Dumfriesshire
On his return from Edinburgh in February 1788, he resumed his relationship with Jean Armour and they married in March 1788. He took out a lease on Ellisland Farm, Dumfriesshire, settling there in June. He also took up a training position as an exciseman or gauger, which involved long rides and detailed bookkeeping. He was appointed to duties in Customs and Excise in 1789. Burns chose the land of Ellisland a few miles north of the town of Dumfries, from Patrick Miller's estate at Dalswinton, where he had a new farmhouse and byre built. He and Jean moved in the following summer 1789 to the new farmhouse at Ellisland.
In November 1790, he had written his masterpiece, the narrative poem "Tam O' Shanter". (The Ellisland farm, beside the river Nith, now holds a unique collection of Burns's books, artifacts, and manuscripts. It is mostly preserved as when Burns and his young family lived there.) Burns gave up the farm in 1791 to move to Dumfries.
About this time he was offered and declined an appointment in London on the staff of The Star newspaper, and refused to become a candidate for a newly created Chair of Agriculture in the University of Edinburgh, although influential friends offered to support his claims. He did however accept membership of the Royal Company of Archers in 1792.
After giving up his farm, he removed to Dumfries. It was at this time that, being requested to write lyrics for The Melodies of Scotland, he responded by contributing over 100 songs. He made major contributions to George Thomson's A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice as well as to James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum. Arguably his claim to immortality chiefly rests on these volumes, which placed him in the front rank of lyric poets. As a songwriter he provided his own lyrics, sometimes adapted from traditional words. He put words to Scottish folk melodies and airs which he collected, and composed his own arrangements of the music including modifying tunes or recreating melodies on the basis of fragments. In letters he explained that he preferred simplicity, relating songs to spoken language which should be sung in traditional ways. The original instruments would be fiddle and the guitar of the period which was akin to a cittern, but the transcription of songs for piano has resulted in them usually being performed in classical concert or music hall styles. At the 3 week Celtic Connections festival Glasgow each January, Burns songs are often performed with both fiddle and guitar.
Thomson as a publisher commissioned arrangements of "Scottish, Welsh and Irish Airs" by such eminent composers of the day as Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven, with new lyrics. The contributors of lyrics included Burns. While such arrangements had wide popular appeal, Beethoven's music was more advanced and difficult to play than Thomson intended.
Burns described how he had to master singing the tune before he composed the words:
My way is: I consider the poetic sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression, then chuse my theme, begin one stanza, when that is composed—which is generally the most difficult part of the business—I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom, humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. when I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper, swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my elbow chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my, pen goes.
Burns also worked to collect and preserve Scottish folk songs, sometimes revising, expanding, and adapting them. One of the better known of these collections is The Merry Muses of Caledonia (the title is not Burns's), a collection of bawdy lyrics that were popular in the music halls of Scotland as late as the 20th century. At Dumfries, he wrote his world famous song "A Man's a Man for A' That", which was based on the writings in The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, one of the chief political theoreticians of the American Revolution. Burns sent the poem anonymously in 1795 to the Glasgow Magazine. He was also a radical for reform and wrote poems for democracy, such as – "Parcel of Rogues to the Nation" and the "Rights of Women".
Many of Burns's most famous poems are songs with the music based upon older traditional songs. For example, "Auld Lang Syne" is set to the traditional tune "Can Ye Labour Lea", "A Red, Red Rose" is set to the tune of "Major Graham" and "The Battle of Sherramuir" is set to the "Cameronian Rant".
Burns alienated some acquaintances by freely expressing sympathy with the American and French Revolutions along with British advocates of democratic reform and universal suffrage such as the Society of the Friends of the People, which advocated parliamentary reform. Burns met other radicals at the Globe Inn in Dumfries. His political views came to the notice of his employers, to which he pleaded his innocence. As the British establishment was hostile to radicalism, Burns felt the need to demonstrate his loyalty to the Crown in order to safeguard his career as an exciseman. To this end, he enlisted in the British Volunteer Corps's Royal Dumfries Volunteers at the rank of private on 28 March 1795.
