652. London’s Golden Age: The Ghosts of Culloden (Part 3)

Summary

The Rest Is History Episode 652: London’s Golden Age: The Ghosts of Culloden (Part 3) Hosted by Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook Aired: March 16, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode finds Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook tracing Samuel Johnson and James Boswell on their momentous 1773 journey through the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides, set against the ghostly aftermath of the Battle of Culloden and the political reverberations of the Act of Union. The hosts unpack the juxtaposition of romantic nostalgia for the “Old Scotland,” the harsh realities of societal change, and the shifting identities in 18th-century Britain, exploring how this legendary literary tour became a window into the final echoes of Jacobite Scotland.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Johnson and Boswell's Journey Begins

• Intro to the Journey: The duo set off from Edinburgh on August 18, 1773, embarking on what would be one of history's most celebrated travels.
• Johnson’s Perspective: Johnson, the quintessential Londoner, is characterized as an unlikely explorer, kitted out like a comic Englishman—brown suit, large coat, boots, oak stick and pistols (08:09). Boswell describes Johnson's presence as bordering on the gigantic and eccentric.
• Edinburgh’s Reaction: Johnson is met as a sensation among Edinburgh’s social elite, further establishing the cultural distinction between England, Lowland Scotland, and the remote Highlands (06:12).

2. Political Tensions: Act of Union and Jacobitism

• Act of Union 1707: Tom and Dominic discuss the continued rawness of the Anglo-Scottish union, with Johnson and Boswell bantering publicly about Scottish independence (12:22).
• Mary Queen of Scots Reference: Johnson argues, “Sir, never talk of your independency. Who could let your queen remain 20 years in captivity... such a queen too.” (12:27)
• Culloden and Jacobite Melancholy: The shadow of the failed 1745 Jacobite uprising and the romantic lost cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie loom large—fueling the mythic undercurrent of the trip (15:37).

3. Romantic Tour or Historical Inquiry?

• Route Selection: Rather than taking the direct westward path, Johnson and Boswell travel north via Inverness—mirroring Bonnie Prince Charlie’s retreat (20:20).
• A Jacobite Tour: “Do you think it is a sort of a Jacobite tour for them?... I think so, yes.” (20:28)

4. Encounters and Impressions Along the Way

• Edinburgh, St Andrews, Aberdeen: Johnson admires aspects of Lowland Scotland—the architecture, enlightenment thinkers—but laments the visible decline in places like St Andrews (22:40).
• Wildness and Romanticism: Johnson seeks the “wilderness” and “peculiar manners” absent in England, relishing Scotland’s untamed landscapes (25:30).
• Boswell’s Morbidity: Boswell’s fascination with mortality (inspecting a hanged highwayman) and his method of handling existential dread become recurring themes (27:20).

5. Banter and Friction: The Human Side

• Comic Misunderstandings: Johnson’s struggles, from horseback riding anxieties to being called a “macaroni,” provide levity but also illuminate his discomfort outside London (24:15).
• Row Over Ridicule: The pair’s relationship comes under strain when Boswell laughs at Johnson’s indignity during a pony mishap; Johnson bristles at having his dignity undermined (45:18).

6. Romance Meets Reality: Disillusionment with Clan Chiefs

• Visit to Sir Alexander MacDonald (47:43):
  • Johnson and Boswell are disappointed by the drab hospitality, lack of clan spectacle, and Lady MacDonald’s underwhelming demeanor—“This woman would sink a 90-gun ship. She is so dull and heavy.” (48:32)
  • Boswell is mortified for Scotland’s reputation; Johnson instead sees broader historical forces at play.

7. Highland Transformation & The Weight of Change

• Johnson’s Reflections: Muses on the impact of the Union and Culloden—Scotland is becoming richer, more commercial, yet the Highlands are emptied and old ways vanish:
  • “We came thither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance and a system of antiquated life.” (50:35)
  • Chiefs have become rapacious landlords; old clan society is dissolving (51:54).
• Parallels to the American Plains: The erasure of Highland traditions likened to the vanishing world of Plains Indians post-colonization (53:40).

8. Moments of Romantic Fulfilment

• Famed Encounters: Staying with Flora MacDonald—who helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape—Johnson sleeps in the Prince’s bed, to Boswell’s delight: “To see Mr. Samuel Johnson salute Ms. Flora MacDonald was a wonderful romantic scene to me.” (57:25)
• The Holy Isle of Iona: Johnson is profoundly moved by the ruins—“Man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force up plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.” (58:27)

9. Memorable Anecdotes & Quotes

• Johnson’s Kangaroo Impression: In Inverness, Johnson mimics a kangaroo to the amusement of all: “He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers... made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.” (33:32)
• On Highland Decline: “Misery is caused, for the most part, not by a heavy crush of disaster, but by the corrosion of less visible evils which canker enjoyment and undermine security.” (54:07)
• Boswell’s Self-Analysis: “The very Highland names, or the sound of a bagpipe will stir my blood and fill me with a mixture of melancholy and respect, for courage and pity, for an unfortunate and superstitious regard for antiquity, an inclination for war without thought, and, in short, with a crowd of sensations.” (43:40)

10. Conflict at Affleck and Literary Legacy

• Affleck Showdown: A climactic familial and ideological clash erupts between Johnson and Boswell’s father over the execution of Charles I—"Lord Affleck is much more impressed by the execution and says that it reminds kings that they have vertebrae in their necks." (63:33)
• The Rival Biographer: Boswell senses a threat to his “ultimate ambition”—a Johnson biography—posed by a mysterious Welsh woman. The episode ends on this tantalizing note, segueing into the next installment (65:47).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Scotland’s Remoteness:
  “...to most Lowlanders, they are as familiar with the Hebrides as they were with Borneo or Sumatra.” (04:08, Tom Holland)

• Johnson on Ridicule:
  “Sir, I shall ride better than you. I was only afraid I should not find a horse able to carry me.” (24:24, Tom Holland)

• Boswell After Culloden Vets Meeting:
  “[He] finds himself in tears and goes off on a kind of massive Scottish patriotism jag.” (43:40, Tom Holland)

• On Disappointment at Sleat:
  “This woman would sink a 90-gun ship. She is so dull and heavy.” (48:32, Tom Holland, quoting Johnson)

• On Grueling Change:
  “The chief has lost his formidable retinue and the Highlander walks his heath unarmed and defenceless with the peaceable submission of a French peasant or English cottager.” (51:54, Tom Holland, quoting Johnson)

• On the True Purpose of the Trip:
  “This is truly the patriarchal life. This is what we came to find.” (56:43, Tom Holland, quoting Johnson on Rassay)

• On Iona:
  “Man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force up plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.” (58:27, Tom Holland, quoting Johnson)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [05:37] Arrival in Edinburgh; English and Scottish perceptions
• [09:13] Johnson’s missed travel ambitions; The Rothermere anecdote
• [12:22] Discussion of the Act of Union and heated banter
• [15:37] Jacobitism, Culloden, and the romantic lure of Bonnie Prince Charlie
• [22:40] St Andrews and marks of Scottish Reformation
• [25:30] Johnson’s search for wildness and “peculiar manners”
• [33:32] Johnson’s kangaroo impression
• [36:38] The road to Loch Ness; the legend and the reality
• [43:40] Meeting a veteran of Culloden; Boswell’s patriotic fervor
• [45:18] The row about the pony and ridicule
• [47:43] The disappointment at the home of Clan MacDonald
• [50:35] Broader reflections on Highland change and loss
• [54:07] The slow ‘corrosion’ of Highland society
• [57:25] The encounter with Flora MacDonald
• [58:27] Iona and Johnson’s emotional reaction
• [63:33] Explosion over Charles I at Affleck
• [65:47] The reveal of Boswell’s rival biographer

---

Tone & Language

• The hosts blend scholarly insight with warm, humorous, and self-aware banter, akin to Boswell’s own literary style.
• They often shift from detailed historic analysis to modern parallels, maintaining a lively and accessible tone.

