Rabbie’s love-hate relationship with Scotland’s lawyers

It was one of many friendships the poet had with lawyers, reflecting the prominent role of ‘writers’ as they were known in the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment in Edinburgh.

As a radical, Burns keenly followed the political battle within the Faculty of Advocates; was a supporter of the Whig Henry Erskine and was disappointed when he failed to be re-elected as Dean over his opposition to the war with France.

He was an admirer of Thomas Muir, the radical advocate who was transported for sedition, prompting Burns to anonymously pen Scots Wha Hae in protest.

He was friendly too with Tory lawyers and benefited from their patronage.

His cousin James was a solicitor in Montrose and his friend and landlord - fellow Freemason Gavin Hamilton, an Ayrshire lawyer, was instrumental in securing the successful publication of the Kilmarnock edition of the Bard’s poems.

But Burns’ chaotic love life – fathering 12 children to four different women – and his equally chaotic financial affairs meant he was no stranger to being on the receiving end of writs and lawyers’ letters.

This led to some of his more trenchant views on lawyers.

Commenting on his father’s sequestration after losing a legal battle with his landlord, Burns lamented that his assets had all gone to “the Hell-hounds that growl in the kennels of justice.”

Among the horrors confronted by Tam O’Shanter are “Three lawyers’ tongues, turn’d inside out, Wi lies seam’d like a beggar’s clout.”

In The Jolly Beggars, Burns protests at how the law protected the interests of the land-owning classes: “A fig for those by law protected! LIBERTY’s a glorious feast! Courts for cowards were erected, Churches built to please the priest!”

But when pirate copies of Burns’ poems began to flood the market it was to a lawyer that he turned. Just like the great Scottish public of today, Burns had a love-hate relationship with lawyers.