Gender, Genre and the Imagining of the Scottish Nation: the Songs of Lady Nairne 

By Leith Davis

Critical Essay

In "Dunottar Castle," Lady Nairne relates the story of the rescue of the Scottish regalia during the invasion of Cromwell. The crown, the sceptre and the sword had been entrusted to the care of Earl Marischal, who had deposited them in his castle of Dunottar under the guard of George Ogilvy of Barras. The song describes the weakening of Ogilvie's troops under siege by the English:

Strong to the stronger aye maun yield,
The rebels ruled the nation,
Brave Ogilvie and a' his men,
They could na keep their station.[1]

But although Ogilvie's men falter, his wife manages to save Scotland's national treasures and, by implication, its national honour, through a clever trick:

His Leddy wi' a manly heart,
She tuik it a' upon her,
To save from skaith her captain dear,
And eke her country's honour. (244)

She wraps the three items in a sack of lint which she then gives to a maid to deliver as a present for the local clergyman. The maid, a "simple lass," is able to leave the besieged castle freely "through the courtesy of the commander of the besieging army," according to Nairne's editor, Charles Rogers (296). The regalia are hidden beneath the pulpit of the church, and Ogilvie is later able to "[give] back his trust" to Earl Marischal (245). Nairne's poem might seem to promote the important role of women in the project of imagining the community;[2] it suggests that while men are unable to use physical force keep the regalia safe from foreign invasion, a woman's cunning saves the day. But there is an important consideration here: the women in the poem demonstrate proper feminine behaviour and virtue, including modesty. The wife, even though she is described as possessing a "manly heart," performs her task "a' unkend [unknown] to Ogilvie" (244). Indeed it is never indicated that he understands that she engineered the scheme. At the end of the song, it is Ogilvie who claims credit for the preservation of the regalia; neither Ogilvie's wife's nor the maid's name is mentioned. The song reinforces the gendered construction of the nation.[3] Although the women have clearly played an important part in the preservation of their "country's honour," their ability to play that part is presented as dependent on the acknowledgement of women's separate sphere; the maid is only able to pass the enemy line because of a convention of granting "courtesy" to women precisely because they do not participate in warfare. In turn, the women must uphold the doctrine of the separate spheres which relegates them to private space; public acknowledgement of the return of the regalia is limited to men. The song suggests that women's role in imagining the community must go undetected for it to be effective. Ultimately in "Dunottar Castle," the women's intervention is hidden within the genre of the marching song: the song opens and closes with addresses to "sir" and "man."

Lady Nairne created a role for herself similar to that of the women in "Dunottar Castle." But in her case, the battle to preserve "her country's honour" took place not over the Scottish regalia, but over the Scottish ballad and song tradition. Her writing and collecting of songs, her patriotic "bounden duty," encouraged the participation of women in the imagining of the nation, but it also limited the form in which that participation could manifest itself. Nairne wrote some seventy songs which she contributed The Scottish Minstrel, a six-volume collection published in 1824 edited by Robert Archibald Smith. Many of Nairne's songs demonstrate a concern not just to perpetuate the ballad and song tradition of Scotland, but to inscribe into that tradition a notion of feminine propriety. She objected, for example, to the inclusion of Burns' "Willie Brew'd a Peck o' Maut" in the Scottish Minstrel, noting: "If Mr. Purdie will in some way obliterate that drinking song of Burns', the work will do credit to all parties" (Rogers 48). Like the women in "Dunottar Castle," Nairne also refused to claim credit for her activities. All of Nairne's songs in the collection were published anonymously. She used the pseudonym "Mrs. Bogan of Bogan" when corresponding directly with Robert Purdie, the publisher. In addition, her contributions to the publication were communicated through a committee of ladies to Purdie and signed "B.B." or "S.M." (for "Scottish Minstrel") or simply left unsigned. In a letter to one of the few friends who knew of her song-writing she indicates her desire to conceal not just her name but also her gender: "If, by any chance . . . Purdie were to be asked, 'Who is B.B.?' I think he would do well for himself, as well as others, to make no mention of a lady" (Rogers 44). She goes on to discuss her sense of the gender hierarchy operative at the time: "still the balance is in favour of the 'Lords of Creation'" (Rogers 44), and she suggests how she herself upholds this hierarchy: "I cannot help, in some degree, undervaluing beforehand what is said to be a feminine production" (Rogers 44). If, as her contemporary William Motherwell put it in his 1827 collection, Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern, the preservation of Scottish ballads was a "bounden duty on all true and patriotic Scotsmen" (iv, my emphasis), Lady Nairne did indeed exhibit a "manly heart." However, like the women in "Dunottar Castle," she expressed that "manly heart" in a "womanly" fashion, participating in the national enterprise, but modestly concealing her part in it. Like Ogilvie's wife, she hid her national exploits even from her husband: "I have not even told Nairne, lest he blab," she wrote in a letter to her confidante (Rogers 41).