---

Summary & Flow

This episode is a sweeping, vivid narrative of travel, nostalgia, and national identity, interspersed with wit, personal drama, and poignant historical reflection. Through their playful yet forensic unpacking of Johnson and Boswell’s journey, Tom and Dominic illuminate the final sunset of traditional Highland society, the enduring power of romantic myth, and the birth of modern travel writing. The episode’s close teases future intrigue with Boswell’s literary rivalry—a classic Rest Is History cliffhanger.

Transcript

[Tom Holland]

This episode is brought to you by TikTok. TikTok gives parents the visibility control they need to help shape an environment that makes sense for their teens.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

For starters, teens under 18 have a 60 minute screen time reminder in place. And with family pairing, parents can set their own screen time limits, see their teens followers whom they follow and help restrict content that's not right for them

[Tom Holland]

because with peace of mind in place, discovery and creativity can follow. Learn [e-mail] GuardiansGuide this episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic now history lives in the contradictions yeah, I've

[Dominic Sandbrook]

always been fascinated by the great mysteries of history. Like what happened to the Maya civilization of Central America? Why were all those great cities deserted? But Tom, there's one mystery that's always fascinated you, isn't there?

[Tom Holland]

Yes, Dominic, I've always been fascinated by the question of how humans came to make and use fire. How did that originate? And a tremendous discovery was announced just last year that the place where it seems fire was invented was Suffolk.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, you know, one of the things that makes history so fascinating is the kind of back and forth between sources to try and explain these great mysteries. And you know what's built for that kind of thinking, Claud, is built for that way of thinking. It doesn't smooth things over. It helps you dig into the disagreement to reveal something new and anthropic. Just committed to not running adverts in Claude, so your thinking stays yours.

[Tom Holland]

Try Claud for free at Claude AI Restishory. This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Car Shopping shouldn't feel like preparing for a marathon of paperwork. That's why Carvana makes buying and financing your car easy from start to finish. Search thousands of vehicles with great prices, all online, all on your time, and when you're ready, your new car shows up right at your door. It doesn't get better than that. Buy your car the easy way on

[Dominic Sandbrook]

delivery fees may apply. I had desired to visit the Hebrides, or Western islands of Scotland so long that I scarcely remember how the wish was originally excited, and was in the autumn of the year 1773, induced to undertake the journey by finding in Mr. Boswell a companion whose acuteness would help my inquiry, and whose gaiety of conversation and civility of manners are sufficient to counteract the inconveniences of travel in countries less hospitable than we have passed. On the 18th of August, we left Edinburgh. So that was the son of Lichfield, Samuel Johnson, and he is describing one of the Great journeys in all history, One of certainly the most intrepid journeys in all history. And he's describing it in his book A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, which is actually one of the great classics of travel literature. And Johnson, the ultimate Englishman, is describing how, for the first time in his life, he ventured beyond England's borders. He goes up to the Hebrides, a journey that in the 18th century would have seemed to the average Englishman, especially a midlander like Johnson, to be going to the very ends of the earth, into the very heart of darkness and the den of savagery. Because, of course, you're going to the most Scottish place imaginable. So, Tom, the western islands. Have you been to the western islands?

[Tom Holland]

I have, yes. Savage Wet is my chief memory of them. Won't surprise people to hear, but very interesting for all the reasons that Johnson will be discovering and Boswell will be discovering. That's good, because you mentioned how to the average Englishman, the Western Isles and Hebrides are incredibly remote to Scots in the Lowlands. And this is something that Johnson points out in his book. He says that to most Lowlanders, they are as familiar with the Hebrides as they were with Borneo or Sumatra. And this is certainly true of James Boswell, the man mentioned by Johnson as his companion on this great adventure and whose escapades we were hearing about in our previous episode. And Boswell, too, you know, he's an inveterate journal writer, and the journal that he writes on this trip to provides him with the basis for his book, because he also gives an account of this journey, the journal of a tour to the Hebrides. And in his introduction to that book, he will spell out what the two men had been hoping to find in the Hebrides. So you summed it up as savagery. Boswell frames it slightly differently. He says that they're looking for simplicity and wildness and all the circumstances of remote time or place, so near to our native great island by which he. Great Britain, of course.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So before we set off ourselves to the Hebrides for this extraordinary journey, a thrilling story, let us kick off in a place very close to your heart, Tom. Edinburgh. So Samuel Johnson has arrived for the first time in the Scottish capital. Remember, England and Scotland have only been united in one country since 1707. So if you're quite old, that's within living memory on the 14th of August, 1773, which is where we kick off. And at Boyd's Inn, which is just off the Royal Mile in the heart of Edinburgh.

[Tom Holland]

Yes. And Samuel Johnson's arrival there is a great sensation in Edinburgh among polite circles, because he is by now one of the most famous people in the whole of Britain. The Great Cham, they call him, the name given to Tartar despots. So he's the kind of the supreme monarch of literary Britain. And he is Also, he's now 64, one of the most recognizable. And Boswell, in his journal of a tour to the Hebrides, prefaces it with a description of what Johnson looked like over the course of this trip. So Boswell writes, his person was a large, robust, I may say, approaching to the gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulence. He has a convulsive twitch. We've mentioned that he's constantly muttering to himself. And Boswell writes, in the intervals of articulating, he made various sounds with his mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth as if clucking like a hen.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So he's unprepossessing company. A first appearance?

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, I mean, he's. He's distinctive, I think it would be fair to say, yeah. And he's arrived in Scotland wearing his habitual brown suit, which, you know, he'd been wearing the first time that Boswell met him, and this time he has brought boots because he suspects it's going to be muddy.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's not wrong.

[Tom Holland]

He's got an enormous brown great coat, complete with kind of vast pockets. Boswell says he would have been able to fit his own dictionary in the pockets. And he's carrying a large English oak stick, and he also has a pair of pistols with him and a supply of bullets. And this, as Boswell observed from an erroneous apprehension of violence. So essentially, Johnson thinks the Highlands are

[Dominic Sandbrook]

going to be crawling with bandits, ruffians and ne' er do wells.

[Tom Holland]

Bandits and ruffians and all kinds of people. Now, I think that Johnson's critics would not have been surprised that he'd kind of basically come outfitted as John Bull, because his public image is very much that of a little Englander, a man who essentially judges all the world by the standards of London. You know, his famous saying, the man is tired of London, is tired of life. But Boswell knows Johnson very well and appreciates that this public image does not correspond to the private reality, because the reason that Johnson hasn't traveled is that for most of his life he's been incredibly poor, and travel is, relatively speaking, much more expensive in the 18th century than it is today. And Johnson, all his life, has had an incredibly frustrated yearning to see the world. So he said of Italy, for instance, that, you know, basically, a life without seeing Italy isn't a life worth living. He's wanted to go to India. He has a particular thing about the

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Great Wall of China by Richard Nixon.

[Tom Holland]

Well, Nixon gets to see it. Johnson never did. And so it's rather touching, actually, that in 1922, the first Viscount Rothermere, Dominic. So the ancestor of your erstwhile employers at the Daily Mail, you're thinking about

[Dominic Sandbrook]

what to say there. I can see that. The cogs turning in her thinking, like, you don't want to completely put yourself on the wrong side of the Rothermere organisation, but equally, you don't want to put yourself on the wrong side of the listeners.

[Tom Holland]

What I will say in favour of the 1st Viscount Rothermere is that, knowing of Johnson's yearning to see the Great Wall of China and knowing he's being frustrated, he presented a stone from the Great Wall to Gough House, which was the house in which Johnson had written the dictionary, which you can still visit to this day. A tremendous.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, that's a lovely thing to have done.

[Tom Holland]

So it has this stone from the Great Wall there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, Great credit to Viktormere for that.

