by Robert Burns
… to shield the honour’d land!
Strong may she glow with all her ancient fire;
May every son be worthy of his Sire;
Firm may she rise, with generous disdain
At Tyranny’s, or dire Pleasure’s chain;
Still self-dependent in her native shore,
Bold may she brave grim Danger’s loudest roar,
Till Fate the curtain drops on worlds to be no more!
Robert Bruce’s Address to His Troops at
Bannockburn –
or Scots Wha Hae
Tune: Hey Tutti Taitie
First printed anonymously in The Morning Chronicle, 8th May, 1794.
Scots, wha hae wi’ WALLACE bled, who have
Scots, wham BRUCE has aften led, whom, often
Welcome to your gory bed, —
Or to victorie. —
5 Now’s the day, and now’s the hour;
See the front o’ battle lour;
See approach proud EDWARD’S power,
Chains & Slaverie. —
Wha will be a traitor-knave?
10 Wha can fill a coward’s grave?
Wha sae base as be a Slave? — so
Let him turn, & flie. —
Wha for SCOTLAND’S king & law, who
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
15 FREE-MAN stand, or FREE-MAN fa’, fall
Let him follow me. —
By Oppression’s woes & pains!
By your Sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
20 But they shall be free!
Lay the proud Usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
LIBERTY ’S in every blow!
Let US DO — or DIE!!!
The exact date and place of composition is unknown. There is, however, evidence to suggest that the lyric was radically reworked. A MS. of the song, sold by Puttock and Simpson in London in 1862, contains this early version:
Do you hear your children cry
‘Were we born in chains to lie?’
No! come Death or Liberty!
Yes, they shall be free!
MacDiarmid’s early insistence of the superiority of vernacular Scots to standard English is certainly, in this instance, borne out by the evolved, final song. As we have seen Burns’s whole intention was to draw analogies with Scottish freedom past and Scottish freedom present. Even more riskily, he was alluding to contemporary French struggles. The last line of the poem, ‘Let US DO—or DIE!!!’ is, triple exclamatory, the tennis court oath of the French revolution-aries. Hence discussing his sending it to Perry’s Morning Chronicle, he wrote to Patrick Miller Jnr. in mid-March 1794: ‘they are most welcome to my Ode; only let them insert it as a thing they have met with by accident & unknown to me’. When Perry did publish it on 8th May, 1794, he did preserve the poet’s anonymity:
If the following warm and animating Ode was not written near the time to which it applies, it is one of the most faithful imitations of the simple and beautiful style of the Scottish bards we ever read, and we know of but one living Poet to whom to ascribe it.
This complimentary but, surely for Burns, frighteningly transparent description, was followed by a weird printing error which read ‘Scene-Lewis Garden’ rather than ‘Tune-Lewie Gordon’. This was corrected in the Chronicle of 10th May, 1794. Why there was a nine-month delay in the song’s publication is unknown, but, as the least seditious of the three Bruce pieces, it is entirely possible that its publication in, for example The Edinburgh Gazetteer would have alerted authorities to link him with the other Bruce poems. The song did, however, reappear in The Chronicle with Burns’s name attached a few months after he was safely dead.
As we saw in the Introduction, government critics were well able to discern the seditious nature of the song: ‘So complete and deplorable was his delusion, that he thought he was doing honour to the ancient heroes of his native land, when he confounded them with the slaves of Robespierre, whom he thought the soldiers of liberty! and on whose arms he implored the benediction of God’ (Low, p. 156). The song reappeared in Thomson’s 1803 collection, not 1799 as Scott Douglas indicated. With Burns dead, Thomson had no compunction in impertinently perverting its political meaning into an anti-French song in a manner symptomatic of the whole nineteenth-century tendency in ‘domesticating’ the poet to Anglo-Scottish tribal pieties:
By changing wha into who, hae into have, aften into often, and sae into so, the following song will be English; and by substituting Gallia for Edward, and Britain for Scotland, it will be adapted to the present time.
