Edited
by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Dawsonville, GA, USA
Email:
jurascot@earthlink.net
Hats off
to Clark McGinn, formerly of London and currently of Dublin, a friend then,
a friend now, no matter where he lives. Clark is always available with a
helping hand or a word of encouragement. For years I had wanted to hear him
speak and finally had that long awaited pleasure in January of this year
during the annual Burns conference at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for
Robert Burns Studies. No one present could have been disappointed in his
presentation as he has mastered one trait many, including me, need to learn
- stand up, speak up, and shut up. I’ll keep saying it until I die, “The
mind will retain only want the tail will endure!”
Some of
our readers may not be aware that Clark has two best sellers that appeal to
the mind, heart and soul of those who love Robert Burns and all things
Scottish, The Ultimate Guide to Being Scottish and The Ultimate Burns Supper
Book. I don’t know of any other two publications that have helped me as much
with both subjects. You may think you know all there is to know about your
Scottishness and the annual Burns Supper you have attended for the last 25
years but if you have not read these two books, you are in for a surprise
about how much you do not know about either topic.
Thanks
again, Clark, for your friendship and for the many guest articles of yours
that appear in the chapters of Robert Burns Lives!.
This article also appeared in the Winter
2011 issue of the Burns Chronicle, Bill Dawson, Editor, The Robert Burns
World Federation Ltd and was initially presented by Clark McGinn during the
Burns & Byron Conference, Manchester University, January 2010.
(FRS: 3-22-12)
SCOTTISH BARDS AND ENGLISH PRELATES
By Clark McGinn
It is interesting to look at
the differing treatment these two socially controversial but highly rated
poets received in terms of their commemoration in the hallows of Poets’
Corner in Westminster Abbey.
A bust of Burns was accepted
into the Abbey’s South transept 88 years after his death, at the first
asking, while Byron had to wait 147 years after his death, with a campaign
which failed on four attempts, only succeeding on the fifth in 1969.
What caused this differential
approach?
Parallels in death
Before every memorialisation
comes a death, and the mythologies of the deaths of both Burns and Byron
share many similarities.
They both died young, in
tragic circumstances (at just over 37 and 36 years old) and shared (albeit
to different degrees) the trappings of celebrity.
There was a widespread and
immediate public recognition of their deaths. For Burns, the ordinary
people of Dumfries who crowded outside the sick poet’s house - ‘Whenever two
or three people stood together there talk was of Burns and him alone’
(Cunningham p. 118) culminating in common man who called out ‘wha’ll be oor
poet noo?’. At Byron’s death, it was said that the Greeks congregated on the
day he died, it being the Orthodox Easter Sunday, each forgetting to greet
each other with the traditional formula of ‘Christ is Risen’ but rather
asking ‘How is Byron?’ (Galt, ch. 48).
That recognition carried
popular and pompous elements into both funerals (you might say that man’s
inhumation of man, makes countless thousands mourn). The public gazed on
the coffins of both poets and on the funerary day, Burns had his ‘awkward
squad’ to fire over him as 8 – 10,000 folk watched the obsequies, while
Byron was escorted by a quarter mile queue of (mainly empty) carriages to be
received into the family vault and the company of his trusty Newfoundland
dog, Boatswain.
Even after entombment, their
bodies were not granted peace, with Burns exhumed twice – once to move to
the mausoleum, and once to welcome his Jean. Burns had to endure had the
indignity of having his scull cast in plaster for budding phrenologists,
however poor Byron suffered worse, as the sexton is quoted reporting on ‘the
quite abnormal development’ of the poet’s ‘sexual organ’. (New York Times
1907)
It is when society was
considering the formal memorialisation of both men, that their stories in
death diverge.
Memorialisation
At the beginning of the
Nineteenth Century, Westminster Abbey, while seen as the National Church,
has not yet defined its role in the commemoration of the great men of the
three kingdoms although the public were beginning to see it as having a role
in capturing the great and the good, perhaps driven by stories such as Lord
Nelson’s 1797 injunction to his men: ‘Victory or the Abbey!’ (He is in St
Pauls, in fact, but the principle is similar).