[Tom Holland]

I think it's the only stone from the Great Wall in the whole of London. So.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Brilliant.

[Tom Holland]

That's an interesting fact. And so Boswell knows this. And so this is why, essentially, he had been confident in urging Boswell to come to Scotland because he knows that Johnson specifically had wanted to see the Hebrides, because Johnson had read about the Hebrides when he was a child. And so it's a kind of childhood fantasy to go there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So Boswell comes scurrying along to this inn off the. Off the Royal Mile, and he's delighted to see Johnson, isn't he? Yeah, he's very excited, but he's a little bit nervous because he's worried that Johnson will embarrass him by bursting out twitching and shouting his anti Scottish prejudices, which would be very bad because Johnson

[Tom Holland]

is notorious for anti Scottish prejudice. You know, he's always fulminating. Scotland's very poor, everyone eats oats and that the Scots are forever fleeing Scotland for England. And Boswell, of course, is an example of that. So, as you say, Boswell is nervous, he takes Johnson by the arm. And so, arm in arm, they walk up the Royal Mile towards his house, which is just off it. And as they go, Boswell finds himself mortified by what he describes as the evening effluvia. So essentially the stench of drains. A zealous Scotsman would have wished Mr. Johnson to be without one of his five senses upon this occasion. As we marched slowly along, he grumbled in my ear, I smell you in the dark. So that's not a good start. And then two days later, there is going to be more have rumphing because it's provoked by what remains 60 foot. Four years on.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

The single most controversial issue in Anglo Scottish relations, and you just mentioned it, it's the act of Union, which had dissolved the Parliaments of England and Scotland and created a United Kingdom of Great Britain. And as you said, this act had been passed in 1707. And the Scottish act of Union is kept in the Parliament House, which stands just off the royal mile, by St. John's Cathedral. And Boswell takes Johnson there and Johnson is shown the document. And as Johnson is inspecting it, Boswell began, in his own words, to indulge old Scottish sentiments and to express a warm regret that by our union with England, we were no more.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Ooh. The SNP entered the chat.

[Tom Holland]

Boswell knows what he's doing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He's winding Johnson up.

[Tom Holland]

He knows that Johnson is going to explode. But Johnson responds in a perhaps unexpected way. Sir, never talk of your independency. Who could let your queen remain 20 years in captivity and then be put to death without even a pretense of justice, without your ever attempting to rescue her and such a queen too. So he's talking about Mary, Queen of Scots and saying that because the Scots hadn't tried to rescue her from captivity in England, therefore they don't deserve to be independent.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Which is perhaps an argument that might defeat the SNP if it gets unleashed now. I mean, who knows?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And they're overheard, aren't they, by the Keeper of the records or who's standing at their elbow.

[Tom Holland]

Yes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And he. He says a thing that you actually often hear, you often see online to this day. Half our nation was bribed by Eng. Polish money. This is basically the sort of ultra Scottish nationalist take on Scottish history and on the act of Union, saying that basically our elite were bribed by the English to sell our independence. And Johnson. Brilliant answer, sir. That's no defense. That makes you worse.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, he's not wrong. Yeah, yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

To use the word we used in the very first episode. This is all very performative, isn't it? They're basically going through the motion, having a bit of fun, playing their parts.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. I Think so. I mean, it's self consciously banter, I think.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right.

[Tom Holland]

And it's exactly what Boswell wanted, because then he can go back and write it up and here we are talking about it all these years on. But I think that Johnson's devotion to Mary Queen of Scots, I mean, on one level it seems completely unexpected kind of tangent, but on the other, it's a reminder that there are actually much rawr and fresher political emotions kind of eddying around in Scotland than those generated by the act of Union three decades previously. So this is in 1745, the great, great, great grandson of Mary Queen of Scots, Charles Stuart, who is better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, he'd landed from France in Scotland and he had raised an army in the Highlands and led them southwards as far as Derby in the Midlands. They're actually not far from Lichfield. And Bonnie Prince Charlie's aim was to overthrow the ruling British dynasty, the House of Hanover. And they were Protestants, the Stuarts are Catholic. And so the Protestant establishment had essentially brought in the House of Hanover to replace the Catholic House of Stuart. And this is why in the 18th century, you have kind of waves of King George's ruling all the time. And Bonnie Prince Charlie wants to overthrow this and claim the throne for his father, King James iii, as loyalists to Jacobus, as he's called in Latin. So Jacobites think of him. Unfortunately, he can't reach London. He retreats, he withdraws to the Highlands and there he is cornered at Culloden, a village by Inverness in the northeast corner of Scotland, and his army had been annihilated. Bonnie Prince Charlie had managed to escape the battlefield, but he has this completely hair raising kind of flight across the Highlands. He gets to the Hebrides and he only manages to get on board a ship and sail back to France by the absolute skin of his teeth. Now, three decades on from that great adventure, the prospects of the Stuarts returning to the British throne and replacing the Hanoverians are obviously, I mean, effectively zero. But there are still those who preserve a wistful loyalty to them. And we mentioned in our very first episode how one of those is Samuel Johnson. Boswell says all his youth he had felt a tenderness for that unfortunate house.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So the Stuarts, that's a common thing among Tories. So Tories had this kind of, this sort of nostalgic loyalty to the House of Stuart, didn't they?

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And Johnson, even as a young man, would have perhaps, maybe there's a slight element of affectation about it, but this so often is with political positions. I mean, it doesn't undermine them.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, it's interesting you say that. I mean, I think that's true to a degree. But in his life of Johnson, Boswell will point out that perhaps his affections might have gone beyond mere tenderness because he. He writes. It is somewhat curious that his literary career appears to have been almost totally suspended in the years 1745 and 1746. So those are the years that Bonnie Prince Charlie.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Is, you know, in Britain trying to seize the throne.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But wasn't he developing the idea of the dictionary at that point? So that's why he's so quiet.

[Tom Holland]

He definitely was by the time Culloden comes earlier. Yeah. It's unclear. And there are a few scholars who suggest that perhaps he was actually embroiled in the campaign. I mean, I think it's unlikely.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, he's the last person you'd want on your side shambling with his massive pockets.

[Tom Holland]

Yes, I think it's unlikely, but it's probable that he was lying low.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Okay.

[Tom Holland]

He probably was known as a Jacobite, and so probably thought that, you know, it was sensible not to draw attention to it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Not anymore, though. Right. The King's King George has given him a pension. And didn't he meet the king in 1767? George III, at the library.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, in the Royal Library at Windsor. And so, I mean, Johnson's unapologetic about this. We remember, we discussed. He's been told this is. Pension is a kind of reward for doing the dictionary. You don't have to serve as a kind of propagandist for the Hanoverians. But even so, I mean, Johnson appreciates, you know, as he says to Boswell, I cannot now curse the House of Hanover. But he says that with a smile. I think that one of the reasons why Johnson does feel fondly towards Boswell is that he knows that Boswell also shares in these sympathies. So Boswell's father, Lord Affleck, he's a Whig and he's a massive supporter of the House of Hanover.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

All right. So, yeah.

[Tom Holland]

But Boswell, right from childhood, seems to have had this kind of romantic affection for Bonnie Prince Charlie. And it may be that, you know, so 1745, when Bonnie Prince Charlie lands, Boswell is four years old. And so this may be the first kind of political intervention that he's become aware of, surely.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

He clearly sees Bonnie Prince Charlie as a very romantic character and supports him, even though, it has to be said, he's offered a coin by a servant if he will shout, God save King George, which he takes. And he does shout it. But having pocketed it, he then goes back to his kind of Jacobite sympathies. He basically stays loyal in a kind of, as you say, slightly performative way, for all his life. And actually, when he was in Corsica, he had kind of mad fantasies about maybe seeing that the Stuarts established on the island of Corsica.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That completely should have happened. That. Should that not have happened. A Stuart kingdom of Corsica.

