Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!
Let us do or die!

These lines are from Robert Burns’s patriotic song “Scots Wha Hae,” written in 1793 and cast as a speech by Robert the Bruce to his troops on the eve of the Battle of Bannockburn (1314). Burns composed it during a period of heightened political tension in Britain, when the French Revolution had stirred radical hopes and provoked government repression at home. By placing revolutionary-sounding language in the mouth of a medieval Scottish king, Burns could celebrate resistance to tyranny and national self-determination under the cover of historical drama. The song quickly became one of Scotland’s best-known national airs and a staple of political and commemorative performance.

The stanza is a rallying cry that frames armed struggle as a moral contest between liberty and usurpation. “Proud usurpers” and “tyrants” are not merely enemies in battle but symbols of illegitimate power; each strike against them is imagined as a strike for freedom (“Liberty’s in every blow”). The culminating “Let us do or die!” compresses the ethos of patriotic sacrifice: action is obligatory, and death is preferable to submission. Burns’s technique—ventriloquizing Bruce—universalizes the message beyond a single historical conflict, turning Bannockburn into an emblem of collective courage and the right to resist oppression.