In the late 18th century, it was a dangerous idea, a political view that could entail deportation to the penal colonies. But the revered Scots poet Robert Burns was openly discussing republican sentiments in the last months of his life, risking punitive action for challenging the authority of the king, an expert in Scottish literature has found.

In a biography to mark the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth, Prof Robert Crawford of the University of St Andrews in Fife, eastern Scotland, has unearthed new evidence which he believes is conclusive proof that Burns was a democrat who sympathised with the French revolution.

A private journal written by a contemporary of Burns records meeting the poet and a friend in Dumfries, two months before Burns died there in July 1796, aged 37. The diary by James Macdonald recalled: “They were both staunch republicans.” Crawford said this claim could have had explosive consequences for Burns: “It was dangerous to be called that then.”

At the time, the British aristocracy was extremely fearful about the risks of radical, democratic ideas spreading in Britain following the French revolution and of threats to George III’s life. Men such as Thomas Muir, the Scots political reformer, were being deported to the Botany Bay penal colony in Australia, for sedition.

“Particularly towards the end of his life in the 1790s, democracy was a dirty word. It was a word associated with terrorism, a word which has just come into the English language; it’s associated with the terreur in France,” he said.

Crawford’s biography of Burns, The Bard, is published by Cape in the UK and by Princeton in the US in January to coincide with more than 300 cultural and arts events being held across Scotland next year to mark the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth in Alloway, Ayrshire, south west Scotland, on January 25, 1759.

Crawford, professor of modern Scottish literature at St Andrews, unearthed Macdonald’s journal in the university’s library and believes the Hebridean, then travelling through southern Scotland meeting poets and writers, is a reliable witness. Macdonald later became a Church of Scotland minister in Fife.

“He’s the last man to have written down a substantial conversation with Robert Burns, about two months before he died in Dumfries,” he said.

There have been continual debates about Burns’s support for anti-monarchist, republican views – a key element in the modern reverence for his work. Many believe his radical views are explicit in some of his most famous poems, where he talks of “that man to man, the world o’er / Shall brothers be for a’ that”, and the “royalty of man” in his Ode to General [George] Washington.

Proving patriotism

These views are very close to French revolutionary sentiment, said Crawford, and Burns suffered as a result. Suspicions about his loyalties inhibited his efforts to be hired as an exciseman in the late 1780s, and he needed the influence of powerful patrons in Edinburgh to overcome them.

In the early 1790s, Burns wrote to one patron, Robert Graham of Fintry, denouncing allegations that he was a radical as “a lie” and insisting he was “most devoutly attached” to the “glorious” British constitution. He even joined the Dumfriesshire Volunteers, formed in 1795 in case of a French invasion, to prove his patriotism.

Crawford believes Macdonald’s diary is highly significant because it records conversations with Burns himself.

“Burns has other friends who are clearly associated with other democratic interests or perhaps republican interests,” he said. “I think this is a quite conclusive document but it’s not the only evidence.” He added: “I’m not saying Burns wants a French invasion, but I think his democracy has a quite pronounced radical edge.”

The National Library of Scotland exhibition, called Zig-Zag: the paths of Robert Burns, includes further evidence of Burns’s distaste for authority. It has the original, unedited version of Tam O’Shanter with the disparaging verse that decries the “three lawyers tongues turned inside oot / Wi’ lies, seamed like a beggars clout / Three priests hearts, rotten, black as muck / Lay stinkin, vile in every neuk”. That verse was originally struck out on his editor’s advice.

It also shows Burns’s preferred version of the song recited by hundreds of millions of people on New Year’s Eve, Auld Lang Syne, written in his handwriting on the blank “interleaf” page opposite a printed version of the song in a book of contemporary Scots songs.—Dawn/Guardian News Service