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.
Nevertheless I am not convinced that this empathy tells us anything about the poet’s religious or political opinions. Many have sympathised with Mary Stuart and condemned Elizabeth of England for holding her in captivity and eventually consenting to have her put to death, but they have not all been Catholics, any more than was Queen Victoria, who said she could not forgive Elizabeth for her ‘cruelty to my ancestress Mary’.
Burns certainly had royalist and Jacobite sympathies — some of the time. But, on the evidence of poems and letters, he also had Whig and democratic ones — some of the time. He approved the American rebellion and thought George Washington the greatest man of the age. Like many English Whigs he welcomed the French Revolution — but he also declared that he stood by the principles of the British — or Anglo-Scottish — Revolution of 1688. Would he have regarded Napoleon as a tyrant and disturber of the European peace, or would he have approved of him as a man who toppled kings and emperors and have hero-worshipped him as Hazlitt and Byron did? Again, he sometimes expressed disapproval of the Union and displayed what one might call proto-nationalist sentiments, but at other times he described himself as British.
I doubt if he had a coherent system of belief. Though he was an intelligent and well-read man, his poems are mostly expressions of feeling, of the mood of the moment. They are also often dramatic; he inhabits the character of an imaginary speaker. There is little consistency.
In this there is nothing remarkable or deplorable. Poets may make use of philosophic systems, but they rarely construct them, lyric poets least of all. When Keats writes ‘Now more than ever seems it sweet to die/ To cease upon the midnight with no pain’, we are not to suppose that he was considering suicide. He caught at a passing thought and found memorable words to express it. So too with Burns.
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’.
Comments