As Philip Connell describes
the position:
The privatised mechanisms of
monumental canonization in Westminster’s poetical quarter raised a number of
difficult questions about the relationship between the practice and motives
of literary commemoration and its supposedly representative, public
function. Perhaps most significantly, it generated considerable uncertainty
about how the literary monument should be interpreted – whether as an
expression of private grief, personal vanity, public-spirited patronage, or
shared cultural tradition. (Connell p.563)
So having a place in the
literary canon did not grant automatic canonisation. The sole decision was
in the hands of the Dean and Chapter and as a Royal Peculiar (i.e. with no
ordinary Episcopal oversight) the Dean’s power was hard to question. To some
extent, decisions had to be made party on space, ‘Gloomy Dean’ Inge of St
Paul’s described the jumble thus: ‘parts of Westminster Abbey look like the
yard of a mad stonemason’ (Inge, 1924), but it is plain that the Dean’s view
of the proposal was paramount.
As Dean Hall said earlier
this year on accepting the proposal of commemoration of Ted Hughes:
The Dean of Westminster does
not generally take the initiative over memorials and has to think very hard
about how to respond to approaches. The Abbey’s present building, little
over 700 years old, already holds the graves or memorials of 3,300 people,
about many of whom little or nothing is known in our day. Deciding within a
few years of people’s death that they will be remembered in hundreds of
years’ time is of course impossible. And yet, it is sometimes right to make
such a decision, as Deans have done over the centuries. (Hall, 2010)
We must always remember that
memorialisation was elective at the Abbey’s choice, Man proposeth, but the
Dean disposeth.
Byron’s Case
When Byron died in 1824, this
uncertainty over the Abbey as being a Pantheon or a Parish Church clashed
directly with the notoriety of the life of the poet.
Maurizio Ascari provides the
detail of the Byronic siege of Westminster, which started when his embalmed
body arrived in England and his publisher John Murray (on his own
initiative) wrote to Dean Ireland seeking the burial of the late poet-peer
within the Abbey. The Dean’s reply was short and sharp: ‘consideration of
duty prevented him from acceding [to the request]’ (Ascari, p. 143).
Magazine articles and books were published in outrage at the shunning of
Byron often using forceful language: ‘Why was the door closed against him
and opened to the carcases of thousands without merit and without name?
(Cunningham, p.122). There is no record that the authorities read these
polemics, they certainly did not heed them.
Over the next decades, the
battle was fought over the Thorvaldsen statute (now in Trinity College,
Cambridge’s library). While the cause was not helped by the poor quality of
the statue, the Dean and Chapter remained single-minded in opposition to the
two further formal requests to site it in the Abbey as an appropriate
memorial to Byron. It was apparent that the authorities could conceive of no
‘appropriate’ memorial at all.
By 1907, the New York Times
was asking 'where is Byron – why isn’t he here?’ [...] People are beginning
to ask whether this ignoring of Byron is a thing of which England should be
ashamed?’ (New York Times, 12 July 1907) but no concerted further effort was
made until the Centenery of Byron’s death in 1924 when the ultimate
Dreadnaught broadside was fired at Westminster: a Letter To The Times
(Times, 30 June 1924) which was signed by Hardy, Kipling, Newbolt, Lloyd
George, Asquith and Balfour (and others) – commending Byron to the bosom of
the Abbey both as a poet and proponent of liberty, roles which the
signatories believed merited inclusion on their own merits, trumping any
question of personal morality.
Dean Ryle replied (Times, 19
July 1924) ‘that the Abbey was no mere literary Walhalla [sic]’ but had a
moral and clerical duty to support Christian principles over all other
considerations:
Byron, partly by his own
openly dissolute life and partly by the influence of licentious verse,
earned a worldwide reputation for immorality amongst English-speaking
people. […] A man who outraged the laws of our Divine Lord, and whose
treatment of women violated the Christian principles of purity and honour,
should not be commemorated in Westminster Abbey … the central and most
sacred Christian shrine in the Empire. (Times 19 July 1924)
He was supported by his
brother-in-Christ Dean Inge of St Paul’s who drew an interesting parallel:
‘Burns has been admitted, rightly in my judgement, though he lived neither
in soberness nor in chastity’ (Inge, 1924) and there the opposing parties
dug the metaphorical trenches which remained for 45 more years until Dean
Abbott ‘giving no official reason’, acceded to the petition of the Poetry
Society for a floor monument in Poets Corner in 1969. The New York Times
posited that ‘perhaps the Church of England is more charitable now towards
eccentric behaviour’ (New York Times, 6 May 1969).
