Images of a bawdy bard

considers the popular notion of the easy-mannered ploughman and delves under the surface

to discover a more disturbing reality

LAST things first; they buried Robert Burns on Monday, July 25, 1796 with full military honours. The corpse was togged out in the uniform of the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, the Hanoverian militia unit of which he was a member. The streets of Dumfries were lined by horsemen from the Cinque Ports Cavalry, a particularly brutal outfit which, a year later, massacred 15 radical workers at Tranent in East Lothian.

The hero-poet of Scotland's sentimental Left was laid to rest with the full blessing of the regime whose servant he was. Short of interring Burns in Westminster Abbey it is hard to see how much more King George could have done.

Nor did Burns die broke. As a government bureaucrat his salary was more than adequate. He lived better than most of his countrymen. His post was secured by his upper-class contacts. Jean Armour was one of the best-dressed women in Dumfries.

True, the poet had ``one or two serious debts'' when he died but they were outweighed by money he was due. The ``cruel haberdasher'' whom Burns accused of hounding him was only trying to retrieve money that was a year overdue. The notion of the ploughman-poet, dying in poverty, reviled and neglected by society is a nonsense.

Indeed, the Burns family did rather well out of the British establishment. Enough money was raised by the poet's admirers to pay Jean Armour a pension of #60 a year.

Burns's eldest son Robert (a civil servant with a taste for gambling) was saved from ruin by the government Stamp Office which paid him a pension of #120 a year in recognition of ``the great literary talents of his father''. Two of Burns's younger sons - James and William - served as colonels in that prime instrument of British imperialism, the army of the East India Company. They retired to Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, two crusty old warriors of the British Raj. None of which detracts from the awesome genius of Burns the poet. But they are awkward facts.

And facts, as the man himself said, ``are chiels that winna ding''. None of them square with the Burns myth which has reduced an enormously gifted, but complex, ambitious, and all too human man to the dimensions of a shortbread-tin transfer.

In the mind's eye of Scotland Robert Burns has become what he never was; a heroic political radical; a fearless rebel against the petty tyranny of the Kirk; an admirer and champion of women. Like most myths it does not stand much scrutiny. The idea of Robert Burns as a kind of proto-Socialist is twentieth-century sentimentality. Burns adjusted his politics to suit the occasion - or his own enthusiasms.

The man who penned A Man's A Man for A' That also wrote an awful ditty called Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat? This contains the sentiment that ``The wretch that would a tyrant own/ And the wretch his true-sworn brother/ Who would set the mob above the throne/ May they be damned together!/ Who will not sing God Save the King/ Shall hang as high's the steeple . . .''

But the staunch Hanoverian who wrote that paid winsome tribute to the exiled Stuarts in Charlie, He's My Darling, and The Chevalier's Lament: ``The deed that I dar'd, could it merit their malice/ A king and a father to place on his throne?/ His right are these hills, and his right are these valleys/ Where the wild beast find shelter, tho I can find none!''

And that whimsical supporter of the Stuart monarchy is also the creator of that blood-thirsty anthem of Scottish nationalism, Scots Wha Hae.

The literary range is dazzling but it does not bespeak the single-minded radical beloved by Labour Party Burns suppers. It was political promiscuity. And it did not go unremarked.

In 1845 Hugh Miller noted sardonically that ``The Jacobite of one year who addressed enthusiastic verses to the `revered defenders of beauteous Stuart' and com- posed The Chevalier's Lament had become in the next the uncompromising Jacobin who wrote A Man's A Man For A' That.'' In Miller's view both the poet's Jacobitism and Jacobinism were ``merely a sort of laughing-gas''. Like many a genius Burns could be almost all things to almost all men. But Che Guevara he was not. Nor is there much substance in the notion of Burns the ecclesiastical rebel. The idea has grown up in the Burns subculture that he was ``freedom's man'' who risked much by pouring scorn on the bullying pulpiteers of the Kirk. The fact is in the 1770s and 1780s the Church of Scotland was firmly in the hands of the so-called ``Moderates''.

They were the clergy elites of Scotland; liberal, Anglicised, theologically sophisticated but politically and socially conservative. Most of them were the appointees (even the creatures) of the gentry and the aristocracy. This was deeply resented by most Scots and eventually split the Kirk down the middle in the Disruption of 1843.

In fact, it was Presbyterian fundamentalists like William ``Daddy'' Auld and ``Holy Willie'' Fisher who were the ecclesiastical rebels of their time, not Robert Burns. And they were easy targets. In attacking them - in brilliant poems like Holy Willie's Prayer and Address to the Unco Guid - Burns was being entirely orthodox.

It was a respectable stance. He was taking the line of the Moderate gentry he longed to join. He was playing to the aristos in the gallery and not to the lower orders. Working-class Scots were leaving the Kirk in droves, disgusted at the hegemony of the toffs Burns admired. It is also worth remembering that Burns's family was not native to the Presbyterian south-west. His father's name was Burness and he came from Kincardineshire in the north-east.

