Robert Burns Junior

Marriage and retirement Aged 22, Robert Burns Junior married Anne Sherwood on 24 March 1809 at St Marylebone Parish Church. The couple had a daughter, Eliza. Her uncle James Glencairn Burns took her to India, where she married Dr Bartholomew Everitt of the East India Company at Bangalore and had a daughter, Martha Burns Everitt.

Education and career Robert, like his brothers James Glencairn and William Nicol, was educated at Dumfries Grammar School, thanks in his case to financial assistance from Alexander John Riddell, brother of Robert Riddell of Friars Carse. Aged 16 in 1802 he was able to enrol and study logic and rhetoric for two years at Glasgow University under Professor George Jardin thanks to funds from the Duchess Anne Mortification, Shaw was a nephew of Robert's uncle, Gilbert Burns, through his wife Jean Breckenridge.

Robert added to his income by teaching mathematics and classics whilst living in London and in Dumfries. Robert Junior, however, was not 'cured' of his addiction and by 20 July 1832 his superiors became aware of the situation and he was prematurely retired. Gilbert had written to Jean Armour Burns's lawyer in 1820, saying, "Mrs Burns informed me some time ago that her son Robert had been very imprudently engaged in some speculations (the nature of which I am not informed of) which had brought him into embarrassed circumstances, and that she had from time to time sent him supplies of money as she could spare."

Memorial events

On 6 August 1844, a "Burns Festival" attended by around 80,000 people took place at Ayr and the Burns Monument at Alloway; with William Nicol, James Glencairn and Robert Burns Junior in attendance, the three surviving sons of the poet, together with their aunt Isabella Burns. They sadly refused to meet Robert, their nephew, their father's natural grandson by Elizabeth "Betty" Burns, at the festival.

"Betty" Burns herself was also excluded from the 1844 festival and, as stated, her son Robert Thomson was rejected upon trying to greet his father's sons, his uncles, at the Ayr Festival.