Ye Jacobites By Name
While on the Texas trip, I did a little reading in the Burns biography (Robert Burns: The Man, His Work, The Legend by Maurice Lindsay) I got out from the Jones Library in Amherst a little while back. At first, I was dissapointed that the biography didn't stick to a narrative style, but was more of an academic biography. But I find myself really liking the passages where the author steps out from the telling of Burns' life and addresses the Burns legend.
Burns is a very interesting character. His poetry is full of compassion and life and as a poet, he became a powerful symbol that is still very attractive to people to this day. It is interesting to hear the biographer speculate why that is, to talk about the wider literary context that Burns found himself in.
I've just read a part of the book where Burns scrawls a quatrain on a window in a tavern, calling the British royal family a race of idiots. Burns was a Jacobite. Which means, he is politically aligned with the Stuarts, descended from King James. The Stuarts were Catholics, but they also represented Scottish nationalism, which was popular among those left behind by the prosperity of the Act of Union, creating Great Britain from England and Scotland. The Unionists supported the Hannoverian succession, which brought the Protestant Georgian line to the throne from Germany.
The Jacobites tried several times to muster an army of highlanders to defeat the British and claim a separate Scottish state under a Stuart king. In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie led the last of the highland risings, which came to an end at the bloody battle of Culloden. That led to the ban on wearing the kilt and, eventually, to the highland clearances that drove many highlanders overseas to the colonies as settlers or soldiers.
Burns was born into this period after Culloden, but before Sir Walter Scott would help revive the Scottish legends with novels like Rob Roy. In a way, just writing in the Scots vernacular was a political act, when literary ambition turned many in Edinburgh to look to England for their poetical sensibilities.
I think of Jacobism today when people refer to our president as King George. In a way, Al Gore is our "King o'er the Sea," having been disenfranchised by an election in 2000 that was so close, and yet so pivotal. Many Gore supporters are angered by the power that Bush assumed after 9/11 and the highly partisan way he has governed.
But although Burns was a Jacobite, he also wrote the song, Ye Jacobites By Name, which is one of my favorites from the CD I bought. Although the song has a beat like a call to arms, it is actually a call for moderation. "What makes heroic strife?" he asks. All war is bloody and leads to orphans, he says.Then let your schemes alone,
Adore the rising sun,
And leave a man undone, to his fate.
Burns is a very interesting character. His poetry is full of compassion and life and as a poet, he became a powerful symbol that is still very attractive to people to this day. It is interesting to hear the biographer speculate why that is, to talk about the wider literary context that Burns found himself in.
I've just read a part of the book where Burns scrawls a quatrain on a window in a tavern, calling the British royal family a race of idiots. Burns was a Jacobite. Which means, he is politically aligned with the Stuarts, descended from King James. The Stuarts were Catholics, but they also represented Scottish nationalism, which was popular among those left behind by the prosperity of the Act of Union, creating Great Britain from England and Scotland. The Unionists supported the Hannoverian succession, which brought the Protestant Georgian line to the throne from Germany.
The Jacobites tried several times to muster an army of highlanders to defeat the British and claim a separate Scottish state under a Stuart king. In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie led the last of the highland risings, which came to an end at the bloody battle of Culloden. That led to the ban on wearing the kilt and, eventually, to the highland clearances that drove many highlanders overseas to the colonies as settlers or soldiers.
Burns was born into this period after Culloden, but before Sir Walter Scott would help revive the Scottish legends with novels like Rob Roy. In a way, just writing in the Scots vernacular was a political act, when literary ambition turned many in Edinburgh to look to England for their poetical sensibilities.
I think of Jacobism today when people refer to our president as King George. In a way, Al Gore is our "King o'er the Sea," having been disenfranchised by an election in 2000 that was so close, and yet so pivotal. Many Gore supporters are angered by the power that Bush assumed after 9/11 and the highly partisan way he has governed.
But although Burns was a Jacobite, he also wrote the song, Ye Jacobites By Name, which is one of my favorites from the CD I bought. Although the song has a beat like a call to arms, it is actually a call for moderation. "What makes heroic strife?" he asks. All war is bloody and leads to orphans, he says.Then let your schemes alone,
Adore the rising sun,
And leave a man undone, to his fate.