wrote ‘the identical Maxwell whom Burke mentioned in the House of Commons' (Letter 637). The
Sun
of 8th October, 1792 included an article entitled ‘English Jacobins. No. I. Doctor Maxwell.' Maxwell was reputed to have dipped a handkerchief in the blood of the guillotined French King. Not only does the poem mention Maxwell's daggers, but links daggers and cannons (‘For cannons or for
daggers', l. 53) to praise those who would help the French republicans. This is a startling reference, given Burns's own attempt covertly to send four carronade cannons captured in his semi-military customs duties from the smuggling ship
The Rosamond
which he subsequently purchased. Hence the full force of the line bringing his and Maxwell's treasonable activities together. It was not public knowledge at this time that Burns had tried to get the cannons to France. So, if a poet other than Burns were to write such a line, it would be a remarkable coincidence.

The target of ferocious radical satire and cartoon caricature for his derogatory description of the French masses as the ‘swinish multitude', Burke's infamous remark was well known to Burns. To Mrs Dunlop, writing on food shortages in Dumfries, Burns ironically wrote ‘How long the
Swinish Multitude
will be quiet, I cannot tell: they threaten daily' (Letter 688). Burns certainly detested Burke. This is clear in his epigram:

Furturgent matterher, the ex-Glasgow University rector, Burke, had previously disputed in the letter columns of
The Glasgow Journal
with the poet's intimate friend Robert Riddell, who wrote several pieces under the pen-name Cato.

Also revealing for the context of Burns's attitude to Burke in general and
The Dagger
in particular, is the fact that the Irishman had also been provoked by Dr William Maxwell's political print activities. Burns most probably had knowledge of the advertisement Maxwell had placed in
The Morning Chronicle
for 7th September, 1792 in which he referred to ‘the present combination of Despots against the Rights of Human Nature'. In writing to no less than Henry Dundas on the urgent matter of charity for French loyalist refugees Burke ended thus:

Already inflamed against Maxwell, the matter of the dagger utterly enraged him. There is a quite fascinating letter reprinted again in Volume VII of Burke's correspondence for 16th January, 1793 from James Woolley of Birmingham, ‘Manufacturer of all Kinds of Swords, Sword-hilts, Bayonets, Ram-rods, Matchets &c.', regarding both the volme (3,000) and nature of the weapons ordered. They were, in fact, to be fair to Burke, brutal foot-long blades designed for the sans culottes to eviscerate the horses of their mounted opponents. The editors conclude the letter with this fascinating footnote:

Nor were Riddell and Maxwell the only intimates of Burns to lock horns with Burke; William Roscoe of Liverpool was also centrally involved. Roscoe wrote perhaps the most famous pro-French/radical song of that decade. It haunted Hazlitt for the rest of his life as a bitter elegy rather than a celebratory anthem. Roscoe wrote ‘O'er the vinecover'd hills and gay regions of France' in 1791. On his death a copy of the song was found in Burns's hand among his papers. This copy was returned by Maria Riddell to Roscoe. These are the relevant lines:

The ‘cobweb' image of the great Irish spider was arguably to provoke Burns to one of his most complex political poems,
The Cobweb
, the penultimate poem in this section. (For the highly relevant conflict between Roscoe and Burke, see
The Writings and Speeches of Edmund
Burke, Vol. IX
, ed. R.B. McDowell, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 24–5).

Also highly important is the fact that Burns is the only poet of the period to describe Burke on the basis of his Irish origins, as ‘Paddy Burke', in
When Guilford Good. The Dagger
also describes Burke as ‘Paddy'. Also, the earlier poem rhymes ‘Burke' with ‘Turk' in the same fashion as
The Dagger
(ll. 27–9). Ll. 5–9 are echoed in Burns's
The Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer:

These old Scots words, ‘glib-gabbet' and ‘auldfarran' are uncommon among other Scottish radical poets of the period, a point emphasised by McGuirk in an American review of Robert
Burns:
The Lost Poems
where she lists ‘dainty chiel', ‘fient a hair', ‘Demosthenes or Tully', the rhyming of ‘happy' with ‘nappy', ‘rhetoric and logic', ‘clishmaclaver', ‘honest heart' and the repeated image of ‘gullies' and ‘whittles' – daggers' as stock-in-trade language of Burns (
Eighteenth
Century Scottish Studies Newsletter, 1997, Books in Review
, pp. 14– 15). In fact,
The Dagger
is without doubt the work of a poet steeped in the úuvre of Scots song, as Burns certainly was.

The burlesque of ‘Now Paddy be nae langer rude,/ But lay aside your storming' (ll. 55–63) is echoed in Burns's
The Ordination:

The notion of Burke trying and failing to ‘shew the Swinish Multitude' the ‘folly o' reforming' politics is similar to a line of prose written by Burns to George Thomson. Burns wrote ‘& shew the swinish multitude that they are but beasts & like beasts must be led by the nose & goaded in the backside' (Letter 632). For this Burke too, the masses or ‘swine are ay sae damned headstrang, /They'll aiblins no believe ye'.

The pantheon of contemporary radical icons, Colonel McLeod, Thomas Erskine, Charles James Fox and Charles Grey are praised in Burns's
Here's A Health tae Them That's Awa.
While any radical
lyricists might applaud these Scottish and English politicians, close reading of the newspaper and printed songs of the period rarely, if ever, mention classical radical icons Demosthenes and Tully (Ci-cero), as mentioned in
The Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer
, ‘Whom auld Demosthenes or Tully,/ Might own for brithers'. Burns, having previously and singularly grouped these radicals together, classical and modern, appears to have done so again.