Shall Brithers Be For A' That

Allan Massie writes:

"Burns certainly had royalist and Jacobite sympathies — some of the time. But, on the evidence of poems and letters, he also had Whig and democratic ones — some of the time. He approved the American rebellion and thought George Washington the greatest man of the age. Like many English Whigs he welcomed the French Revolution — but he also declared that he stood by the principles of the British — or Anglo-Scottish — Revolution of 1688. Would he have regarded Napoleon as a tyrant and disturber of the European peace, or would he have approved of him as a man who toppled kings and emperors and have hero-worshipped him as Hazlitt and Byron did? Again, he sometimes expressed disapproval of the Union and displayed what one might call proto-nationalist sentiments, but at other times he described himself as British."

He goes on:

"Logically, Jacobitism is incompatible with the expression of democratic sentiments, but there is no incompatibility between being moved by the Jacobites’ loyalty to a lost cause and expressing belief in the brotherhood of man. Each sentiment may be sincere at the moment it finds utterance in speech or verse."

Quite so. But one may and must go further than that.

We may and must identify with the tradition of those Catholics, High Churchmen (subsequently including first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics, and always including Scottish Episcopalians), Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others who, never having been convinced of the full legitimacy of Hanoverian Britain, of her Empire, and that of Empire’s capitalist ideology, created the American Republic, fought against slavery both there and in the British Empire, transformed the United Kingdom into a parliamentary democracy, founded the Labour Movement, and opposed the Boer and First World Wars.

And we may and must identify with the largely subterranean ties binding these islands, and thus also the Commonwealth (to which all these islands properly belong), through the vast Jacobite diaspora, to all those touched by the financial centres of the Continent, by the trading ports circling Europe, by the Russian Navy, by the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies, and by so many other things besides.