1 THERE will be many toasts made in honour of Robert Burns tonight as the world celebrates his life and work. Let’s also raise a glass to Agnes, or Nancy, McLehose, the Glasgow woman who was the love of his life, and to whom one of his most famous love songs is dedicated.
2 When a 1791 handwritten manuscript of Ae Fond Kiss (normally held at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh) went on display in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall for just two hours, hundreds of people turned up to see it. Burns wrote it as his great love, Agnes, prepared to depart these shores for Jamaica to try to patch things up with her estranged husband. ‘Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; Ae fareweel, and then forever…”
3 Born Agnes Craig on the Saltmarket in the late 1750s, her father was a Glasgow surgeon and her mother a minister’s daughter. She met James McLehose, or Maclehose, on a journey to Edinburgh and legend has it her beauty so entranced the young lawyer that he booked all the other seats on the coach to be alone with her for the full ten hours. Despite the romantic beginning, their marriage – during which they had four children together - was unhappy and they separated in 1780.
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4 Agnes moved to Edinburgh after the break-up of her marriage and became a poet. She met Robert Burns in December 1787 and they embarked upon a passionate relationship, writing to each other as Clarinda and Sylvander. Burns is said to have written many of the love letters he sent to Agnes in Glasgow’s Black Bull Inn.
5 On arriving in Jamaica, James did not meet Agnes and she discovered he had replaced her with a mistress. She came back to Scotland, moving to Edinburgh in 1810. She was careful to retain ownership of the Burns letters, and they were only published after her death, by her grandson. She died in October 1841.
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