Burns’s radical views ‘no secret’
ROBERT Burns’s radical and progressive political opinions were ‘in plain view’ while he worked as an excise man in the late 18th century, an expert claims.
Professor Gerard Carruthers, co-director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at Glasgow, University, has studied recently unveiled letters and is due to give a talk on them in Edinburgh tomorrow.
He will say: ‘There are lots of near-conspiracy theories through two centuries which have sought to account for Burns’s career in the excise service.
‘The common idea is that the government had Burns where they wanted him: under their control and politically silenced.
‘In fact as the new letters by contemporaries of Burns show, he was delighted and not reluctant to be given his position.
‘Also, the new material reveals that Burns’s progressive political views were an open secret in the civil service.’
John Mitchell, the bard’s excise boss, wrote the two letters to one of the poet’s most important patrons, Robert Graham of Fintry.
The university said it had helped to inform the debate on the extent of the bard’s radicalism. Burns was an opponent of monarchy and slavery, and a champion of democracy and the rights of man.
The letters, located at the National Records of Scotland, came to light as part of a joint Glasgow and Oxford University project, Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century.