Burns joined the unit's second company, which had been formed on 21 March; all its members provided their own uniforms and agreed to serve without pay, although they were limited to serving in a five mile radius around Dumfries. In April Burns wrote a song titled Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat?, which expressed both British nationalist sentiments and Burns' egalitarian views; his military service did not stop him from writing revolutionary poems and letters anonymously. Burns took his military service seriously, consistently attending the unit's training sessions, which were typically around two hours twice a week, and was never fined for absenteeism, drunkenness or insolence unlike many of his fellow soldiers. He also served on the unit's supply committee from August to October 1795.
Latterly Burns lived in Dumfries in a two-storey red sandstone house on Mill Hole Brae, now Burns Street. The home is now a museum. He went on long journeys on horseback, often in harsh weather conditions as an Excise Supervisor, and was kept very busy doing reports. The father of four young children, he was also frequently occupied as a song collector and songwriter. As his health began to give way, he aged prematurely and fell into fits of despondency.
Rumours of intemperance (alleged mainly by temperance activist James Currie) may have been overstated. Hard manual farm labour earlier in his life may have damaged Burns's health.
Burns possibly had a long-standing rheumatic heart condition, perhaps beginning when he was 21, and a bacterial infection, possibly arising from a tooth abscess, may have exacerbated this.
On the morning of 21 July 1796, Burns died in Dumfries at the age of 37. The funeral took place on 25 July, the day that his son Maxwell was born. As Burns was a soldier he received a military burial, which included having his Volunteer Corps uniform and sword being placed on his coffin, which was carried by Burns' comrades in the Royal Dumfries Volunteers. The Cinque Ports Light Dragoons and Angusshire Fencibles were also present at the funeral, with the former's military band playing the "Dead March" from George Frideric Handel's Saul. The Royal Dumfries Volunteers fired three volleys over his coffin before it was deposited into a graveyard in the far corner of St. Michael's Churchyard in Dumfries. A simple "slab of freestone" was erected as his gravestone by Jean Armour, which some felt insulting to his memory. His body was eventually moved to its final location in the same cemetery, the Burns Mausoleum, in September 1817. The body of his widow Jean Armour was buried with his in 1834.
Armour had taken steps to secure his personal property, partly by liquidating two promissory notes amounting to £15 (about £1,100 at 2009 prices). The family went to the Court of Session in 1798 with a plan to support his surviving children by publishing a four-volume edition of his complete works and a biography written by James Currie. Subscriptions were raised to meet the initial cost of publication, which was in the hands of Thomas Cadell and William Davies in London and William Creech, bookseller in Edinburgh. Hogg records that fund-raising for Burns's family was embarrassingly slow, and it took several years to accumulate significant funds through the efforts of John Syme and Alexander Cunningham.
Burns was posthumously given the freedom of the town of Dumfries. Hogg records that Burns was given the freedom of the Burgh of Dumfries on 4 June 1787, 9 years before his death, and was also made an Honorary Burgess of Dumfries.
Through his five surviving children (of 12 born), Burns has over 900 living descendants as of 2019.
Armour died on 26 March 1834 and was interred into the Burns Mausoleum on 31 March 1834. The temporary reopening of the mausoleum provided an opportunity to exhume Burns' body by a local group who believed in phrenology, a pseudo-science whose practitioners believed an individual's personality could be predicted by measuring the skulls.
The night before Armour's funeral, the group was supposedly granted permission to exhume Burns's body by her brother, Robert Armour. They were led by Archibald Blacklock, a surgeon, and John McDiarmid, Dumfries Courier editor and phrenologist. Other group members included Adam Rankine, James Kerr, James Bogie, Andrew Crombie and their assistants.
The group attempted to enter the mausoleum at 7 pm, but there were many people present in the graveyard and they decided to try again later that evening. The skull was removed and taken to James Fraser, a local plasterer of Queensbury Street, Dumfries. The skull was later returned to the tomb.
A plaster cast was sent to George Combe, a Scottish lawyer and practitioner of phrenology based in Edinburgh. Combe published a report about his findings, entitled 'Phrenological development of Robert Burns. From a cast on his skull moulded at Dumfries, the 31st day of March, 1834'.
It is unknown how many casts were made by Fraser, with some sources reporting three were made. Six casts are known though some may be copies of the original cast.
Anatomical Museum, University of Edinburgh
The Hunterian, University of Glasgow
Writers' Museum, a museum in Edinburgh
Dumfries Museum
East Ayrshire Museums
National Trust for Scotland's Robert Burns Birthplace Museum
