Robert Burns was born in 1759, 13 years after the last battle fought on the United Kingdom mainland at Culloden Moor near Inverness. In celebration of Robert Burns’ 254th birthday this week’s Murder Ballad Monday takes a tangential route to our normal subject matter. We will spend this week in the company of Robert Burns and some of his songs that tell about a campaign that sought to radically usurp the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and return the throne of this country to the House of Stewart but ended in hugely disastrous defeat. Over the week we will look at three songs that Burns wrote and which show the hope, the passion, the bitterness and the defeat of the Jacobite cause. This introduction seeks to show that Robert Burns not only connected to the Jacobite cause romantically, he also had a connection through his family and this was a great source of pride for him.

Charles Edward Stuart was born in Rome in 1720. Charles’ grandfather had been King James VII and II of Scotland and England. James , a Roman Catholic, had been replaced by William of Orange, a Protestant. An attempt was made by Charles’ father, James VIII and III in 1715 to gather the clans and attempt to retake the throne. James decided after the Battle of Sheriffmuir, which was more of a draw with neither side really getting anywhere, to return to France. Having failed to get anywhere with his planned invasion, James quickly became a political embarrassment for the French and they were very pleased when he took up an offer of support from Pope Clement XI and moved his household to Rome. Charles Edward grew up believing that his God-given destiny was to restore his family to the throne. In 1743 his father named him ‘Prince Regent’ and with the title went the right to speak and act in his father’s name. The march to the new rebellion was well and truly under way.

Robert Burns’ paternal grandfather, after whom Robert had been named, had been a gardener in the household of Earl Marischal Keith at Inverugie Castle in Aberdeenshire. The Earl supported Charles Edward’s father’s attempt to retake the throne in 1715. As a consequence of this support, Keith suffered badly in the aftermath. Robert Burns later wrote:

Given that in the year of 1759 when Robert Burns was born, Charles Edward Stuart was still plotting to restore his family to the British throne shows that even after their cause ended in disastrous defeat, to claim any kind of loyalty to the Jacobites was a very dangerous thing to do. Charles spoke to the French government who were planning an invasion of England and had hoped to count on Jacobite support. The planned invasion never came close to reality but the threat lingered on.

So come, one and all, and hear the tales of war, of battle, of exile and of death. Our first song, which we will look at in our next part, tells of the story of a battle and a successful one at that for Charles Edward. Ladies and gentlemen our first song by Robert Burns on our Jacobite journey is ‘Johnie Cope.’