(Interestingly, it remains
more difficult to find out information on Byron within the Abbey’s official
website than most of the other denizens of Poets’ Corner.)
Burns’s Case
At Burns’s death there was no
shortage of clerical criticism of his life. Ministers of the Kirk were
openly hostile to the poet’s memory (with a few honourable exceptions such
as Revd Hamilton Paul) but in the main, the score-settling of the likes of
Revd William Peebles (who coined the abusive term Burnomania) saw the living
asses kicking the dead lion.
The non-clerical view was
radically different, with a popular cult which took off after the
publication of the Currie Edition in 1800, seeing the first Burns supper in
Alloway Cottage in July 1801 and the growth of that social memorialisation
in tandem with monumental subscriptions on the Doon, in Dumfries and in
Edinburgh in the second decade of the Nineteenth century. The growth of this
affectionate and widespread celebration of Burns hit a high point at the
Birthday Centenery of 1859 where we see a broader acceptance of Burns by the
clergy – tellingly summarised by the minister of Geelong, Australia who told
his Burns Supper audience ‘that some years ago a person of his profession
would have felt it an insult to be asked to be present on such an occasion;
but that time had passed.’ (Ballantine, p.514 )
This arc of acceptance by the
Kirk is embodied in the career of one of the most influential Scots church
figures of the Victorian Era, The Revd Dr Norman Macleod.
When he was a young man and
minister of Galston Kirk in Ayrshire he refused to attend the neighbouring
town of Newmilns’s first Burns Supper in 1838 in words not unlike Dean
Ryle’s:
Only consider the matter
seriously as a Christian man, and say how we can, with the shadow of
consistency, commemorate Burns after sitting down at the Lord’s Supper to
commemorate the Saviour? I have every admiration for Burns as a poet; but is
it possible to separate the remembrance of his genius from the purposes for
which it was so frequently used […], however much I may admire the beautiful
poetry of Burns [...] I cannot, I dare not, as a Christian minister do this;
neither can I but in the strongest manner disapprove of any dinner to his
memory. What I have said would, I well know, in the estimation of the world
be termed cant; but with the vast majority of thoughtful, well informed
Christians, it is self- evident truth. (Wellwood, p.32)
By 1859 however, Dr Macleod
felt able to sit on the platform of the Glasgow Centenary Dinner at the City
Hall and to speak about the poet. His focus on the poet’s ‘failings’
(articulated at some length in front of Burns’s son James Glencairn, as
guest of honour) brought a mix of cheers and many hisses from the audience,
leading to an early close to the worthy preacher’s sermon (Ballantine, pp.
54/5). Ten years later he was silent during the controversy created by the
Revd Fergus Ferguson who preached (and subsequently published) a
hellfire-and-damnation sermon entitled ‘Should Christians Celebrate The
Birthday Of Robert Burns?’ with the ultra-Presbyterian thesis that our poet,
as evidenced in Holy Wille’s Prayer or The Holy Fair or The Ordination, let
alone in the conduct of his life, was an incorrigible atheist, drinker and
fornicator and therefore an evil influence on the good folk of Scotland in
these golden times of Victorian values. This stirred up a classic
controversy in the Scottish press, mostly on the side of defending Burns and
the positive elements captured at his birthday celebrations until the last
word was had by the fount of Victorian values – the Queen herself - who was
recorded as dismissing the poor minister’s moral crusade and she closed the
dispute by describing her ‘fondness’ for Burns.
Macleod, now Dean of the
Thistle, spent his closing years in the Queen’s service, often reciting Tam
o’Shanter and A Man’s A Man to her and her daughters as they worked their
spinning wheels at Balmoral. (Macleod, p. 335).
In this period in the Church
of England, too, there were distinguished churchmen who saw merit in Burns,
notwithstanding his ‘irregularities’. A key link between Court and Abbey
was Dean Stanley, himself a liberal theologian and confidante of the Queen.
