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Internationally synonymous with Scottish identity, Robert Burns yes ScotlandHe was the national bard, a status he had achieved through his popularity since his death in 1796. He wrote some of the country’s most famous poems, including the satirical ode “An Address to Haggis” and the rousing Scottish “Wha Hae.” His most famous work, the emotional “Auld Lang Syne,” is sung to the world every New Year’s Eve.
Every January 25, Scots celebrate his life with good food (including haggis, which he dubbed “The Pudding Chief”) and recitations of his poetry. This Burns Night, I highly recommend reading one of the bard’s lesser-known works from 1790, The Lamentations of Mary, Queen of Scots, Spring Comes.
Mary, Queen of Scots, who was also an important figure in the Scottish cultural imagination, was executed in 1587 for conspiring against her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England. Following her execution and Elizabeth’s death, Mary’s son James was crowned King of Both Countries in 1603, meaning Mary is often regarded as the last unique Scottish monarch.
Mary’s legacy has long been controversial. Throughout her life she was portrayed either as a Catholic Jezebel, a “terrible” female ruler, or as a Catholic martyr.
Since her death, many writers, including Burns, have created fictional versions of the Queen of Scots based on their own perceptions of her cultural significance. However, Burns’s poem, written 200 years after her execution, played an important role in shaping her legacy.
Mary was the subject of fierce debate among men in 18th-century Scotland. Philosopher David Hume and others referred to Mary as a “whore” who “murdered her husband.”
Hume was using slander weaponized by Mary’s contemporary political enemies to control her public reputation. The Scottish nobles of the time accused the Queen of murdering her second husband, Lord Darnley. She married the man accused of killing Darnley just months after his death, seemingly bolstering the idea of her guilt. They denounced her as a murderer and adulterer, and she was forced to abdicate in 1567.
By contrast, Burns’s portrayal of the “affable but unfortunate” Mary is sympathetic. His condolences first appeared in a 1790 letter to his friend and heiress Francis Dunlop. He went on to describe the work in another letter to Lady Winifred Maxwell Constable in 1791, calling it “in memory of our dear Queen of Scots, who is so much injured”.
Burns’s sympathy for the Queen may have been influenced by a popular defense of the Queen written by his friend William Tytler. Tytler challenges the claims of Hume and others, critically re-examining the evidence used to condemn Mary for killing her second husband.
Burns’s portrayal of Mary was also influenced by his Jacobite sympathies – he believed that the exiled Stuarts, represented by Mary, should be restored to the English throne. The emerging Romantic literary tradition, oriented toward natural imagery and individualistic expressions of emotion, also influenced his depiction of the Queen.
Written from the perspective of Mary as she awaits execution, Burns’s “Mary” contrasts the happy years of her youth as “Queen of Bonny France” (she became Queen of France in 1558 when she married Dauphin Francis II of France) with her current imprisonment in England among the “Foreign Band”. She denounced “money [many] Traitor of Scotland” and wished her son James “kinder stars”.
About the author
Kate Kane is a PhD candidate in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow.
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The poetess Anne Hunter (1742-1821) may also have influenced Burns’s portrayal of the Queen in her Elegy of Mary, Queen of Scots. Published around 1780, it bears clear similarities to Burns’ later lamentations.
Both Hunter and Burns write about Mary in the first person, describing Elizabeth I as a “false woman,” using nature-based imagery, and ending with Mary’s provocative belief that she would continue to exist after her death. Unfortunately, the possible influence of Hunter’s work on the bard has been largely forgotten, as her poems were often published anonymously.
Burns uses his mourning to solidify Mary’s status as a tragic figure represented in Romantic literature. Burns’ work inspired Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who wrote three poems about the “weeping captivity” of the Queen in the early 1800s—a very similar lament, and both pieces also feature her voice.
Burns’s Mary declares that Elizabeth is a little woman because of “the blood that flows in women’s breasts/You never knew,” and he also helps create an enduring trope that portrays the feminine, powerless Mary as the victim in opposition to the cold, calculating (and unfeminine) Elizabeth.
This idea continues in works ranging from Walter Scott’s The Abbot (1820) to Phillipa Gregory’s The Other Queen (2008). Liz Lochhead’s 1987 play The Beheading of Mary Queen of Scots is the most important work to date, challenging the depiction of the queens as two “mean girls locked in a violent feud to the death”.
Both Mary and Burns were poets whose bodies were exhumed in an attempt to redefine their cultural reputations, and both are now lucrative attractions for Scotland’s tourism and heritage industries.
With Burns Night upon us once again and Mary’s last letters on display in Perth for the first time, it’s time to read Mary, Queen of Scots’ tribute on the coming of spring, and remember how much Scotland was shaped by the lives and myths of two figures.