Jacobite History to National Song: Robert Burns and Carolina Oliphant (Baroness Nairne)

Abstract

Jacobite History to National Song: Robert Burns and Carolina Oliphant (Baroness Nairne) Carol McGuirk Florida Atlantic University . . . it is the "inter"—the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. —Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture1 I. Portable Culture [T]he Scotish Muses were all Jacobites. I have paid more attention to every description of Scots songs than perhaps any body living has done, and I do not recollect one single stanza, or even the title of the most trifling Scots air, which has the least panegyrical reference to the families of Nassau or Brunswick; while there are hundreds satirizing them. This may be thought no panegyric on the Scots Poets, but I mean it as such. —Robert Burns, Notes on Scottish Song2 Jacobitism during the eras of active rebellion (i.e., the years surrounding 1688, 1715, and 1745) was inherently partisan in its polar oppositions: justice versus injustice, Tory versus Whig, king versus usurper. During the 1790s, Robert Burns and Carolina Oliphant (who later in life became Baroness Nairne) transformed this single-minded party zeal into what they both called "national song." The term "national" should not be taken, however, as suggesting that Burns and Nairne impose detailed prescriptions for Scottish identity. Both drew on a Jacobite heritage of disaffection, and as William Donaldson says of Burns's songs, "generalised the antiunion element in Jacobitism into a symbol of Scottish national and historical distinctiveness in contradistinction to the 'British' and assimilationist ethos of the Whigs."3 This Scottish "distinctiveness" promoted by their songs, although illustrated by copious reference to Scottish history, has at bottom little to do with wearing the tartan or following one king and not another. As national poets, Burns and Nairne derived one imperative injunction from the Jacobites, and that was to define resistance as the ground of Scottish national consciousness. They dramatize this resistance [End Page 253] in very different ways, but for both, "Scotland" is not so much a culture as a counterculture. Culloden, the last battle in the last Jacobite war, was fought on April 16, 1746. At the core of Nairne's songs of the 1790s is an elegiac account of the mid-century struggle and exile of her own parents and grandparents. Burns, whose father and grandfather were likewise displaced in the aftermath of Culloden, echoes family stories, too, but he also employs Jacobite speakers to convey his enthusiasm for resistance movements in his own day. The writings of both preserve seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history for a wider (if less topical and specific) cultural recollection. Both reshape anecdotes of war and conflict as "family" songs, "loyalty" songs, "freedom" songs, even love songs; this recasting does not dilute but rather (in the manner of good poetry and song) concentrates the source material's latent power. As national poets, both work to transform the details of history into a lyric ontology, a "Scottish" consciousness. Jacobitism became portable in their retelling, for their songs opened up the Jacobites' often coded references, projecting broad appeals to emotion and sentiment. The uncounted thousands of nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants who carried the songs of Burns and Nairne with them around the world preserved, in performance of these songs, a sympathetic account of the vanished culture(s) of the dispossessed Jacobites.4 Paradoxically enough, dissemination of their version of Highland history was occurring during the same decades in which the Highlands themselves were being stripped of people and stocked with sheep. Their songs operate in exactly the kind of "inbetween space" described by Homi K. Bhabha in the first epigraph, although for Nairne and Burns the music to which their words are set—which itself lies somewhere between folk song and art song—performs some of the tasks of negotiation that Bhabha reserves purely for speech, or what he calls "the split-space of enunciation."5 Their songs' hybridity (beyond the interplay of words...