Sympathies and empathy

The composer James MacMillan, in a letter published in the Scottish Catholic Observer, expressed regret, but not surprise, that he had never in his youth been pointed in the direction of Robert Burns’s ‘wonderful “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots” ’, which he has recently set to music.

The composer James MacMillan, in a letter published in the Scottish Catholic Observer, expressed regret, but not surprise, that he had never in his youth been pointed in the direction of Robert Burns’s ‘wonderful “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots” ’, which he has recently set to music. The consensus that, in his opinion, ‘tries to dismiss Burns’ royalist and Jacobite sympathies . . . would also throw a collective hairy fit at his clear empathy for Mary, this most Catholic of Queens, this most Catholic of Scots’.

MacMillan is not alone in thinking that Burns has been claimed by others, first by Protestants, then in our own time by Socialists and Nationalists. Dr Gerard Carruthers of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, agrees. ‘Catholics in Scotland have sometimes felt that Burns was not for them, but a closer inspection of the history shows this to be a fallacy.’ He also remarks that in writing poetry in Scots in the 18th century Burns was largely writing in an idiom more associated with Catholics and Episcopalians — that is, with Jacobites and Tories.

This is fair comment, though one might add that the ‘Lament’ praised by MacMillan is written, except for the occasional word, in standard English, and is an arrangement of conventional, though charming, common- places. One may agree with the composer that it displays an empathy for Mary who, in her own mind at least, died a martyr for her Catholic faith, though while in power in Scotland she had made no attempt to reverse the Protestant Revolution, as her cousin Mary Tudor had done in England.