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

What adventures occurred during Samuel Johnson and James Boswell’s journey into the heart of Scotland? How was their trip a gateway to the history of Scotland’s union with England in 1707? And, was Dr Johnson embroiled in the bloody Battle of Culloden…? Join Tom and Dominic as they travel into Scotland’s dark history, alongside Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and discuss their fascinating and funny adventures in the Highlands. Advertise with us: [email protected] _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek + Harry Swan Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really.

• 0:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you can shop loads and loads of cars online, you can compare prices, you can check the financing and trade-in options, and of course, you can do it from wherever you are. You start online, go to the dealer for your test drive and finish wherever works for you. Your information, your data stays with you, so there is no starting over. Plus, you are working with local dealers and there are real people there to help.

• 0:42Tom Holland?

  So buy your car online on AutoTrader, really.

• 0:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions, there's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.

• 1:10Tom Holland?

  For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.

• 1:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.

• 1:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.

• 2:00Tom Holland?

  Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee, you make it, add milk, drink it, nothing more.

• 2:10Tom Holland?

  Except.

• 2:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Except when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the seventeen hundreds, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.

• 2:26Tom Holland?

  And suddenly you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised. Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us. And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.

• 2:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok.

• 2:45Tom Holland?

  Visit tiktok.com forward slash discover more.

• 3:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 seventeen seventy-three, 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 eighteenth of August, we left Edinburgh. So that was the son of Litchfield, Samuel Johnson. And he is describing one of the great journeys in all history,

• 3:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 eighteenth 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.

• 4:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Tom, the Western Islands, have you been to the Western Islands?

• 4:33Tom Holland?

  I have, yes.

• 4:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Savage?

• 4:36Tom Holland?

  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.

• 4:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's good.

• 4:48Tom Holland?

  Because you mentioned how, to the average Englishman, the Western Isles, the 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 provides him with the basis for his book.

• 5:33Tom Holland?

  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 means Great Britain, of course.

• 6:02Dominic 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. And 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 we're at Boyd's Inn, which is just off the Royal Mile in the heart of Edinburgh.

• 6:37Tom 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 recognisable. 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 large, robust, I may say, approaching to the gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulence."

• 7:20Tom Holland?

  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."

• 7:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he's unprepossessing company at first appearance?

• 7:50Tom Holland?

  Yeah, I mean, he's distinctive, I think it would be fair to say. And he's arrived in Scotland, wearing his habitual brown suit, which 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.

• 8:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's not wrong.

• 8:08Tom Holland?

  He's got an enormous brown greatcoat, 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 going to be crawling with...

• 8:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bandits, ruffians and ne'er-do-wells.

• 8:39Tom 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 who's 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 travelled 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.

• 9:21Tom Holland?

  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 Great Wall of China.

• 9:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Like Richard Nixon.

• 9:40Tom 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

• 9:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Tom Holland?

  the ancestor of your erstwhile employers at the Daily Mail.

• 9:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're thinking about what to say there. I can see the cogs turning and you're 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.

• 10:02Tom Holland?

  What I will say about in favour of the first Viscount Rothermere is that knowing of Johnson's yearning to see the Great Wall of China and knowing he's been 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. Tremendous, a tremendous place.

• 10:20Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 10:22Tom Holland?

  So it has this stone from the Great Wall there.

• 10:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, great credit to Viscount Rothermere for that.

• 10:26Tom Holland?

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

• 10:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Brilliant.

• 10:29Tom 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.

• 10:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Boswell comes scurrying along to this inn off the Royal Mile, and he's delighted to see Johnson, isn't he?

• 10:58Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 11:11Tom Holland?

  Because Johnson is notorious for anti-Scottish prejudice. You know, he's always fulminating that Scotland's very poor, everyone eats oats, and that the Scots are forever fleeing Scotland for England. Boswell, of course, is an example of that. So

• 11:28Tom Holland?

  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.

• 11:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 11:45Tom Holland?

  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 huffrump thing, because it's provoked by what remains, 64 years on.

• 12:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 12:08Tom 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 Giles 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."

• 12:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ooh, the SNP end to the chat.

• 12:49Tom Holland?

  Boswell knows what he's doing.

• 12:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's winding Johnson up.

• 12:52Tom 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 pretence 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.

• 13:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Tom Holland?

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

• 13:24Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 13:28Tom Holland?

  Yes.

• 13:29Dominic 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 English 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.

• 13:51Tom Holland?

  "Sir, that's no defence. That makes you worse."

• 13:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, he's not wrong. Yeah, yeah. 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 motions, having a bit of fun, playing their parts.

• 14:04Tom Holland?

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

• 14:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 14:09Tom 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 rawer and fresher political emotions kind of edging 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

• 14:51Tom Holland?

  and led them southwards as far as Derby in the Midlands, so 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 Georges 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

• 15:31Tom Holland?

  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 north-east corner of Scotland, and his army had been annihilated. And 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

• 16:14Tom Holland?

  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. So the Stuarts.

• 16:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 16:42Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 16:52Tom 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.

• 17:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Tom Holland?

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

• 17:20Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 17:24Tom Holland?

  He definitely was by the time Cluddin comes. Earlier, 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.