[Tom Holland]

Well, if history's great, great what ifs would have stopped Napoleon.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

So I think that obviously Johnson and Boswell do have this fascination, and by this point, it may be nothing more than that, with Bonnie Prince Charlie, you know, the whole story, it's very romantic. His defeat at Culloden, his escape across the Highlands, you know, the fact he takes refuge on the Hebrides. And I think it is definitely an important motivator for both of them in making this trip. And I think it also helps to explain the route that they end up taking, because the obvious route to the Western Isles from Edinburgh is, duh, to go westwards. But Johnson and Boswell opt instead to take a much more roundabout route. They take the Eastern Road out of Scotland, up the coast, going northwards towards Inverness. And Inverness, of course, is a place that is very close to Culloden. And to get from Inverness, they will be going down Loch Ness and then across the hills and across the sea to the Western Isles. That is basically the route that Bonnie Prince Charlie had taken.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And it's incredibly picturesque. I mean, it's ticking every box, that route.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Do you think it is a sort of a Jacobite tour for them? I mean, genuinely, they've designed it accordingly?

[Tom Holland]

I think so, yes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Nice.

[Tom Holland]

It's one of many factors, but I think for both of them, the sense of the romance in Bonnie Prince Charlie's story lends an extra patina of excitement to the scenes that they're going to be seeing in the Highlands.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think absolutely excitingly for them, they will also get to visit one of my alma maters, or whatever the plural of alma mater is.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, yeah, St. Andrews.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

St. Andrews. So very exciting. So they're about to set off. Johnston has had a tremendous time in Edinburgh, hasn't he? He actually liked it, despite the stench.

[Tom Holland]

He does. So he keeps landing what Boswell calls his pleasant hits against Scotland. But actually, yeah, he's pretty well behaved. He's genuinely impressed by the beauties of Edinburgh and its architecture, and he's very flattered by the kind of the great host of Edinburgh Luminaries who come to visit him in Boswell's house really enjoys their company. And of course Edinburgh, I mean, Edinburgh is not an intellectual backwater. This is the great age of the Scottish Enlightenment and there are lots of people who it's well worth Johnson meeting. So he, I think, really enjoys Edinburgh. They leave Edinburgh on the 18th of August and they have with them a single servant who is absolutely massive bohemian, very well traveled, speaks lots of languages. Frederick the Great would have loved him, would have enrolled him in his army. They obviously want someone who's huge because Johnson is clearly still a bit nervous about what they're going to be finding in the Highlands. So they leave Edinburgh, as I say, they're heading eastwards and they head for St Andrews, Scotland's oldest university and a city described by Johnson as once arch Episcopal, meaning there had once been an archbishop there, but the Scottish Scottish Reformation had then destroyed it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right.

[Tom Holland]

And Johnson does not approve of this at all and thinks that John Knox is an absolutely terrible man and laments it. He's treated very well again by the professors, all of whom are thrilled to meet him. But he does find the city unhappily declined. So he writes, one of its streets is now lost, and in those that remain there is the silence and solitude of inactive indigence and gloomy depopulation.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

There is something quite gloomy about St Andrews. So it's out on the east coast of Scotland. You've got nothing between you and the kind of Siberian winds, can be very cold and you're a long way from anywhere.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, I think for Johnson, though, it's not just that, you know, there are the ruins of, you know, bare ruined choirs and all of that, the marks of Scottish Reformation. It's also that it does seem to be very depopulated. Yeah, it's clearly not as flourishing as it once was. And this will become one of the great themes of his book on the Highlands, this sense that there are parts of Scotland, the Lowlands, that are absolutely booming, but there are other parts, and particularly the more northerly reaches that are clearly not. And the whole trip Johnson is brooding on this and actually he has a lot of time to think because the journey is quite a long one and going from St Andrews up towards Aberdeen, you know, the coach is kind of bumping around on the roads and Johnson, who isn't usually a man to complain, but he is, I think, slightly feeling his age. And there's one particularly long and dreary stretch of road in the approaches to Aberdeen, he goes so far as to worry about how on earth he is going to cope riding a horse. And he tells Boswell, if we must ride much, we shall not go. And there's an end on't. And I have to say that there's an end on't is one of my favourite phrases from Johnson. But the next day he's cheered up and Boswell joshes him about the fact that he'd been, you know, worrying about horses and kind of always lapsing into self pity, says, why, sir, you was beginning to despond yesterday. You're a delicate Londoner. You're a macaroni.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, that's great banter. So Johnson would absolutely despise. He would. I mean, that would force him to ride.

[Tom Holland]

Yes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He's not gonna. He's not gonna take being called a macaroni.

[Tom Holland]

No, because macaronis are people who dress in exaggerated Italian fashions with enormous wigs. That's not Johnson's vibe at all. And Johnson is very indignant about his. Sir, I shall ride better than you. I was only afraid I should not find a horse able to carry me. Which has to be said is a reasonable worry, because he is, as we say, enormous by this point.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

So that evening they arrive in Aberdeen, they get to the inn, the inn is full, Boswell mentions his family name and immediately a room is found for them. So that's a measure of the reputation, if not of Boswell himself, of his father, Lord Affleck. And the next day in Aberdeen, Johnson gets lionized again. And the city elders are so excited to have him in their presence that they actually vote him the freedom of the city. So Johnson is now in a much better mood, and what is more, they are now starting to approach the sublime kind of landscape that he's been hoping for. Because to quote Boswell, he always said that he was not come to Scotland to see fine places of which there were enough in England, but wild objects, mountains, waterfalls, peculiar manners.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So again, there's that sense of romanticism, isn't there? The love of the kind of savage and the wildness and all of that kind of thing, you know, casting off the. The veneer of the city and getting into nature.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. And Johnson is often thought as a kind of, you know, classical figure, you know, his Latin and his love of London and all of that. But he has come to Scotland to see wilderness. And so wilderness he is going to see. And there's a taster for Boswell of how potentially alarming this enthusiasm for wild scenery might be because they visit the Bullers of Buchan which is a wild coastal walk that goes around very boiling waters, known locally as the pot. And Boswell, actually. I mean, he's terrified to see the hugely corpulent Johnson kind of striding along this rocky ledge with grim rocks and boiling waters below him. It was rather alarming to see Mr. Johnson poking his way. And I guess Boswell is thinking, well, how's it going to play if, you know, the greatest man of British letters plunges to his death? That's not going to be a good look at all. Anyway, Johnson survives it and gets in the coach and he's very happy. But Boswell, I think, reflecting on the possibility of Johnson falling to his death, he suddenly become prey to gloomy fancies, and the landscape and the literary associations around Inverness kind of play on his fears. So by the afternoon of the 26th of August, they're driving across the heath where Macbeth was supposed to have met the three witches at the start of Shakespeare's play. Boswell finds himself shivering in terror, and he's working himself up into an absolute state. And then as they're rattling along across this heath, they see the rotting body of a highwayman in a gibbet. The highwayman has been there for two months. And Boswell, he describes it as that strange curiosity which I always have about anything dismal, climbs out of the coach and inspects it. And it has to be said that Boswell has quite a thing about hangings. It isn't, I think, because he's a sadist or anything like this. I think it's actually the opposite. I think it's because he is oppressed by mortality and kind of dares himself to stare it in the face. He would go and talk to people who are about to be hanged and then watch them be hanged and then inspect their bodies afterwards. And it's kind of staring. The inevitability of death in the face, I think. And so his response to this often, I mean, here it gets even weirder.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes.

[Tom Holland]

Is that he would go out and have sex with a prostitute, I think, to feel alive, obviously, the very deep waters there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But also Boswell does that. I mean, his response to anything. I mean, his response to the death of his mum was to go to a brothel. No, I mean, I know.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, but this, I think, is what makes him such a fascinating man, is that he has all the, you know, these kind of these strange takes on life, these strange approaches, these strange emotions, but he just writes them up.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Strange approaches that always somehow come back to the same destination.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, well. Well, I Mean, that is one. That is destination, but another destination, as we say, is this kind of.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, this.

