Will the Bard be next on the woke warriors’ hitlist?
For all his genius, Burns was anything but a saint. And for that, he could end up on the wrong side of history
LAST year, on the birthday of Scotland’s National Bard, a short essay entitled Robert Burns and Jamaica was published on the Glasgow Museums website. It begins with the facts everybody knows – that Burns is a ‘Scottish cultural icon and national obsession’ and ‘many public monuments were erected in his honour in the 19th century, often through public subscription’.
It records that the first Burns Supper was held in Greenock in 1802, just six years after the poet’s death at 37, and that many Scottish streets were named after him.
Then, with a heavy heart, it gets to the dirt: ‘Few will know that this poet celebrity, who railed against oppression in Scotland and wrote The Slave’s Lament (1792), once intended to emigrate to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation that made its money from the labour of enslaved African people.’
To those who were unaware, this revelation, it admits, is ‘shocking’. But, in the age of woke, where statues are toppled and writings are excised for the crime of being of their time
He boasted of a sexual encounter which may have amounted to rape
and not ours, these notes on the Bard, 235 years after the fact, are a form of due diligence. Warning! Burns is problematic.
In the capital, meanwhile, a statue of Burns in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is in the crosshairs of the Edinburgh Slavery and Colonial Legacy Review, which was launched last year in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.
Views are sought on whether the poet’s apparent willingness to work for slave owners in the Caribbean is ‘an important theme which needs highlighting’. What will happen with the statue is unknown.
There is also the matter of the Bard’s track record with women. The composer of much of the most affecting love poetry ever penned on these islands was, in person, far from the romantic smoothie he could be in verse. Foremost in the litany of abusive and feckless behaviour peppering his adult years is the occasion he boasted of a sexual encounter which may have amounted to rape.
In a letter to a friend, he brags about giving his heavily pregnant lover Jean Armour a ‘thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones’.
Scalade is an archaic word denoting a military attack, breaching defences. Adding insult to injury, Burns made Armour swear ‘never to attempt any claim on me as a husband’.
In 2018, as the #MeToo movement gathered momentum in the wake of sex allegations surrounding film producer Harvey Weinstein, Scotland’s former Makar Liz Lochhead characterised the 1788 episode in rural Ayrshire as ‘very, very Weinsteinian’.
She need not have stopped there. Burns’s caddish, often cruel antics are well documented. His personal life, in modern parlance, was a car crash. The flurries of passion in verse where love is pledged ‘till a’ the seas gang dry’ are, to those who take the trouble to find out about him, punctured by the reality in which his thirst for conquests brings chaos to his own life and inflicts it on others. He fathered at least 12 children with at least four women, and Armour, who bore most of them, was treated like a doormat. In letters, he wrote of his disgust with her rural plainness when set against the beauty of well-to-do Agnes Maclehose, the Edinburgh lawyer’s wife with whom he had become smitten. That did not stop him pursuing Maclehose’s servant Jenny Clow, who bore one of several illegitimate Burns children. All in all, then, the 21st century charge sheet against the ploughman poet eulogised perhaps more exhaustively than any other Scot in history makes sobering reading in the era of cancel culture. The question is, can he come through it? Does the reputation of the man whose verse is etched on the nation’s psyche, who is celebrated in statues from Aberdeen to Adelaide and who makes Nicola Sturgeon ‘proud to be Scottish’, survive the 2020s? Or, in this most intolerant of decades, is it on borrowed time? A clue to the direction of travel may be provided by the sullying of another pivotal 18th century Scottish figure, David Hume, whose name was summarily removed from an Edinburgh University building in 2020 due to his ‘comments on matters of race’.
That year, a sign was draped over the chest of his statue on the Royal Mile, quoting the offending passage from 1753 which reflected the thinking of the time. There have since been calls for the statue to be removed entirely.
Might similar humiliation await Scotland’s many statues of Robert Burns? Will trigger warnings attend Burns Suppers – or, worse, boycotts be urged among ‘right-thinking’ Scots in view of behaviours incompatible with the modern moral zeitgeist?
The seeds of a Burns backlash have been growing for some time. A year before #MeToo, Scottish literary critic and author Stuart Kelly questioned why we still dutifully raise a glass to a man of Burns’s character.
He wrote: ‘There is an image of Burns – a bit of a rascal, a little roguish, a naughty roister-doisterer – who nevertheless produced some of the greatest love poetry in our language.’