One could hardly think of a more direct linkage of linguistic and political emasculation. Not only of Burns himself, but of the Scottish tradition in that Burns had informed Thomson that he had adapted two lines from William Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s epic poem on William Wallace to compose his own final stanza: ‘A false usurper sinks in every foe/ And liberty returns with every blow’ (Book VI, chapter 2, ll. 92–3). With his customary eclecticism, however, there is also a Scottish translation, noted by Hogg, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act III, scene ii) where Brutus asks the gathered crowds ‘Who is here so base as would be a bondsman?’ which turns into ‘Wha sae base as be a slave?’
So powerful was the democratic impulse of the song that John Mayne, in his A Patriotic Address to the Inhabitants of the United Kingdom (1799), attempted by means of turgid verses to invert its meaning:
English, Scots and Irishmen,
All that are in Valour’s ken!…
… Now’s the day, and now’s the hour,
Frenchmen wou’d the Land devour—
Will ye wait till they come o’er
To give ye Chains and Slavery?
Who wou’d be a Frenchman’s slave?
Who wou’d truckle to the knave?
Who wou’d shun a glorious grave?
The Ghost of Bruce
First printed in The Edinburgh Gazetteer, 24th September, 1793.
I WHO erewhile the Ghost of far fam’d Bruce
Bade aft the dread and eke the joy to see,
Alone went wandering through his laurel’d field
The other night, revolving all the ills,
5 Our Country has endur’d from P[it]t, D[unda]s,
And all their Pension’d Slaves – Curse of our Isle.
O’erwhelm’d with grief, and bursting into tears,
I cried, Indignant, ‘Oh! dear Native land!’
‘My country!’ ‘Is there not some chosen curse,
10 Some hidden thunder in the stores of Heaven,
Red with uncommon wrath to blast the men
Who owe their greatness to their Country’s ruin!’
Scarce had I spoke, when, thick, involv’d in mist,
More awful and more grand than former fire,
15 The Chief of Men, great minded Bruce appear’d.
‘Cheer up your heart, my Son; why grieve you so:
Your Country in her breast still carries Bruce,
And ne’er shall be enslav’d. Trust me (he said)
So far you’ve done your duty as I bade,
20 To warn my Country what she had to fear —
And what she had to hope for from my arm.
The time is now arriv’d, when all that’s dear
To Briton’s shall arouse them from their sleep —
To sleep no more, till each brave Briton’s free:
25 But still it much imports each Patriot Scot
To act with prudence, keen and still reserve.
Their foes are wringing out their dying pangs
On Virtue; — but the strife will soon be o’er —
Bid all my Sons be firm; and when the storm
30 Shall gather thickest, boldly show their front,
United as in One. The work is done’.
He only added, When the clouds should burst,
That awful hover’d over Britain’s Isle,
He woul
d again appear to stay the hand
35 Of Vengeance, and bid Mercy take her place.
Agrestis – September 6th, 1793
This poem is a very close variation on the first ‘Bruce’ poem but is more dangerously outspoken in that (l. 5) Pitt and Dundas are named. It also opens with a specific echo of Milton in the first line of Paradise Regained: ‘I who erewhile the happy garden sung’. Hence the concept of Bruce as risen, redemptive figure is re-emphasised in the first line. The Miltonic ‘feel’ of the two poems, a world penetrated by supernatural entities, is also as close to Blakean Milton influenced mytho-poetry as Burns ever came. ‘When the clouds should burst/ That awful hover’d over Britain’s Isle’ could, indeed, come directly from Blake’s America. Even more telling in identifying Burns as author is the fact that four lines from Addison’s Cato are adapted and integrated into the poem. As Liam McIlvanney’s forthcoming study shows, Addison, in particular, and eighteenth-century republican literature were the deliberate Murdoch selected texts in Masson’s reader used in Burns’s schooling. Cato is also mentioned four times in Burns’s letters. The lines in question are those spoken by Marcus, Cato’s son, to his brother Portious:
Oh Portious! Is there not some chosen curse,
Some hidden thunder in the store of Heav’n,
Big with uncommon vengeance to blast the men
Who owe their greatness to their country’s ruin.