Susan Stewart has identified the ballad as a transgressive genre which both defines and confounds the boundaries between oral and written, popular and elite, authentic and inauthentic traditions (102-131). As both Stewart and Katie Trumpener suggest, the eighteenth-century ballad and song revival also provided a means by which the peripheral nations of Britain--Ireland, Wales and Scotland--could transgress against the hegemony of a London-dominated Britain and assert their national identity. Allan Ramsay's The Tea-table Miscellany (1724-37) was one of the first collections of Scottish song. In the introduction to that work Ramsay suggests that the song tradition has promoted Scottishness not only in Britain but in other nations as well: "Scots tunes . . have an agreeable gaiety and natural sweetness, that make them acceptable wherever they are known, not only among ourselves, but in other countries" (1: vii). He also claims a distinct pedigree for Scottish songs that increases their importance: "What further adds to the esteem we have for them, is their antiquity, and their being universally known" (1: vii). Finally, he suggests that the songs work to counteract the "fine flourishes of new music imported from Italy and elsewhere" (1: vii-viii). For Ramsay, the Scottish songs and ballads offer an important assertion of native identity. Writing in the latter part of the century, Robert Burns further capitalized on the transgressive nature of ballads and of the Scottish song tradition in order to subvert the expectations of the English literary market on which he was dependent. In his "Epistle to Lapraik," for instance, he contrasts the song tradition of labouring-class Scotland with British literary high culture, juxtaposing the "sang about" at which he hears the piece by Lapraik and his own efforts at "jingling" or "mak[ing] a sang" with the "jargon" and "Grammar" of English poetry.[4]

Like the ballad and song collectors and writers before her, Lady Nairne participated in an assertion of Scottish identity. Virtually all of her songs are written in Scottish dialect, albeit one which is fairly easily intelligible to the reader of standard English. Many of her songs recall those from Allan Ramsay's Scots ballad opera The Gentle Shepherd (1725) in their alignment of Scottish identity with a pastoral world peopled by stock characters. In Nairne's "Huntingtower," for example, Jamie urges his sweetheart to appreciate the beauty of rural Scotland:

The hills are grand and hie, Jeanie,
The burnies rinnin' clear, lassie,
'Mang birks and braes, where the wild deer strays,
Oh cum wi' me and see, lassie. (178)

"Saw Ye Nae My Peggy," too, stages the lovers in a rural setting:

'Twas but at the dawin',
Clear the cock was crawin'
I saw Peggy ca' in
Hawky by the brier,
Early bells were ringing,
Blythest birds were singing,
Sweetest flowers were springing,
A' her heart to cheer. (194)

The idealism of Ramsay's pastoral world depended on the existence of a hierarchy in which those of "gentle" birth set an example for the lower classes. Nairne also suggests such a hierarchy in poems like "The Auld House," which extols the virtues of "the auld laird,/Sae canty [cheerful], kind and crouse [brisk]" (182), but she is also often critical of the class to which she belongs. Although her labouring-class characters lack the realism of those in Burns' work, Nairne is often more similar to Burns than to Ramsay in her depiction of upper class characters. Nairne's "The County Meeting," for example, recalls Burns' satirical depiction of human foibles in such poems as "The Holy Fair":

There's the Major, and his sister, too,
He in the bottle-green, she in the blue;
(Some years sin' syne that gown was new,
At our County Meeting).
They are a worthy, canty pair,
An' unco proud o' their nephew Blair;
O' sense, or siller, he's nae great share,
Though he's the King o' the Meeting. (168)

"The Fife Laird" calls attention to the laird's foolishness:

Ye shouldna ca' the Laird daft, though daft like he may be;
Ye shouldna ca' the Laird daft, he's just as wise as me;
Ye shouldna ca' the Laird daft, his bannet has a bee,--
He's just a wee bit Fifish, like some Fife Lairds that be. (172).