He first thought of the position of Burns in his definitive work ‘Historical
Memorials of Westminster Abbey’:
Of the three greatest
geniuses of that period [turn of the Nineteenth Century], two [sc. Burns and
Sir Walter Scott] sleep at Dumfries and at Dryburgh under their own native
hills; the third [sc. Byron] lies at Newstead […] Hard trial to the
guardians of the Abbey at that juncture: let us not condemn either him or
them too harshly.’ (Stanley 1868, p.300)
Theologically, too he
recognised a quality in Burns and was prepared to be controversial not just
in his abbey, but North of the Border when, in his Address as lord Rector at
St Andrew’s University in 1875 he adjured the undergraduates ‘to go to Burns
for your Theology’, praising the wise humour, the sagacious penetration, the
tender pathos of Robert Burns; the far-seeing toleration, the profound
reverence, the critical insight into the various shades of religious thought
and feeling, the moderation which ‘turns to scorn the falsehood of extremes’
(Stanley 1875, pp. 14-15)
The Abbey door appeared to be
open wide enough to let in the man Dean Stanley had elsewhere characterised
as the ‘prodigal son of the Church of Scotland’ (Oliver, p.349). Colin Rae
Brown (originally of Greenock, now of London) and Bailie Wilson of Glasgow
made an approach. What guaranteed success was that they had not only raised
a substantial public subscription but with the populist slant that no single
donation could exceed one shilling. The Prince of Wales, The Scots Peers and
the MPs from the Scottish constituencies all headed the subscription lists,
but underpinning them were thousands and thousands of ordinary folk, from
across Scotland and from throughout the Scots diaspora. The combination of
Dean Stanley and 20,000 Scotsmen can’t be wrong, so on 7 March 1885, the
ubiquitous Burns orator, Lord Rosebery could say without contradiction:
the spontaneous welcome which
the trustees of the national temple of fame has accorded the effigy of Burns
[…] seemed to him not to represent the partiality of friends or the
enthusiasm of devotees, but the voice and judgement of posterity. The
subscribers [...] felt in handing over to the Abbey the bust they were
bringing the very choicest offering they could bring to the shrine of the
Empire. (New York Times, 23 March 1885)
Burns’s first time success
was well regarded across the Empire and the English-speaking world, as
Stanley’s successor, Dean Bradley had described it in his speech on the day:
‘the poet's best legacies to his race, all that is good, beautiful and
beautiful and noble in his poems, may long invigorate, enrich and delight
mankind in every corner of the world.’(Goodwille, p.64). He even apologised
for the ‘tardiness’ in recognising Burns, which gave new impetus to the
voices seeking to return to the question of that other Scottish poet: ‘Now
that Burns had received his due, we may begin to hope that room will be
found in the Poets’ Corner for a bust of Byron’. (Inangahua Times 18 May
1885, p.2).
What caused This Difference
in Official Recognition?
The treatment of these two
outstanding poets by the Dean and Chapter could hardly be more different. I
believe that three factors were at work here.
Personal Frailties: both men
lived lives beyond the limits of the teachings of the Christian churches
into which they were baptised. One of the aims of Currie’s first full
biography of Burns was to create a ‘firebreak’ to control debate around
potential moral criticism of the poet’s life, but the important
ecclesiastical point is that Burns (albeit grudgingly) accepted punishment
from the Kirk Session for the breaches of Church law they condemned him for.
Secondly, and to my mind, crucially, his wife Jean Armour Burns, lived for
many years after his death, having obviously recognised and repeatedly
forgiven her beloved husband’s faults. The church had awarded its public
punishment and the widow had said nolle prosequi on all personal grounds.
On the other hand, Byron in
life or in death gave no apology, in fact probably the opposite. This was
inadvertently compounded by his supporters who pressed the Abbey too hard,
too early (in 1824) and who tried to change the point of debate (in 1924)
but who only failed to answer the Abbey’s key concern about the perceived
immorality of Byron’s whole life.
Popular Cult: By the time the
Abbey was approached for Burns, there was a huge popular infrastructure of
support for the ‘Burns Cult’ at home and abroad as evidenced by the
cross-section of society seen in the breadth of the 20,000 subscribers
across the UK, the Empire and the USA. While the Burns Federation was yet
to be born, Burns Suppers and Burns Clubs were common, and the 1859 Burns
Birthday Centenary had been a global and highly successful celebration.