[Tom Holland]

This. This kind of enthusiasm almost for working himself up into a state of. Of terror and dread of death. And that evening, he is, you know, completely morbid. And Johnson either doesn't recognize it or wants to tweak Boswell's tale. So Boswell writes that Mr. Johnson did not know of my, you know, basically the fact that I was in a massive funk, or he told me afterwards he would not have talked as he did, for he diverted himself with trying to frighten me, as if the witches would come and dance at the foot of my bed. So you can imagine, you know, Johnson basically telling Boswell lots of ghost stories. Yeah, Boswell kind of gibbering in his bed.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So if you're into ghosts and death, two very exciting places to come. So on the road to Inverness, two more big sites to look at. One of them is Macbeth's castle, so the castle of Cawdor. And the other is the battlefield of Culloden, which we've already heard about. So let's start with Macbeth's castle. So they do visit Macbeth's castle, its own. I mean, how does that work in those days? Somebody must live there. Or is it ruined?

[Tom Holland]

It's ruined. But there's a local minister who entertains them, and they go and inspect the castle. And Boswell is delighted by it, not by the castle itself so much as the spectacle of Mr. Samuel Johnson in this remote place, all its literary associations. And in fact, he wrote a letter to David Garrick, the great actor, that very evening. Indeed, as I have always been accustomed to view him, Dr. Johnson, as a permanent London object. It would not be much more wonderful to me to see St. Paul's Church moving along where we now are. And I think you have this sense throughout the trip that Boswell is almost like a kind of documentary director.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right.

[Tom Holland]

He's removed someone from his comfortable surroundings and placed him in a locale where kinds of adventures might ensue. And he's always kind of framing Johnson in his mind.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I have a friend called. Called Rory who once took Dennis Rodman to North Korea.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, my God. And he stayed there, didn't he?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, they hung around. It was a promotional thing for Paddy Power, I think. So.

[Tom Holland]

Improbable.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So. Yeah, but no more improbable than Samuel Johnson going to Scotland.

[Tom Holland]

Absolutely. And so this is a crucial part of Boswell's delight in the whole trip. So they get to see the castle at Cawdor. They do not Go to inspect the battlefield of Culloden. And I think there are various reasons for this. Firstly, it's off the road, and Johnson isn't a man for taking, I think, a hike across Scottish river.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Okay.

[Tom Holland]

They don't have horses that they could ride. And it's a very, very sensitive location. I mean, you know, it's a little bit like, I don't know, poking around a nuclear facility in Iran. It's probably not the most sensible thing to do if you're a tourist. But it's clear that the history of Bonnie Prince Charlie is very much on their minds now, because they arrive in Inverness, and then the next day they make a point of visiting this Fort George, which is this fortress that had been built in the wake of Culloden to kind of pacify the Highlands. So it's at one end of Loch Ness, and Fort Augustus is at the other end of Loch Ness. They're very excited by now because they know that they are going to be following the line of Loch Ness, and they're going to be heading out into a country upon which, as Johnson puts it, perhaps no wheel has ever rolled. And so they buy four horses. One for Johnson, one for Boswell, one for Ritter, their giant bohemian manservant.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, yeah, I forgot he was there.

[Tom Holland]

And a fourth to carry their baggage. And that evening, they're last for a while in civilized company. They're in an inn in Inverness. All kinds of, you know, as usually happens, luminaries have. Have turned up to have a Gorp at Dr. Johnson and listen to his conversations. And Johnson is in excellent form. And they're discussing the state of the world. And the name of Joseph Banks comes up. Because the backdrop to this is that Captain Cook has just returned from his trip around the world, their trip to Australia with the goat. Johnson had actually written the poem in Latin, saluting the goat. And he's friends with Banks. And he reveals that Banks in Australia had seen a really remarkable animal, which Banks terms a kangaroo. And people say, well, what does this kangaroo look like? And Johnson, this incredibly eminent, this incredibly distinguished, this incredibly heavy man, rises to his feet. He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So the first kangaroo impersonation we've ever had on the rest is history. Very exciting. But ahead has even greater excitement because we talked about one exotic and improbable creature in a kangaroo, and we might just be about to meet another, because after the break, Johnson and Boswell will be going to Loch Ness.

[Tom Holland]

This episode is brought to you by Rocket Money.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Tom we often talk about how to organize our finances. I'm very conscious that I'm paying for a lot of MAD subscription, and there's one thing that we've talked about often, the show. It's the thing that we probably hate more than any other, and it's a hidden fee. I would love to get my finances under control. There are all these things piling up on our bank statements and I think I need to fix this problem. I need to sort this out and to stop this.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, my finances are so chaotic that I need this app.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So I'll tell you what it is. It's called Rocket Money. It's a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions. It monitors your spending and it helps

[Tom Holland]

to lower your bills so that you

[Dominic Sandbrook]

can grow your savings.

[Tom Holland]

With Rocket Money, you can track all of your subscriptions and you can easily cancel within the app with just a few taps, saving you time avoiding charges. And you can also set budgets and goals and get personalized insights and regular reports to track how you're doing. They will even send you real time alerts for large transactions, upcoming bills, refunds and even low balances. So let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. [e-mail] is history.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's RocketMoney.com is history. RocketMoney.com is history now at the Home Depot receive 12 months special financing and free basic installation on carpet projects with Lifeproof Lifeproof with Pet Proof Technology, Home Decorators Collection and Trafficmaster Carpets.

[Tom Holland]

Bring a new look to your floors or give them a durable surface that

[Dominic Sandbrook]

stands up to life's tough messes. Get 12 months special financing on installed carpet projects right now at the Home Home Depot offer valid March 12 through March 29, 2026. Exclusions and additional charges may apply for licenses. See homedepot.com licensenumbers it's crunch time at

[Tom Holland]

work and you need to bring wings to your workday. Visit redbull.com gettingitdone and answer a couple questions about your work style to get a Spotify customized playlist tuned to your productivity. Plus score a can of Red Bull

[Dominic Sandbrook]

on us while you go from to do ta done.

[Tom Holland]

And remember, Red Bull gives you wings. Supplies are limited.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Terms apply. Visit the website for more information. Welcome back to the Rest Is history. It is 30 August 1773. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell have left Inverness they have left the world of stagecoaches and comfortable inns and civilized company, and they are riding west into the Highlands. And their destination, Tom Loch Ness.

[Tom Holland]

So Boswell writes about it at Loch Ness, and the road upon the side of it, between birch trees with the hills above, pleased us much. The scene was as remote and agreeably wild as could be desired.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exciting.

[Tom Holland]

So they don't spot the monster.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

What? Oh, disappointing.

[Tom Holland]

Nobody knows the monster exists.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's so disappointing. That's. I guess that's because the monster was invented in 1930s by the Daily Mail. No.

[Tom Holland]

Yes. And you can hear our episode about that. That. But even though they don't spot the monster, Boswell does notice a very old woman standing outside a wretched little hovel, as Boswell puts it, made of earth and it has a window. And the way the window is stopped is with a kind of a circle of turf. This, for Boswell, is amazing. And his kind of documentary maker instincts kick in and he is filled with a desire to see Johnson step inside this hovel. And so they all pile in, and inside it they find a pot filled with goat meat bubbling over a peat fire. And Johnson, like Louis Theroux or someone, he's kind of interviewing this woman, even though she doesn't speak English, she only speaks Gaelic, or Erse, as Johnson calls it. So to quote Boswell, Mr. Johnson asked her where she slept. I asked one of the guides who asked her. In Erse, she spoke with a kind of high tone. He told us she was afraid. We wanted to go to bed. To her, this coquetry, or whatever it may be called, of so wretched a like being was truly ludicrous.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's very ungallant by Boswell. He's being very mean about this woman, just because she's old and maybe not as prepossessing as the people with whom he consorts in Westminster Bridge, but maybe

[Tom Holland]

his reputation had gone before him.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, she thinks, jesus, Boswell's turned up, I can see, clutching a pint of wine. I'm in for it now.