Kelly added: ‘But here is another r-word. Rapist.’
He suggested setting aside a day to recite work by a less troubling poet – Veronica Forrest Thomson, for example, who was born to Scots parents in Malaya in 1947 and, like Burns, died young.
A note of circumspection has entered Nicola Sturgeon’s hitherto gushing tributes to the Bard. In a Sky Arts documentary last year she observed that his views on women ‘weren’t very positive’.
As for ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’, well, she would have preferred it if he had said ‘“A person’s a person” or something like that’.
Scottish singer KT Tunstall, meanwhile, admitted last year that Burns would be ‘100 per cent cancelled’ if he were writing today.
Mercifully, to date, few serious establishment figures have called
Will trigger warnings attend Burns Suppers?
for a wholesale rethink on Burns’s place in Scottish hearts.
Where knee-jerk cancellations have been imposed on others – up to and including the nation’s most important philosopher – a more measured view of the Bard is prescribed, for all that his torrid life story may stretch 21st century tolerances.
Liz Lochhead, for example, stops
short of shooing people away from his poetry. ‘Burns was a very complicated person,’ she says, ‘sincere in his many conflicting personae.’
She writes. ‘Is it about the Art or is it the Life, though? The Art every time. Obviously.
‘My quarrel isn’t with Burns. It is with the prurient sentimentalising of him by us Scots.’
Miss Sturgeon, who in 2017 praised Burns for his ‘enduring values of equality, inclusion and internationalism’, was by 2021 urging that we ‘enjoy him and appreciate him with all of his flaws and imperfections’.
She added: ‘He was a flawed genius. But first and foremost, he was a genius.’
The worry for the First Minister, who quotes Burns often – note her characterisation of Boris Johnson as a ‘wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie’ for refusing to agree to a second independence referendum – is she may be fighting a rearguard action against the very woke mob with whom she and her ministers are increasingly aligned.
Since when was genius considered a get-out-of-jail card in the present moral crusade?
Perhaps poverty works in the poet’s favour. By 1786, when he was days away from boarding The Nancy in Greenock, bound for Savannah La Mar, Jamaica, Burns was broke.
The sugar plantation where, in his words, he was to become ‘a poor Negro driver’, offered a steady salary – three years at £30 (around £5,000 today) per annum – and young men from across Scotland were flocking to the Caribbean to take up similar positions.
A farmer, he was the product of a different social milieu to that of David Hume, the moneyed man of letters pontificating on race in the comfort of his armchair.
But money was not the only consideration pulling Burns into the slave trade. It is widely acknowledged that the desire to escape the mess he had made in Scotland was another.
At the time, Jean Armour had just given birth to twins, her father wanted him jailed, and another serving girl, Elizabeth Paton, had just presented him with his first illegitimate child.
Though his bags were packed for the voyage and goodbyes already bidden, the success of his first published collection of poems, the Kilmarnock Edition, kept him in Scotland, and his 1792 work, The Slave’s Lament, appeared with no trace of hypocrisy.
Burns scholar Professor Gordon Carruthers of Glasgow University tells the Mail that, while the poet ‘had no illusions’ about the role awaiting him in Jamaica, ‘arguably, what begins to make him think more about slavery etc is both the democratic vocabulary of the
French Revolution and the increasing awareness of the horrors of slavery during the 1790s’.
He adds: ‘He was a great poet and songwriter expressing a lot of fine human sentiment and people are free to do what they wish with areas of his personal life that they believe warrant criticism.’
Abertay University sociologist Stuart Waiton, who is critical of those trawling history books for celebrated figures to shame with modern morals, sees a depressing inevitability in Burns being hauled over the coals.
He says: ‘There is a tragic irony that a man of the Enlightenment, like Burns, who will have had to face-off the mystical reactionaries of his day, is now facing destruction by today’s anti-enlightened and reactionary mystics.’
Glasgow Museums’ essay ends with a bit of supposition. ‘Had Burns travelled to Jamaica he would no doubt have been appalled by the cruel realities of plantation life where enslaved Africans were forced to work under horrific conditions and were arbitrarily punished and brutally tortured by white overseers, or “bookkeepers”.’
Doubtless he would be appalled, too, to see himself as others, in their moral conceit, are now seeing him. Though his finest work is timeless, he was, for a’ that, a man of his time.