Outside Greece, there was no similar popular memorialisation of Byron, so
the advocates of his inclusion could be characterised as a narrow interest
group rather than Rosebery’s ‘voice and judgement of posterity’.
Distance: Dean Stanley’s
liberal characterisation of Burns as ‘the prodigal son of the Church of
Scotland’ (or maybe even more acutely he could be described as the patron
sinner of Scotland) recognised that although Burns had sinned against the
Kirk’s law, he had returned to its folds (albeit reserving the right of free
thought and satire) after accepting its punishments. How could a prelate of
a sister Church add an outside level of ecclesiastical censure? Byron was a
member of the Church of England, and not in its good books. The Church of
England, however, could add no condemnation of Burns.
I think this last point is
valuable, for we should remember that Burns was only commemorated in the
High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh as recently at the year 2000. Norman
Macleod’s successor, Revd Dr Gilleasbuig Macmillan tells a story of how a
female parishioner of the Cathedral tackled me on the decision to install a
window in St Giles’ Cathedral in memory of the poet Robert Burns. ‘A great
poet he may have been, and a lovely maker of lovely songs but how on earth
could I justify a tribute in a Christian church to a man whose relationships
with women were so notoriously unchaste?’ As I prepared some placatory
defence, her husband said quietly ‘the prodigal son’. Exactly I said with
relief. (McKay, p360).
Perhaps
the best that can be said is that poets are like the Biblical prophets – not
without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and
especially in his own Church.
Bibliography
Newspapers
Inangahua
Times (NZ), 18 May 1885
New York Times, 23 March 1885
New York Times, 12 July 1907
New York Times, 6 May 1969
Times, 30 June 1924
Times, 19 July 1924
Books and
Articles
Ascari,
Maurizio, (2009), “‘Not in a Christian Church” Westminster Abbey and the
Memorialisation of Byron.’ The Byron Journal, Vol. 37, Issue 2, 2009 pp. 141
-150
Ballantine,
James (1859), ‘Chronicle of the Hundredth Birthday of Robert Burns, A.
Fullarton & Co, Edinburgh and London, 1859
Connell,
Phillip (2005) ‘Death and the Author: Westminster Abbey and the Meanings of
the Literary Monument.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies vol. 38 No 4 Summer 2005
pp. 557 - 585
Cunningham, Alan (1824) ‘Robert Burns and Lord Byron’, The London Magazine,
August 1824
Ferguson,
Fergus (1869), ‘Should Christians Commemorate The Birthday Of Robert
Burns?’, Andrew Elliot, Edinburgh, 1869
Galt, John
(1830) ‘Life of Lord Byron’ London: Colburn and Co. 1830
Goodwille, Edward (1911) ‘The
World's Memorials of Robert Burns’, Waverly, Michigan 1911
Hall, John
(2010), ‘Press Release: Poets’ Corner Memorial for Ted Hughes’, Westminster
Abbey, 22 March 2010
Inge,
William Ralph (1924), ‘Monuments in Churches. The Byron Tablet’ The Morning
Post, 31 July 1924
McKay,
Johnson (2002) ‘And finally – Flaws in the Glass’, Expository Times, vol.113
no 10, 2002
Macleod,
Donald (1876) ‘Memoir of Norman Macleod’, Worthington, New York, 1876
Oliver,
Grace Atkinson (1885) ‘Arthur Penrhyn Stanley: His Life, Work and Teaching’
London, 1885
Pittock,
Murray (2009), ‘Byron’s Networks and Scottish Romanticism’, The Byron
Journal, Vol. 37, Issue 1, 2009 pp. 5 - 14
Stanley,
Arthur Penhyrn (1868) ‘Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey’, John
Murray, London 1868
Stanley,
Arthur Penhyrn (1872) ‘Rectorial Address St Andrews March 31 1875’,
Macmillan & Co, London 1872
Wellwood,
John (1897) ‘Norman Macleod’, Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, Edinburgh &
London, 1897
© Clark
McGinn, 2010 |