What is Burns Night? The legacy of a poet who shaped Scotland

Internationally synonymous with Scottish identity, Robert Burns is Scotland’s national bard, a status he has achieved thanks to his popularity since his death in 1796. He wrote some of the country’s most famous poems, including the satirical ode, the Address to Haggis, and the stirring Scottish Wha Hae. His best-known work, the emotional Auld Lang Syne, is celebrated around the world every New Year’s Eve.

Every year on January 25, Scots celebrate his life with good food (including haggis, for which he declared himself “chief of the Puddin race”) and reading his poems. On this Burnt Night, I invite you to read The Approach of Spring, Lamentation of Mary Queen of Scots, one of the Bard’s lesser-known works from 1790.

Mary, Queen of Scots, who also holds an important place in the Scottish cultural imagination, was executed in 1587 for conspiring against her cousin, the English Queen Elizabeth I. Following her execution and Elizabeth’s death, Mary’s son James was crowned king of both countries in 1603; this means that Mary is generally seen as the last Scottish monarch.

Mary’s legacy has long been debated. During her lifetime, she was portrayed as either a papist jezebel, a “monstrous” female ruler, or a Catholic martyr.

Since her death, numerous writers, including Burns, have written fictional versions of the Queen of Scots based on their own beliefs about her cultural significance. But the poem Burns wrote 200 years after his execution played a major role in shaping his legacy.

Mary was the subject of heated debate among Scottish men in the 18th century. People such as philosopher David Hume labeled Mary a “whore” who “murdered her husband.”

To control Mary’s public reputation, Hume was using the same slurs that were weaponized by Mary’s contemporary political enemies. Scottish lords at the time implicated the queen in the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley. The fact that she married the man accused of murdering Darnely, just months after his death, seemed to support her perception of guilt. They accused him of being a murderer and adulterer, and he was forced to abdicate in 1567.

Burns’s portrayal of the “lovely but unfortunate” Mary is, on the contrary, sympathetic. His elegy first appeared in a letter to his friend, the heiress Francis Dunlop, in 1790. In another letter, this time to Lady Winifred Maxwell Constable in 1791, he described the work as “a tribute to the memory of our lovely Scottish Queen, sorely wounded.”

Burns’s sympathy for the queen was probably influenced by the popular defense written by her friend William Tytler. Challenging the arguments of the likes of Hume, Tytler critically re-examined the evidence used to condemn Mary for the death of her second husband.

Burns’s portrayal of Mary was also influenced by her Jacobite sympathies; He believed that the exiled Stuart dynasty, represented by Mary, should be restored to the English throne. The developing tradition of romantic literature, focusing on natural imagery and individual emotional expression, also shaped his representation of the Queen.

Written in the voice of Mary awaiting execution, Burns’ Mary contrasts her youthful happiness as “Queen of France” (she became Queen of France through her first marriage to the French dauphin Francis II in 1558) to her current imprisonment in “foreign bands” in England. shouting “mony” [many] A traitor in Scotland” and wishes for “better stars” for his son James.

The Lamentation of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, by the poet Anne Hunter (1742–1821) may also have influenced Burns’ portrayal of the queen. Published around 1780, it bears distinct similarities to Burns’s later elegies.

Hunter and Burns write as Mary from a first-person perspective, describing Elizabeth I as a “false woman”, using nature-based imagery, and culminating in Mary’s defiant belief that she will live on after her death. Unfortunately, the possible impact of Hunter’s work on the bard has been largely forgotten because his poetry was often published anonymously.

With his elegies, Burns cemented Mary’s status as a tragic figure ripe for romantic literary representation. Burns’s work inspired the romantic poet William Wordsworth to write three poems about the queen of “weeping bondage” in the early 1800s; A very similar elegy and two works that suit his voice.

With Burns’s Mary declaring Elizabeth a lesser woman, “the weeping blood on the woman’s breast / That you never knew,” she also helped create an enduring trope that presented the feminine, clumsy Mary as the victim and opposite of the cold and cunning (unfeminine) Elizabeth.

This idea has been pursued in many works, from Walter Scott’s The Abbot (1820) to Phillipa Gregory’s The Other Queen (2008). Liz Lochhead’s 1987 play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off is the most significant work to date to challenge the portrayal of queens as “two mean girls locked in a fight to the death”.

Both Mary and Burns were poets; The bodies of both were exhumed in an attempt to redefine their cultural reputations, and both have now become profitable attractions for Scotland’s tourism and heritage industries.

As the Night of the Burn comes again and Mary’s last letter is exhibited for the first time in Perth, it is now time to read the Lamentation of Mary Queen of Scots on the Approach of Spring and to remember two figures whose lives and mythologies greatly shaped Scotland.