The Burnesses had the kind of Episcopalian roots that did not sit well with the rural Calvinism of ``Daddy'' Auld and the kirk session of Mauchline. Burns would have inherited Episcopalian disdain for fervent Presbyterianism.

And while no-one - possibly not even Shakespeare - could conjure up a love poem with the power and facility of Burns, there is a strain of sexual thuggery in his life that still appals. It conjures up George Orwell's famous remark about Salvador Dali that it is possible to be a great artist and a miserable human being. The evidence suggests that Burns was not so much the ``Rantin, Rovin Robin'' of his own imagination, as an unpleasant, calculating, and irresponsible lecher. A ``serial shagger'', in the words of one Burns aficionado.

Not only did Burns spawn nine children with Jean Armour between 1786 and 1796 (in and out of wedlock), he also produced bastard offspring by Liza Paton (1785), May Cameron (1787), Jenny Clow (1788), and Anne Park (1791). And it is possible that Margaret Campbell ``Highland Mary'' died in premature childbirth in 1786. Thirteen children (that we know of) by five different women, few of whom received any support from Burns.

His treatment of some of them was, at times, awful. When he heard that May Cameron had given birth to his son he wrote to his friend asking him to ``send for the wench and give her 10 or 12 shillings . . . and advise her out to some country friends''.

While Burns was penning his ghastly letters to the genteel Mrs Agnes Maclehose ``his Clarinda'' he was rogering her maid Jenny Clow. When the wretched girl fell pregnant she had to take the poet to law before he would part with a penny.

The faithful Jean Armour was, occasionally, treated with a contempt she did not deserve. In March 1788 Burns boasted in a letter to his crony Robert Ainslie that ``I have given her a guinea and I have f***ed till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory. . .'' Then he went on: ``I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim . . . She did all this like a good girl . . .''

Burns may have wrapped his sexual escapades in some of the finest demotic poetry ever written, but unwrapped they make depressing reading.

They amount to two decades of calculated lechery. And at a time when the only relief abandoned women (and their babies) could expect was from the Kirk which Burns affected to despise. It is easy to see why James Armour did his best to keep his daughter away from Burns. And why he fainted on the spot when told that the poet had made her pregnant.

Disentangling the man from the myth is hard going. Two hundred years of adulation and whisky-addled Burns suppers have embedded it deeply into our culture. In the process we have loaded on to the poor ghost's shoulders more than any phantom should bear.

Like the Scottish football team (and to some extent Charles Edward Stuart) he is the victim of a kind of transferred nationalism.

The man himself deserves better. But the myth is part of the psychopathology of a stateless nation. As such, it says more about the Scots than it does about Robert Burns.

genius Burns could be almost all things to almost all men. But Che Guevara he was not. Nor is there much substance in the notion of Burns the ecclesiastical rebel. The idea has grown up in the Burns subculture that he was ``freedom's man'' who risked much by pouring scorn on the bullying pulpiteers of the Kirk. The fact is in the 1770s and 1780s the Church of Scotland was firmly in the hands of the so-called ``Moderates''.

They were the clergy elites of Scotland; liberal, Anglicised, theologically sophisticated but politically and socially conservative. Most of them were the appointees (even the creatures) of the gentry and the aristocracy. This was deeply resented by most Scots and eventually split the Kirk down the middle in the Disruption of 1843.

In fact, it was Presbyterian fundamentalists like William ``Daddy'' Auld and ``Holy Willie'' Fisher who were the ecclesiastical rebels of their time, not Robert Burns. And they were easy targets. In attacking them - in brilliant poems like Holy Willie's Prayer and Address to the Unco Guid - Burns was being entirely orthodox.

It was a respectable stance. He was taking the line of the Moderate gentry he longed to join. He was playing to the aristos in the gallery and not to the lower orders. Working-class Scots were leaving the Kirk in droves, disgusted at the hegemony of the toffs Burns admired. It is also worth remembering that Burns's family was not native to the Presbyterian south-west. His father's name was Burness and he came from Kincardineshire in the north-east.

The Burnesses had the kind of Episcopalian roots that did not sit well with the rural Calvinism of ``Daddy'' Auld and the kirk session of Mauchline. Burns would have inherited Episcopalian disdain for fervent Presbyterianism.

And while no-one - possibly not even Shakespeare - could conjure up a love poem with the power and facility of Burns, there is a strain of sexual thuggery in his life that still appals. It conjures up George Orwell's famous remark about Salvador Dali that it is possible to be a great artist and a miserable human being. The evidence suggests that Burns was not so much the ``Rantin, Rovin Robin'' of his own imagination, as an unpleasant, calculating, and irresponsible lecher. A ``serial shagger'', in the words of one Burns aficionado.

Not only did Burns spawn nine children with Jean Armour between 1786 and 1796 (in and out of wedlock), he also produced bastard offspring by Liza Paton (1785), May Cameron (1787), Jenny Clow (1788), and Anne Park (1791). And it is possible that Margaret Campbell ``Highland Mary'' died in premature childbirth in 1786. Thirteen children (that we know of) by five different women, few of whom received any support from