And "Jamie the Laird" criticizes the physical as well as on the mental shortcomings of the laird:

His legs they are bow'd, his e'en they do glee,
His wig, whiles it's aff, an' when on, it's ajee;
He's braid as he's lang,--an' ill-faur'd is he,
A dafter like body I never did see. (174)

"The Laird o' Cockpen" also comments on class relations, but this song also indicates the limits of Nairne's critique. In Burns' rendition of the traditional song on which "The Laird of Cockpen" was based, "When she cam ben she bobbed," a "Collier-lassie" kisses Cockpen (496). The exact relationship between Cockpen and the "Collier-lassie" is left vague; his behaviour is described as "right saucy," although he is also described as "leaving the dochter of a lord" for the Collier lassie's sake (496). But Burns moves beyond a depiction of aristocratic sexual dallying with members of the lower class. In keeping with the democratic sentiment found in other poems of his such as "A Man's A Man," Burns' version of "The Laird o' Cockpen" suggests an essential equality between people of different classes:

O never look down, my lassie at a',
O never look down, my lassie at a',
Thy lips are as sweet and thy figure compleat,
As the finest dame in castle or ha'. (496)

Burns presents a transgressive image of class miscegenation coupled with an equally transgressive democratic politics. (Notably, however, whereas "A Man's A Man" measured that equality in terms of character of the man, Burns' "When she cam ben she bobbed" deflates the ideal somewhat by employing the criterion of attractiveness for the woman). Nairne, however, doesn't go as far as Burns in her critique of class relations. Although the woman in Nairne's version is poor, she is of decent birth, as she is described as: "a lady . . . A penniless lass wi' a lang pedigree" (170). Moreover, in Nairne's version of the song, the relationship between Cockpen and the woman is legitimized. Cockpen comes calling in order to ask for the woman's hand in marriage:

The laird o' Cockpen, he's proud and he's great,
His mind is ta'en up wi' things o' the State;
He wanted a wife, his braw house to keep,
But favour wi' wooin' was fashious to seek.

Although the woman, "McClish's ae daughter o' Clavers-ha' Lee," initially turns him down, she later realizes her mistake and accepts him after all:

Next time that the laird and the lady were seen,
They were gaun arm-in-arm to the kirk on the green. (171)

The limits of class miscegenation, however minimal, are suggested by the fact that the couple have no progeny: "But as yet there's nae chickens appear'd at Cockpen" (171). Nairne may be critical of the gentry at times, but she nevertheless supports the boundaries between the classes.

"The Laird o' Cockpen" points out another important aspect of Nairne's project. The ballad's subversive apparatus often included the transgression of gender roles.[5] Capitalizing on this tradition, Burns' version of "The Laird o' Cockpen," for example, relies in part for its effect on the "Collier-lassie" making the initial move by kissing Cockpen, transgressing both class and gender boundaries. Nairne, however, was concerned to reassert female propriety within the genre of Scottish song. Mistress Jean never steps over the limits of her female sex. In addition, Nairne alters the original lyrics to emphasize male respect for women. When Jean comes into the room, the Laird is the one who "bobs": "An' when she cam' ben he bowed fu' low" (171). This concern for female propriety can be seen as early as Nairne's first song, "The Pleughman," composed in 1793. Robert Burns' rendition of "The Ploughman" is presented from the perspective of the female partner of the ploughman, who is constantly emphasizing her own sexual attraction to her man. Burns' narrator notes: "The bonniest sight that e'er I saw/Was th' Ploughman laddie dancin" and "O but he was handsome" (315). Burns emphasizes the physicality of the Ploughman, describing him as "aften wat and weary" (314). In response, the narrator urges him to change his clothes "And gae to bed, my Dearie" (314). And Burns' version includes an innuendo which also draws attention to the sexual relationship between the female narrator and the ploughman, as she asserts: "I never gat my Coggie fou/Till I met wi' the Ploughman" (314), playing on the double entendre of "coggie" as "drinking vessel" and "womb." Nairne's version, however, eliminates both the familiar and the sexual relationship between the ploughman and the woman by presenting the song in the third person. Nairne emphasizes maternal instead of sexual love: "His mother's blessin's on his head,/That tents her weel, the pleughman" (179). Unlike Burns', Nairne's version never mentions the ploughman's physical appearance, but instead remarks on his skill and cheerful disposition. Nairne presents a pastoral celebration of rural life that glosses over both physical hardship and physical pleasure:

All fresh and gay, at dawn of day,
Their labours they renew, man;
Heaven bless the seed and bless the soil,
And Heaven bless the pleughman. (180)

A number of other songs by Nairne perform a similar cleansing of sexually explicit or implicit material, paying particular attention to correcting representations of female desire. In Burns' rendition of "There grows a bonnie Brier Bush," the two lovers, Nancy and Sandy, seek out a private location, presumably where they can engage in sexual activity: "We'll awa to Athole's green, and there we'll no be seen" (692). Burns also presents Nancy going to Edinburgh in search of another lover during Sandy's absence:

What will I do for a lad, when Sandy gangs awa?
I will awa to Edinburgh, and win a pennie fee,
And see an onie bonie lad will fancy me . . . (692)

Nairne eliminates what Rogers refers to as the "doubtful sentiments" (296) in Burns' version, in particular Nancy's sexual appetite, turning the song instead into an affirmation of the male lover's fidelity:

"I ne'er lo'ed a dance but on Atholl's green,
I ne'er lo'ed a lassie but my dorty Jean,
Sair, sair against my will did I bide sae lang awa',
And my heart was aye in Atholl's green at Carlisle ha'." (240)

Nairne also revises "Down the Burn, Davie." The original song by Robert Crawford was, according to Rogers, "licentious in nature" (294). Burns removed some of the questionable material, but Nairne went even further. Burns' version presents the woman declaring her intention to follow her lover: "Love, I like the burn,/And ay shall follow you" (563). In Nairne's version, the male lover is the one to make such a proposition: "'Gang down the burn,' cries Davie, blythe,/'And I will follow thee'" (233).

