On the Fifth of November, 1788, Burns attended a special service of thanksgiving held at Dunscore Kirk to celebrate the centenary of the Revolution. The Rev. Mr. Kirkpatrick’s remarks about ‘the bloody and tyrannical House of Stuart’ sent the poet home to write an open letter to his friend David Ramsay, editor of the Edinburgh _Evening Courant_, in which he mingled unveiled satire with a sense of historical perspective hardly to be looked for in an ‘unlettered ploughman’. He went to church, he said, to give thanks for ‘the consequent blessings of the Glorious Revolution. To that auspicious event we owe no less than our liberties religious and civil--to it we are likewise indebted for the present Royal Family, the ruling features of whose administration have ever been, mildness to the subject, and tenderness of his rights.’ But, he continues, cannot we give thanks for our present blessings ‘without, at the same time, cursing a few ruined powerless exiles, who only harboured ideas, and made attempts, that most of us would have done, had we been in their situation?’ ‘Were the royal contemporaries of the Stuarts more mildly attentive to the rights of man? Might not the epithets of “bloody and tyrannical” be with at least equal justice, applied to the house of Tudor, of York, or any other of their predecessors?’ In short, the Stuarts were only fighting for prerogatives which former monarchs of England and contemporary monarchs of France enjoyed unchallenged, and the poet disclaims ability to determine whether their overthrow ‘was owing to the wisdom of leading individuals, or to the justling of party.’ And then comes the sting: ‘Man, Mr. Printer, is a strange, weak inconsistent being.--Who would believe, Sir, that in this our Augustan age of liberality and refinement, ... a certain people, under our national protection, should complain, not against a Monarch and a few favourite advisers, but against our whole legislative body, of the very same imposition and oppression, the Romish religion not excepted, and almost in the very same terms as our forefathers did against the family of Stuart! I will not, I cannot, enter into the merits of the cause; but I dare say, the American Congress, in 1776, will be allowed to have been as able and enlightened, and, a whole empire will say, as honest, as the English Convention in 1688; and that the fourth of July will be as sacred to their posterity as the fifth of November is to us.’