The Life Of Robert Burns

Last Years

Some think that Burns always lived in poverty, but as a Gentleman of the Excise he had employed farm labourers to handle the sickle and plough. Had he lived, he might well have risen to a life of comparative leisure with the impressive salary of £1000 a year, and he knew it. What he could not know was that, at the age of thirty-two, he was already a dying man.

Burns and his family lived in Banks Street in May Burns moved to larger accommodation in what is now named Burns Street, this was to be his final home and exists until today as a museum, preserved almost exactly as it was then. By 1794 his illness was beginning to show in February he wrote: 'For these two months I have not been able to lift a pen. My constitution and frame were, ab origine, blasted with a deep taint of hypochondria, which poisons my existence.' To add to the problems of his own health, there were those of his little daughter Elizabeth, whose young life was already fading to its close.

By spring he managed to take a six-day tour in the company of John Syme, they spent three days at Kenmure Castle. This was the last spring Burns was to have.

That Winter Burns began to display an anxiety neurosis about money that was to accompany him to the grave. But since his assets greatly exceeded his debts at his death, it is hard to resist a suspicion that his financial worries were at least partly symptoms of manic depression.

Burns would have been kinder to himself in his last years of life if he had taken to his bed: he might also have lived longer had he given himself the rest that his tired heart needed. But instead he fought his disease. Continuing to write songs and letters right into his last months. His end came quicker thanks to a course of treatment prescribed to him be his friend Dr. William Maxwell who mis-diagnosed him with 'flying gout'. Burns was advised to bathe in frigid seawater and undergo energetic horseback riding. Burns was too weak to mount a horse so forego this part of the treatment. Unfortunately it wasn't until a few years after Burns's death that the stethoscope was invented and his heart disease could have been diagnosed. His pain and wretchedness seeped into his letters. In January 1796 he wrote to Mrs Dunlop of little Elizabeth's death: 'The Autumn robbed me of my only daughter & darling child ... I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock when [I] became myself the victim of a most severe Rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful; until after many weeks of a sick-bed it seems to have turned up more life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room, and once indeed have been before my own door in the street.'

On 3 July he dragged himself the nine miles to Brow Well, where he drank the water, and waded daily chest-deep in the muddy sea. Here he wrote his last letter to Mrs Dunlop: 'Madam, I have written you so often without receiving any answer, that I would not trouble you again but for the circumstances in which I am. An illness which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveler returns. Your friendship with which for many years you honoured me was a friendship dearest to my soul. Your conversation and especially your correspondence were at once highly entertaining and instructive. With what pleasure did I use to break up the seal! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpitating heart. Farewell!!!'

His farewell letter to his brother contained his financial worries: 'I have been a week at sea-bathing, and I will continue there or in a friend's house in the country all the summer. God help my wife and children, if I am taken from their head! They will be poor indeed. I have contracted one or two serious debts, partly from my illness these many months and partly from too much thoughtlessness as to expense when I came to town that will cut in too much on the little I leave them in your hands. Remember me to my Mother.'

On 7th June marked his final meeting with Maria Riddell, she had sent a carriage for him, and as he stumbled out of it he questioned: 'Well Madam, and have you any commands for the next world?' He remained a magnificent actor to the last. When Burns returned home on the 18th his wife was appalled by his condition. To her father he wrote what was to be his last letter: 'Do, for Heaven's sake, send Mrs Armour here immediately. My wife is hourly expecting to be put to bed. Good God! what a situation for her to be in, poor girl, without a friend! I returned from sea-bathing quarters today, and my medical friends would almost persuade me that I am better; but I think and feel that my strength is so far gone that the disorder will prove fatal to me.' What his medical friends could not know was that he was dying of a leaking valve in his heart. Mercifully he soon went into a coma, and was dead in three days.

Robert Burns died on the morning of 21 July 1796. The bard's corpse was carried in its coffin from his home to council Chambers, where it lay in state while John Syme organised the funeral ceremony with the Colonel of the Royal Dumfries Volunteers. The Cinque Port Cavalry and the Angus Fencibles were in town, who lined the route with comrades in uniforms, badges of mourning on their sleeves. While the burial service was taking place in the north-east corner of St Michael's churchyard, Jean Burns gave birth to her ninth and last child.

A fund was put in place to give Jean and her family financial security for the rest of their lives. It was pledged that a biography of the bard should be written without delay, its profits to be devoted to her further support. Dr James Currie accepted this responsibility without payment.

Burn's remains were removed from their original resting place and put in a vault of a costly mausoleum.