[Tom Holland]

So there is a lot of banter along this theme. Johnson.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right.

[Tom Holland]

Johnson makes exactly this point. Yeah, I think he's amused, but he's also embarrassed, and he definitely doesn't want to hurt her delicacy. And so he refuses to go into the bedchamber. Boswell inevitably does. And he lights a piece of paper, goes in and inspects it, and he finds it. It's all, you know, thrillingly basic. It's everything that he'd been hoping for. They then sit down with the old woman. And the old woman is incredibly hospitable. She. She gives them both a dram, and then she asks in return, do you have some snuff? And they don't have any snuff, but they reach into their pockets and they both give her a sixpence. And they're chatting away through the interpreter. And she tells Johnson and Boswell that she is as happy as any woman in Scotland. And then when they go on their way, she sends them with prayers, which she offers up in. In Gaelic. And Boswell writes, Mr. Johnson was pleased at seeing, for the first time, such a state of human life. So.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, that's nice.

[Tom Holland]

This is what he's been looking for, basically, in the Highlands. So they continue on their way, following the line of Loch Ness southwest, and by nightfall they have reached Fort Augustus, which is at the opposite end from. From Inverness, where they stay as. As guests of the governor. And I have to say that when you read both Johnson and Boswell's account, particularly of this stretch along Loch Ness, there's quite a kind of Great plains in the 1870s vibe, you know, remote, remote landscapes, forts.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

The sense of, you know, slight nervousness looking over your shoulder and everything reminds

[Dominic Sandbrook]

me of the stuff we did on stage about Scottish visitors going to the New World, going to the United States in the sort of middle of the 19th century, with dogs called Peevish.

[Tom Holland]

Yes. Get eaten by Native Americans.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. Anyway, so they go up into the mountains, don't they? The next day.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And Johnson is really struck by the wildness. It's exactly what he expected. Everything basically is ticking. It's ticking all his boxes. Right. It's exactly as he.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

As he hoped and dreamed it would be. And it's about this point that he starts thinking, this would make a great book.

[Tom Holland]

He does. And he's still pondering this. This notion that he'd first had in St Andrews, which is the contrast between all the industry and the bustle of the Lowlands and the kind of the emptiness of northern Scotland. And that evening, they've been traveling over wild, thinly inhabited upland regions, and they climb down and they arrive in Glenmoriston, which is a glen where Bonnie Prince Charlie had taken refuge in a cave. And they look around them and they find that the glen is almost empty. It's kind of deserted of habitation. There is one place where they can stay. And their landlord confirms to them, yes. That 70 men had gone out of the glen to America. And Johnson is really struck by this. And he's thinking, you know, there is the sense here of some profound historic change and what is going on? What explains it? So he's kind of sitting there thinking it. Meanwhile, Boswell's emotions are a kind of typically Boswellian mix of kind of fastidious distaste for this awful place they're staying in. But Boswell calls it a sty. Yeah, but it's intermingled with a sense of romantic pride at how magnificent the scenery is and how splendid all the customs are. So the fastidious distaste, first they're shown into their room. I mean, it's awful. It's obviously heaving with bedbugs. Johnson doesn't care. Johnson just kind of throws himself down and immediately falls asleep. Boswell lies on his kind of horrible mattress, stressing out about bedbugs, and he has this weird fancy that a spider was traveling from the wainscot towards my mouth. He finally falls asleep, wakes up early, he's still very stressed. And he began to imagine that the landlord, being about to emigrate himself, might murder us to get our money. Johnson, completely unperturbed, he's lying there with a coloured handkerchief tied around his head, and Boswell actually has to kind of prod him to get him up. They then go and have breakfast. And at breakfast, Boswell's mood is immediately transformed by meeting a veteran of Bonnie Prince Charlie's army. A Highlander had signed up with the prince when he'd first landed, gone down with him deep into England, come back to Culloden and escaped from Culloden. And so he relates this whole story, and Boswell, as he listens to it repeatedly, finds himself in tears and goes off on a kind of massive Scottish patriotism jag. So he writes the very Highland names, or the sound of a bagpipe will stir my blood and fill me with a mixture of melancholy and respect, for courage and pity, for an unfortunate and superstitious regard for antiquity, an inclination for war without thought, and, in short, with a crowd of sensations.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, that's nice.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, a crowd of sensations could be Boswell's motto. That's basically what he's all about. So he's in a very romantic mood. And a couple of days later. So by now it's the 2nd of September, they've reached the coast and they've boarded a boat and they're being rowed across to Skye. And as they're being rowed, they pass the very point where Bonnie Prince Charlie had first landed on Scottish soil. And Boswell sits there, and previously he said that his blood was stirred. Now his mind is stirred. But basically he's very, very stirred by all of this.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But, but yeah, he's had a massive row with Johnson. What's going on?

[Tom Holland]

He has, he had a huge, I mean, they've been getting on so well, but the day before they, they, they get taken in the boat to Skye, they've had a massive bust up. So they've been coming down a mountain. Johnson is, is on this pony and he's so heavy that the poor pony stumbles. So the guide reaches for the bridle and he tries to calm down both Johnson and the pony. The pony is nervous. Johnson is kind of irate that the pony has collapsed under him and Johnson is kind of rumbling away. And as he's doing this, the guide is trying to distract Johnson and cheer him up. And he says, see such pretty goats. Then he whistles and he makes them jump. And Boswell thinks this is hilarious. A common ignorant horse hirer imagining that he could divert as one does a child, Mr. Samuel Johnson. And he can't stop laughing. And Johnson has a massive, massive strop about it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, because Johnson's dignity has been completely undermined by this. Right. He can't ride the pony. The pony's collapsing, they're going down the hill, the bloke is treating him like he's a child and Boswell's laughing at him. It's too much for Johnson.

[Tom Holland]

It's absolutely too much for Johnson. And one of the themes of this whole trip, which Boswell, you know, he'd known this, but it's repeatedly something that he's stumbling up against, is that Johnson cannot bear to be made to look ridiculous. And if he does, he, he almost always loses his temper. And so he loses his temper now. And Boswell, after this kind of bust up, he rides ahead to kind of try and scope out their onward travel arrangements. And Johnson takes this again as a personal insult. He sees it as Boswell thinks that he can't cope with riding as fast as he can. And when Boswell comes back, he says, do you know, I should have sooner thought of doing as you have done as picking a pocket. And it's only the following morning that they make up. And again there's this brilliant phrase, let's

[Dominic Sandbrook]

think no more on, oh, I'm glad they made up.

[Tom Holland]

Anyway, they do make up, so they've

[Dominic Sandbrook]

got what they've got to look forward to. They haven't met any clan chiefs yet.

[Tom Holland]

No, that's what they really want.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes. So there's a clan chief coming and this is the chief of Clan MacDonald of Sleat. So Sir Alexander MacDonald. So tell me about him.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, so he's married to Elizabeth Boswell, who's a distant cousin of Boswell's. So Boswell knows Sir Alexander MacDonald and had actually met with him in London. And there Sir Alexander had issued a formal invitation because Boswell had said, you know, we're coming to the Hebrides. So they're very excited about this because obviously they want to meet a real Hebridean clan chief. And they're approaching the southern tip of Skye and they're looking out and they see that Sir Alexander has come down to the sea's edge to welcome them. And what's even better, he is in full tartan. And this is massively exciting because tartan is actually, strictly speaking, illegal. In the wake of Culloden, it had been prescribed for everyone except for Highlanders serving with the British army. And so the fact that Sir Alexander MacDonald has turned up in the traditional Highland dress, this portends tremendous, tremendous entertainment. What's even better is that Lady MacDonald, who's very beautiful, she is standing at the top of the bank and she is making, to quote Boswell, a kind of jumping for joy. So everything seems set for a taste of traditional Hebridean hospitality. Accept that this is not what they get.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, no.

