Logically, Jacobitism is incompatible with the expression of democratic sentiments, but there is no incompatibility between being moved by the Jacobites’ loyalty to a lost cause and expressing belief in the brotherhood of man. Each sentiment may be sincere at the moment it finds utterance in speech or verse. Poetry, as someone — Housman? — observed, is not the thing said, but the words found to say it and the manner of saying. Moreover, it was natural for Burns to have sympathies on either side of the Scottish national quarrel between Whigs and Tories. On his mother’s side he was descended from persecuted Covenanters, on his father’s from displaced Jacobites.
As for ‘Mary’s Lament’, it is a dramatic poem, words given to the tragic queen by the poet. One may even judge that a poet who could not find words for her was possessed of a dull imagination and a sour temper. Burns could feel for her and with her, as he could feel for the mouse whose nest his plough had destroyed. But the poet who could imagine the queen calling for ‘the next flowers that deck the spring’ to ‘bloom on my peaceful grave’ was the same man who in a letter could dismiss another martyred queen — Marie Antoinette — as ‘ a prostitute’.
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