Free The Canongate Burns by Robert Burns

were among this swelling radical ‘enemy’ and in one incident he tells Home, open conflict erupted between radicals and loyalists at London’s Haymarket theatre when the revolutionary song ‘Ca Ira’ was demanded by reformers, but chanted down by loyalist calls for ‘God Save the King’. Similar tensions spread to the provincial theatres, including Dumfries and an unidentified informer reported to the Excise that Burns was in the reformist mob. Mackenzie goes on in the same letter to condemn Scottish academics: ‘From my Communication with Men of Letters here, I can perceive that they are generally on the side of the Malcontents’. 32 Fanatically partisan, status obsessed, politically scared, Mackenzie so hated his reforming and radical political enemies that he could not speak their names. To do so would give them a credibility he utterly sought to deny. For Mackenzie the radical was equivalent to the bestial. This is why in Mackenzie and the subsequent Tory criticism he inspired always described Burns as surrounded by destructive groups of unnamed degenerates in Edinburgh and, even worse, Dumfries.
    It should further be understood that Burns was not a unique case for such treatment. The heavily subsidised, reactionary literary, magazine and newspaper culture put together by Pitt and Dundas specialised in trashing the radical literary enemy by varied forms of abuse based on the relationship of personal licentiousness to consequent political anarchy if these people were to succeed. Forexample, Mary Wollstonecraft with whom Burns corresponded received treatment even worse than his, as a promiscuous woman she was even more reprehensible than a randy ploughman. Engrossed in destroying the careers of any radical sympathisers, Mackenzie boasted to the ultra-loyalist George Chalmers, in March 1793:
    One thing Mr Young suggests as never yet thought of, which however was thought of here, and enforced in two short Articles in the Newspapers by myself, at the very opening of this Business, namely the resolution of not employing Jacobin Tradesmen, which had a very excellent Effect in this Town.… contrary to my Expectations, the War has I think done good in this Country, given a Sort of Impulse to the good Part of the Community … 33
    An ever-willing anti-reform propagandist, Mackenzie helped organise the Scottish distribution of a vicious attack, printed by the same George Chalmers, on Tom Paine as a degenerate, dangerous individual. The black art of character assassination, well established before the death of Burns, won rich patronage for the loyal Mackenzie, appointed Comptroller of Taxes in Scotland in 1799.
    The degree of Mackenzie’s vindictiveness and his stress of the later Dumfries years, also alert us to one of the most pervasive and politically wilfully misconceived of myths surrounding Burns. Indeed, so pervasive that it has even penetrated the normally sceptical consciousness of Professor T.M. Devine who has recently written of ‘the public recantation of such celebrated supporters of the radical cause as Robert Burns’. 34 This alleged recantation stems from one misinterpreted, truncated song, The Dumfries Volunteers . It avoids all the substantial poetic evidence of the Dumfries years to the contrary; not least Extempore [on the Loyal Natives’ Verses ]:
    Ye true ‘Loyal Natives’, attend to my song,
    In uproar and riot rejoice the night long:
    From envy and hatred your corps is exempt:
    But where is your shield from the darts of contempt?
    The poem catches perfectly both Burns’s contempt for the British cause under the war-mongering Pitt and the political company he was keeping in the bitterly politically factionalised little town from which he kept sending out not only radical poems to politically sympathetic London, Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers, but, ashis doctor William Maxwell had, weapons to the French. All this, of course, at ferocious