The De'il cam fiddling thro' the town,
And danced awa wi' the Exciseman;
And ilka wife cried, ‘Auld Mahoun,
We wish you luck o' your prize, man.’
We'll mak our maut, and brew our drink,
We'll dance, and sing, and rejoice, man;
And mony thanks to the muckle black De'il
That danced awa wi' the Exciseman.
There's threesome reels, and foursome reels,
There's hornpipes and strathspeys, man;
But the ae best dance e'er came to our Ian',
Was-the De'il's awa' wi' the Exciseman.
(Robert Burns, The De'il's awa' wi' the Exciseman, 1792)
In 1823 the English government introduced a new Act reducing the outrageous excise tax to levels that made it possible for enterprising Scots to come out of hiding and legally produce and sell their beloved whisky. (Bottle of Glenlivet malt whisky, 1990)
In late December 1783, a desperate king took a seemingly desperate political step. With all of his other options exhausted, George III asked William Pitt, then only twenty-four years old, to form a government. In recognition of both the king's remarkable choice and the time of year, Pitt's critics, eagerly expecting the new administration to be short-lived, dubbed it the “mincepie administration.” The critics were of course wrong; Pitt survived not only that Christmas season but another twenty in office. Yet they had reason to be skeptical. For one of the “presents” delivered to the young chancellor of the Exchequer that first Christmas Eve was the preliminary report of a parliamentary committee, appointed under Lord Shelburne, “to enquire into the illicit practices used in defrauding the revenue.”