These lines areadapted and quoted by Burns/Agrestis. Addison was the first poet to inspire Burns towrite poetry in his youth when he read his Vision of Mirza. Burns quotes Addison in his autobiographical letter to Dr Moore, stating that his lines ‘for though in dreadful whirls we hung,/ High on the broken wave’, were ‘music to my boyish ears’. There are 22 references to Addison in the poet’s letters, more than for Fergusson, Ramsay, Young or Milton. A further Burns–Addison–Robert the Bruce link occurs. Burns wrote to Captain Patrick Miller enclosing a copy of Scots Wha Hae and casually quotes Addison’s poem Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax, ‘O Liberty—, / Thou mak’st the gloomy face of Nature gay, / Giv’st beauty to the sun, & pleasure to the day’ (Letter 613). Addison was not the most popular poet in Scotlandat this time, so the notion that another poet other than Burns would link Addison’s poetry with the story of Bruce in the context of a critique on contemporary politics in the way that Burns does in relation to Scots Wha Hae, at this exact time is, in the face of the textual evidence almost bizarre. The language of liberty might have been ubiquitous during the 1790s, but an association between Addison, Robert the Bruce and contemporary political problems in Scotland at this time is a triangle pointing one way, towards Burns.
In his explanatory letter to George Thomson, quoted earlier, Burns refers to composing Scots Wha Hae during his yesternight’s evening walk when he linked Bruce’s fight for freedom and liberty with the modern struggle for the same ideals. This same experience, linking Bruce to contemporary political tumult, is woven into and narrated in this version of the second Bruce poem. How coincidental that Agrestis was, like Burns, wandering alone the other night, contemplating the ‘ills’ of contemporary Scotland, thinking of King Robert De Bruce. Agrestis, it would appear, was able not only to read the poet’s mind, but his letters also.
Hogg also reveals in The Lost Poems that The Ghost of Bruce switches from the general use of ‘Britons’ to ‘each patriot Scot’ in ll. 22–5, a change of emphasis echoed by Burns in his earlier prose ‘… let every Briton, and particularly every Scotsman’ (Letter 283). The phrase ‘thick mists obscure involv’d me round’, from Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn, is very akin to the image of Bruce appearing ‘thick, involv’d in mist’. In such a tight description one would not expect three words to be repeated in this similar imagery, ‘thick’, ‘involv’d’ and ‘mist’. The words ‘thick’ and ‘mist’ are commonplace and predictable, but ‘involv’d’ is the unexpected and quite improbable repetition in both examples, once again suggesting one author. Even the description of Bruce as the ‘Chief o’ Men’ can be traced to the first version of A Man’s A Man, where Burns wrote ‘The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor, / Is chief o’ men for a’ that’. Not only is this exact phrase employed here, prior to the composition of the democratic anthem, but when Burns changed the phrase ‘chief o’ men’ in A Man’s A Man, he switched the word ‘king’ for ‘chief’: ‘Is king o’ men for a’ that’. Having described King Robert the Bruce as a ‘chief’, the change in A Man’s A Man from ‘chief’ to ‘king’ would appear to be almost a natural, subconscious word association. Furthermore, the image of the battle louring in Scots Wha Hae— ‘See the front of battle lour’—that is, the enemy coming towards the Scottish troops like an ominous, dark and angry cloud, is one developed in more detail by Agrestis in The Ghost of Bruce, ll. 29–33.
Another trope in Burns, a powerful man given to the practice of explosive shot-putting (he left his shot-putt at Ellisland farm), is that of the sometimes vengeful, justice-giving arm. It is found, for example, in A Birthday Ode when in an analogous political situation, he envisages the return of the Stuarts and the overthrow of the present royal family:
So Vengeance’s arm, ensanguined, strong
Shall with resistless might assail
Usurping Brunswick’s head shall lowly lay,
And Stewart’s wrongs and yours with tenfold weight repay.