A number of songs that Nairne either writes or rewrites are Jacobite in nature. Her father had named her Caroline after King Charles, and her family had been deeply involved in the Jacobite cause. A number of her songs were written in order to please her uncle, the Lord of Strowan. Yet as Rogers suggests, the material she had to work with, the "anonymous minstrel literature of the two last Scottish rebellions," while "not lacking in melodramatic force," consisted of "numerous phrases" which testified "that the bards were vindictive and coarse" (139). "The Jacobite songs of Lady Nairne," he goes on, "breathe the loyal fervour of a warm-hearted people, awake a compassionate sympathy for the ill-starred adventurer, and excite to valour and patriotism" (139). But in sanitizing these songs, removing the traces of their "coarseness,' Nairne also goes a way towards incorporating the Jacobite cause within the larger structures of British society. Murray Pittock describes the effect of the Jacobite songs of Nairne's contemporaries, Burns and James Hogg: "If Burns made Jacobite language the contemporary of the radical cause, James Hogg cultivated it as a revelation of the primitive, a disrespectable and forceful survivor of a past ardently present in the identity and sufferings of Scotland" (224). I suggest that Nairne defuses the radical element of Jacobite language by overlaying the songs with her own image of feminine propriety. A number of Jacobite songs fall into a category which Pittock describes as "erotic." They depict "the absent king as lover" (5), often from the perspective of the beloved. As William Donaldson suggests, "it is notable how many later Jacobite songs do have a female narrator" (66). Burns' version of "Charlie he's my darling" foregrounds the element of female desire found in many such songs, reinforcing the political transgression by combining it with a depiction of transgressive female behaviour. In Rogers' words, Burns' version "partakes of the levity of the older ballads" (291). As he is walking up the street, Prince Charles "spie[s] a bonie lass" looking at him through the window (667). He bounds up the stairs to reach her, and Burns suggests that she is equally if not more desirous to meet him: "And wha sae ready as hersel/To let the laddie in" (667). In addition, Charles' seductive effect on the woman is presented in terms which emphasizes her sexual appetite: "For brawlie weel he ken'd the way/To please a bonie lass" (667). The chorus, "An' Charlie he's my darling, my darling, my darling," further reinforces the woman's perspective and agency in the encounter.

Many of Nairne's Jacobite songs, like "The Hundred Pipers" and "The Gathering Song," fall into another of Pittock's categories: "the aggressive/active song, calling for war or opposition to the Whig state" (5). When she writes or rewrites songs that recall the "erotic" category, she revises them to eliminate sexually explicit material. Nairne's version of "Charlie is My Darling," for example, retains the chorus but replaces the sexual attraction between Prince Charles and the individual woman with a more general attraction that the troops have for the townfolk:

As he came marching up the street,
The pipes played loud and clear,
And a' the folk came running out
To meet the Chevalier. (203)

Burns' version ends with a suggestion that all the Jacobite soldiers are as dangerously attractive as Charles:

Its [sic] up yon hethery [sic] mountain,
And down yon scroggy glen,
We daur na gang a milking,
For Charlie and his men. (667)

Nairne, however, depicts the soldiers as faithful husbands and fathers:

They've left their bonnie Hieland hills,
Their wives and bairnies dear,
To draw the sword for Scotland's lord,
The young Chevalier. (204)

Moreover, in songs such as "Will ye no come back again," Nairne transforms eroticism into general nostalgia for the Jacobite cause. "Will ye no come back again?" addresses the exile of Prince Charles: "Bonnie Charlie's now awa',/Safely owre the friendly main" (209). Eroticism is avoided, however, by an emphasis on national rather than individual longing. Instead of focussing on a lover's reaction, the song commends the Scottish people's loyalty, suggesting the way that "English bribes" could not persuade any Scot to betray the rightful king. The song concludes with a focus on nature as a continual reminder of the exile:

Sweet's the laverock's note and lang,
Lilting wildly up the glen;
But aye to me he sings ae song,--
Will ye no come back again? (210)

The question, repeated three times in the chorus, focuses attention on the loss rather than on a probable return.