[Tom Holland]

So Alexander turns out to be an absolutely terrible host. He's kind of mean, he's really boring and he's boorish. And there are no clansmen, there are no claymores. Kind of no outlander vibes in any way. The dinner is a shocker. It's kind of undercooked. It's boring. So Alexander hasn't brought his chef with him to the island. The punch, there's almost no alcohol in the punch at all.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, that's the lowest thing. That's poor.

[Tom Holland]

And Lady MacDonald, whom Boswell remembered as being absolutely enchanting. Yeah, seems. I mean, Johnson. Johnson says she seems cut out of cabbage. This woman would sink a 90 gun ship. She is so dull and heavy.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, Jesus. That's even more disappointing than the punch. God, this is ticking. None of my boxes.

[Tom Holland]

So that's very dispiriting. And Boswell is mortified, kind of on his own behalf, but also on behalf of Scotland. This is exactly he doesn't want Johnson seeing it's not what he wants at all.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Sir Alexander MacDonald has let Scotland down,

[Tom Holland]

so he has a blazing row with Sir Alexander.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Get a better wife, for God's sake.

[Tom Holland]

Boswell wants to leave. That night, Johnson Says, no, we can't. That would be rude. So they stay there for four days. They head off to go and stay with these other people who've invited them. And from there they're going to make a crossing to the nearby island of Rasi. And they kind of arrive, they're ready to get in the boat, but then the kind of massive storm blows up and they can't make the crossing. So this is very disappointing as well. And Johnson, sensing that Boswell is bored, starts to entertain him with an impersonation of Lady MacDonald, leaning forward with a hand on each cheek and her mouth open. And Boswell, unlike Lord Affleck, his father, is a big fan of impersonations, and he thinks that Johnson has absolutely nailed this impersonation. And he writes, to see such a beauty represented by Mr. Johnson was excessively high. But there are only so many impersonations of Lady MacDonald that can be done over the course of two days. And so by the time the storm finally subsides, they are so ready to cross to Rassay, but there are only so many times that Johnson can do an impersonation of Lady MacDonald. And so they're stuck there for two days, and Boswell is just, you know, so depressed. Have all Johnson's criticisms of Scotland, you know, have they been based in fact? I mean, is he right? Is Scotland actually a terrible place?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So, actually, Johnson's perspective is slightly different, though, isn't it? Because he's basically struck by how much has changed in Scotland in recent years. He's almost quite mournful and quite melancholy about it. He says, basically, clearly there was some romantic, you know, mist shrouded, beautiful Scotland, Scotland, but it has been destroyed or it's being lost. And that's what really is on his mind.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, so he writes in his book, we came thither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance and a system of antiquated life. So Boswell is blaming Sir Alexander for their poor reception, and I think that's reasonable enough. But I think Johnson is seeing it in a slightly deeper kind of profounder historical context. And I think he feels essentially that they've come there too late and that recent history, you know, its effects have been remorseless. There hasn't really been any resisting it because Scotland has joined with England in the Union, and as a result has become richer. You know, it's joined this enormous single market, it's become more prosperous, it's become a commercial nation, a polite and commercial nation, but only in the Lowlands. And Johnson feels that the wealthier the Lowlands have grown, the less prepared the elites of Edinburgh and Glasgow have been to put up with the autonomy of the clans. And the law had begun to disarm the clans. So, Johnson writes, the chief has lost his formidable retinue and the Highlander walks his heath unarmed and defenceless with the peaceable submission of a French peasant or English cottager. And this is something, obviously, that has struck Johnson, Johnson only on their tour, because, remember, he had brought his pistols with him, but now he finds there aren't any pistols, there aren't any claymores. You know, the Highlanders have. Have no weapons whatsoever, and this is partly because Scottish laws have disarmed them. But it's also British state repression following the Battle of Culloden, when, you know, the Hanoverian regime had received this terrible shock, and it's in the wake of that, that the tartan had been banned and carrying weapons and all kinds of things. And Johnson's right, their pride had been crushed by the heavy hand of a vindictive conqueror, and that chiefs had degenerated from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords, and that many of the chiefs, rather than stay in their. Their ancestral stronghold surrounded by their clansmen, that most of them have migrated southwards to the Lowlands, to Glasgow, to Edinburgh, some of them have even gone to London. And it doesn't surprise Johnson at all to learn that Sir Alexander MacDonald had been educated at Eton.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So, yeah, they're losing their Scottishness.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. I mean, certainly they're losing their status as a, you know, a Hebridean clan chief. The clan chiefs are all going to Eton and the clansmen, rather than kind of choose to moulder in glens or on the Isles or whatever, are increasingly leaving for America either to fight for the British army there, there, or to set up as colonists. And Johnson feels that it's not really the Union that's brought this about, that it's not even Culloden that has doomed them, that it is actually just the kind of, the inexorable way of things, that this is how a commercializing nation, a prospering nation, that there are victims.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Doesn't it go back to your parallel that you made earlier on with the Plains Indians and visitors to the Great Plains, that you could conceivably visit the Great Plains in the late 19th century and you take your pistols, thinking this part of you that thinks, gosh, are we going to be taken prisoner by the. By the Sioux or something, and you get there and it's all gone and it's all changed. And. And it's partly repression and it's partly the process of, you know, capitalism and industrialization and urbanization and all those kinds of things. And this is a preview of that.

[Tom Holland]

No. Yeah. And I think what Johnson says about the process of immiseration that are essentially destroying the traditions of the Highlands could equally be applied to the Plains Indians. So he writes, misery is caused, for the most part, not by a heavy crush of disaster, but by the corrosion of less visible evils which canker enjoyment and undermine security. The visit of an invader is necessarily rare, but domestic animosities allow no cessation. And so this is the judgment that he delivers in his book on the Western islands, you know, and it's a kind of somber one. It's profound one. I mean, I think it's. That's true more generally. I mean, you could apply it perhaps to. To life in Western democracies at the moment if you wanted to.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And there are people in Scotland when this book comes out who say, well, this is just because Johnson hates Scotland. I don't think this is true. I don't think. Actually, I think Johnson has a wonderful time in Scotland. He's writing as a man who has an instinctive sympathy for the underdog, but he is also writing as someone who, in the course of his travels, does actually see enough of the traditional Highland ways to feel very, very wistful for their decline. And what he sees, he enjoys so much that he, from this point on, will always refer to his travels in the Western Isles as the pleasantest part of my life.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh. Oh, that's nice.

[Tom Holland]

So Boswell actually needn't have worried. Johnson isn't having a bad time. He hadn't been put off by Sir Alexander MacDonald sticking his fork into a liver pudding while his guests were kept standing. He hasn't been put off by the storms. I mean, you know, it's western Scotland. Johnson's expecting storms. And the two months in the Hebrides that follow this kind of slightly unfortunate introduction to sky, they are a triumph. So Raci, when they finally reach it, proves an absolute ball. There's everything that they'd been hoping for from Sir Alexander MacDonald. There's fiddling, there's dancing. And even though Johnson sits out the reels, he's absolutely in his element. And Boswell wrote In great relief, Mr. Johnson was in fine spirits. He said, this is truly the patriarchal life. This is what we came to find. They come back to Skye and they travel to Kingsburgh. And there they meet the ultimate in living Jacobite history. And this is Flora MacDonald, the woman who had saved Bonnie Prince Charlie. And she had escorted the wanderer, as Boswell calls him, disguised as her Irish maid, Betty Burke. And it has to be said that According to Flora MacDonald, he didn't make a very convincing Irish maid. She'd brought him from the Outer Hebrides to Skye, and from Skye, Bonnie Prince Charlie had been taken onwards to the mainland again and put on a ship and taken back to France. And again, Boswell, the documentary Director to see Mr. Samuel Johnson salute Ms. Flora MacDonald was a wonderful romantic scene to me. And what's even more romantic is that they stay in Flora MacDonald's house and Johnson sleeps in the very bed that Bonnie Prince Charlie had slept in. So if you're a Bonnie Prince Charlie tourist, and I mean, you know, this is incredible.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, if you're an old Tory like Samuel Johnson with Jacobite sympathies, this must be absolutely fantastic.