It is highly significant that this poem does not call for a similar act of restorative violence but rather for fortitude and patience till the nightmare political hurricane blows itself out. L. 31, with the phrase ‘United as in One’, may also be deeply relevant as not derived from history but contemporary radical rhetoric. Consider this passage from Address from the Society of United Irishmen in Dublin, 1792 which was designed to provoke the Convention of Friends of the People in Scotland into action:
We have told you what our Situation was, what it is, what it ought to be; our End, a National Legislature; our Means, an Union of the whole People. Let this Union extend throughout the Empire. Let all unite for all, or each Man suffer for all. In each country let the People assemble in peaceful and constitutional Convention. Let Delegates from each country digest a Plan of reform, best adapted to the Situation and Circumstances of their respective Nations, and let the Legislatures be petitioned at once by the urgent and unanimous Voice of England, Scotland and Ireland.
This radical vision of the enlightened end of history with each democratically united nation in a consequent equal, pacific union with nations similarly inclined, hence an end to both Anglo-British imperialism and Irish religious self-division, is to reappear in one of Burns’s most important political poems, Ode on General Washington’s Birthday in the posthumous section. This poem, however, is one that, with American exceptionalism, is of the British Isles as the scene of tri-national tragedy. The above quotation is taken from Appendix II of Elaine W. McFarland’s indispensable Ireland and Scotland in the Age of Revolution (Edinburgh, 1994).
An Unpublished Letter on Robert the Bruce
As a natural appendix to these ‘Bruce’ poems, we add the following hitherto unpublished letter by Burns. This letter remained with its recipient Dr Hughes until his death in 1843 and was sold later in the century to a New York collector, Mr John Kennedy. In January 1928, the Hereford Burns Club published the letter with its history. A copy of this is available in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow and a facsimile of the letter is displayed in the Burns Room of the Murray Arms Hotel, Gatehouse of Fleet, in Galloway. Why the letter has not been included in the poet’s collected letters is unknown. It is certainly genuine. It was written as an explanation to Bruce’s Address to His Troops at Bannockburn and dated 1795:
This battle was the decisive blow which put Robert the First, commonly called Robert de Bruce, in quiet possession of the Scottish throne. It was fought against Edward the Second, son to that Edward who shed so much blood in Scotland in consequence of the dispute between Bruce and Baliol.
Apropos, when Bruce fled from L
ondon to claim the Scottish crown, he met with the Cummin, another claimant of the crown, at Dumfries. At the altar, in the Priory there they met, and it is said that Bruce offered to Cummin – ‘Give me your lands and I’ll give you my interest in the crown’, or vice versa.
What passed nobody knows, but Bruce came in a flurry to the door and called out to his followers – ‘I am afraid that I have slain the Cummin’. ‘Are you only afraid!’ replied Sir Roger de Kilpatrick (ancestor to the present Sir James Kilpatrick of Closeburn), and ran into the Church and stabbed Cummin to the heart; and coming back said, showing a bloody dagger, ‘I’ve sicker’d him!’ – that is in English, I have secured him. Until lately this was the motto of the Closeburn family, but the late Sir Thomas changed it into ‘I make sure’ – the crest still is the bloody dagger. R.B.
The Scotian Muse:
An Elegy.
First printed in The Edinburgh Gazetteer, 1st October 1793.
The Muse unwilling leaves the sacred shore,
Where every virtue held its peaceful reign —
Hangs with regret on scenes she lov’d before;
The last sad wand’rer from the pensive plain.
5 She views where once the Sons of Freedom stray’d
Whose hard misfortunes claim the sigh sincere:
She saw fair Genius fly his native shade,
And pour’d the parting tribute of a tear.
But why, sweet maid, so fondly dost thou cling