Jean Armour

Jean Armour married Robert Burns after bearing him twins twice, took in a child of his by another woman, and spent her thirty-eight years of widowhood managing what he had left behind. She was a stonemason's daughter in Mauchline in Ayrshire. When she became pregnant in 1786 Burns gave her a written attestation of marriage, which under Scots law was probably binding; her father destroyed it and sent her away, which is part of why Burns spent that year planning to emigrate to Jamaica and publishing the Kilmarnock volume of poems to pay for the passage. He did not go. She bore twins in 1786 and twins again in 1788, and they were formally married that year, by which point the Kilmarnock poems had made him famous in Edinburgh. She had a strong singing voice and a stock of old Scots airs, and he set words to tunes she sang him; several of the songs in the Scots Musical Museum came to him that way. She raised Elizabeth, his daughter by the servant Anna Park, alongside her own children without recorded complaint, and said of him that he should have had two wives. He died in 1796 aged thirty-seven, on the day she gave birth to their ninth child. She lived on in the house at Dumfries, received the admirers and collectors who came looking for him, and supplied a good deal of what is known about how the songs were made. She is buried beside Burns in the mausoleum at Dumfries. Their son James Glencairn Burns became an officer in India. The house at Dumfries is now a museum and much of its furniture is hers.

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