[Tom Holland]

Absolute heaven. Yeah. So he really is having a brilliant time. And I think the final highlight for Johnson is perhaps the most moving of all. And this, they. They, they go to Mull and then they take a crossing, a very short crossing, to Iona, which is a holy island for the Scots and indeed, I think, for any British Christian. St Columba, the Irish monk, had founded a monastery there back in. In563, commemorated as the great cradle of Scottish Christianity. And Johnson feels an immense surge of emotion visiting it. And he wrote about it in very, very famous line, that man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force up plain of marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Nice. So for Boswell, you describe him as a documentary maker. I mean, he's got all the shots he wanted. He's got Johnson in Bonnie Prince Charlie's bed. He's got Johnson looking, you know, melancholy and thoughtful and stirred with a religious feeling in the ruins of Iona. I mean, he's made a tremendous film. Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And so all their kind of, you know, memories of rows about ponies and so on have ended up, up pretty much forgotten. And in fact, there are only two episodes during the whole tour around the Hebrides, which it would subsequently cause Boswell pain to recall. And the first of these had occurred on 16 September. Johnson had a cold but was otherwise in fine form. And he's, you know, talking away about a whole host of. Of things. And he suddenly, it seems to Boswell goes off on a mad one. Johnson says, I have often thought that if I Kept a seraglio. So a harem. The ladies should all wear linen gowns or cotton, I mean, stuffs made of vegetable substances. And he's saying this because they've been talking about how linen is kind of vastly preferable to anything with animal substances. But it is a slightly really unexpected left field, Sally. And the fact that he said, I have often thought that if I kept a harem, I mean, Boswell finds this so unexpected that he bursts out laughing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Johnson doesn't like that.

[Tom Holland]

Johnson doesn't like this because he feels that he is now an object of ridicule. And in the kind of the published version of his journals, Boswell says he was too proud to submit, even for a moment to be the object of ridicule and instantly retaliated with keen sarcastic wit and a variety of degrading images. And Boswell doesn't specify what these degrading images are in the book, but in his journal he had done. And essentially what Johnson had done was to say, oh well, if I had a harem, you would be the eunuch. And there are some quite deep waters here, I feel, because of course Boswell had wanted to keep a harem for himself. He talked about that with Rousseau. And the idea of being a eunuch to Johnson, I mean, it just seems so wrong.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It hits him on various levels because a Boswell is so priapic that for him to be a eunuch, to be unmanned in this way, is an insult to his, to his masculinity. But also he kind of is Johnson's eunuch already.

[Tom Holland]

Well, he's the attendant, isn't he? He's the subordinate figure.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, he's Johnson's superfan.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. So I think there's a lot going on there. And so Boswell writes, I would gladly expunge from my mind every trace of this severe retort. And you can see why it's clearly striking him on all kinds of levels. Then there is a second episode which is very famous and again, Boswell could not bring himself to relate it in full. And it takes place at the very end of their journey. They've come back from the Hebrides, they're heading down to Edinburgh. But before they reach Edinburgh, they head southwards to the one place in Scotland that Johnson had always said he'd wanted to see and which Boswell had always longed to show him. And that of course is the ancestral seat of the Boswells.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Affleck. Oh, that's risky.

[Tom Holland]

It is risky.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Cuz his father, his father is. What is he? He's A wig. He's a Presbyterian, he's a Hanoverian. He's got no sense of fun or humor. I mean, I can't see him getting on with Samuel Johnson. I mean, he has.

[Tom Holland]

He has got a sense of humor, but it's very sharp and bitter and. And kind of piercing. It's not jolly.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And Boswell knows this. And so he. He says, you know, if Lord Affleck had not invited Johnson, Johnson, I would not have taken him there because, you know, he'd be fearing the worst, you know, worried about fireworks. But Lord Affleck had insisted. And so Boswell and Johnson had duly arrived at Affleck on the 2nd of November. And to begin with, everything goes well. Both men behave themselves. Johnson has a lovely time being led up by Boswell to inspect the ruins of the old castle on the. You know, on the gorge above the rivers. And the days pass and things seem to be perfectly amiable between Lord Affleck and Johnson. But then on the 6th of November, disaster. So Lord Affleck has a collection of medals and he keeps them in the library in his great classical house that he's just had built, and he pulls them out and he shows them to Johnson. When Oliver Cromwell's coin unfortunately introduced Charles I and Toryism, it's like when we

[Dominic Sandbrook]

do a thing and we end up with George Hours.

[Tom Holland]

Yes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The publisher and historian couple loft. And we accidentally praise Oliver Cromwell and he goes ballistic and starts shouting about Charles the First. This is. This is what happens. Right.

[Tom Holland]

This is the essence of Toryism, the belief that Charles the First should not have had his head chopped off.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Lord Affleck is, Is. Is. Is much more impressed by the execution and says that it reminds kings that they have vertebrae in their necks.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And Johnson just explodes and. And the row goes on and on. And Boswell, he can't avoid mentioning it in his book because it's really quite famous. The news of it leaks out, but he refuses to go into details. It would certainly be very unbecoming in me to exhibit my honoured father and my respected friend as intellectual gladiators for the entertainment of the public. And you slightly feel reading that. Well, I mean, nothing has stopped you doing exactly that before. I mean, Boswell only has to hear a conversation and he's transcribing it. But.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But not when they've gone head to head. No, that's the difference.

[Tom Holland]

These two men who are so important in his life, it kind of is his ultimate nightmare. But to reiterate basically everything else that Johnson has said on this tour, Boswell has written down. They are there in his journals. They are ready to be used. Johnson has decided on the course of the tour that he's going to write a book. Boswell has already, even before going on the tour with Johnson, decided that his ultimate ambition is to write a biography of Johnson. Johnson, once Johnson is dead. And so this is one of the reasons why he has been kind of occasionally goading Johnson. He wants, you know, he wants kind of good copy. Throughout the tour, he's pressing Johnson to tell him details about his life. And it's almost the case that Johnson is so busy writing up what Johnson says that he doesn't actually have much time to talk to Johnson. Johnson and Boswell have both returned from this trip with the kind of raw material for future books that both of them had wanted. And Boswell absolutely feels I do now have the material for a kind of a biography of Johnson that will be unlike any biography that has ever been written. However, even as he is plotting this, he is aware that he has a rival. Someone who actually is more familiar and certainly more intimate with Johnson than Boswell has ever been. And this is a rival who isn't just a woman, but more than that. Dominic, a woman from Wales.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Crikey. Well, that is a bombshell. Very exciting. If you're a member of the Rest Is History club, you can get that episode right now. If you're not and you would like to join our own depopulated Hebridean clan, then Please head to therestishistory.com so next time on the Rest is History. A sentence I thought I would never say. We will be talking about a Welsh woman. Goodbye.

[Tom Holland]

Bye bye. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up and audit dread.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's time for Vanta.

[Tom Holland]

Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance. Or call it compliance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to vanta.com calm. There's phishing and then there's phishing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Out here, you're after dinner. Online hackers are after your data. They'll bait you with fake emails, lookalike sites, anything to lure you in.

[Tom Holland]

But with Cisco Duo's end to end

[Dominic Sandbrook]

phishing, resistant access control. Every login, every device, every user stays protected. Looks like no one's biting today. Cisco Duo fishing season is over.

[Tom Holland]

Learn [e-mail] Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone. Paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full [e-mail].