• 17:35Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 17:39Tom Holland?

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

• 17:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 17:44Tom Holland?

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

• 17:50Dominic 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, at the library?

• 17:59Tom Holland?

  Yeah, in the Royal Library at Windsor. And so, I mean, Johnson's unapologetic about this. We, remember, we discussed, he, 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.

• 18:33Tom Holland?

  Boswell's father, Lord, Lord Affleck, he's a Whig and he's a massive supporter of the House of Hanover. All right, so, yeah. But Boswell, right from childhood, seems to have had this kind of romantic affection for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and it may be, you know, it's, 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, yeah. 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.

• 19:15Tom Holland?

  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. That completely should have happened. Should that not have happened? There's a Stuart kingdom of Corsica? Well, of history's great, great what ifs, it would have stopped Napoleon. Yeah. Um, 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, he takes refuge on, on the Hebrides, and I think

• 19:57Tom Holland?

  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.

• 20:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 20:28Tom Holland?

  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.

• 20:45Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 20:48Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 20:53Tom Holland?

  I think so, yes.

• 20:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm, nice.

• 20:55Tom 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 patterner of excitement to the scenes that they're going to be seeing in the Highlands, I think, absolutely.

• 21:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Excitingly for them, they will also get to visit one of my alma maters, whatever the plural of alma mater is.

• 21:16Tom Holland?

  Oh, yes, St Andrews.

• 21:17Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 21:25Tom Holland?

  He does. So he keeps landing what Boswell calls his pleasant hits against Scotland, but actually.

• 21:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Tom Holland?

  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, it's 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 travelled, speaks lots of languages. Frederick the Great would have loved him, would have enrolled him in his army.

• 22:15Tom Holland?

  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 Reformation had then destroyed it.

• 22:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 22:41Tom 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."

• 23:05Dominic 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 Siberian winds. It can be very cold and you're a long way from anywhere.

• 23:15Tom 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.

• 23:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 23:27Tom Holland?

  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

• 24:12Tom Holland?

  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.

• 24:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, no. Oh, that's great banter. So Johnson would absolutely despite, he would, I mean, that would force him to ride.

• 24:46Tom Holland?

  Yes.

• 24:47Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 24:49Tom 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 it. 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.

• 25:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Tom 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.

• 25:55Dominic 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 veneer of the city and getting into nature.

• 26:07Tom 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 Bucken, 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 huge 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

• 26:51Tom Holland?

  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.

• 27:02Tom Holland?

  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's 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

• 27:46Tom Holland?

  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. 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 were 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, is that he would go out and have sex with a prostitute,

• 28:30Tom Holland?

  I think, to feel alive. Obviously, the very deep waters there.

• 28:33Dominic 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,

• 28:40Tom Holland?

  I know. 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.

• 28:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Strange approaches that always somehow come back to the same destination, no?

• 28:58Tom Holland?

  Yeah, well, well, I mean, that is one, that is one destination, but another destination, as we say, is this kind of

• 29:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 29:04Tom Holland?

  This, 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 recognise 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.

• 29:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Tom Holland?

  Boswell kind of gibbering in his bed.

• 29:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  So if you're interested, ghosts and death, two very exciting places to come. So on the road to Inverness, two more big sights to look at. One of them is Macbeth's Castle. So the castle of Cordor 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. It's own, I mean, how does that work in those days? Somebody must live there or is it ruined?

• 30:11Tom 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 with 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.

• 30:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 30:54Tom Holland?

  He's removed someone from his comfortable surroundings and placed him in a locale where

• 31:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Tom Holland?

  all kinds of adventures might ensue. And he's always kind of framing Johnson in his mind.

• 31:06Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 31:11Tom Holland?

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

• 31:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they hung around. It was a promotional thing for Paddy Power. I think so improbable. So yeah, but no more improbable than um yeah, Samuel Johnson go to Scotland.

• 31:24Tom Holland?

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

• 31:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 31:45Tom Holland?

  They don't have horses that they could ride. Um, 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 Caluden 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

• 32:28Tom Holland?

  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.

• 32:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah. I forgot he was there.

• 32:42Tom 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 as it 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.

• 33:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:06Tom Holland?

  Because the backdrop to this is that Captain Cook has just returned from his trip around the world, the trip to Australia with the goat. Johnson had actually written the poem in Latin, saluting the goat. Um, and he's friends with Banks. Um, and he reveals that Banks in Australia had seen a really remarkable animal, which Banks terms a kangaroo. And people say, well, what, you know, what does this kangaroo look like? And Johnson, this incredibly eminent, this incredibly distinguished, this incredibly heavy man.

• 33:45Tom Holland?

  Rises to his feet.

• 33:48Tom Holland?

  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.

• 34:02Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 34:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spend all my time working, and in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland, who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could use to hire that clone for me.

• 34:47Tom Holland?

  Well, Dominic, you are in luck, because if you are hiring, then ZipRecruiter is the great time saver. You can try it free at ziprecruiter.com/history. It shows you qualified candidates almost instantly. So, save time with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/history. That's ziprecruiter.com/history. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 35:31Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So, go to mintmobile.com/history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 36:11Tom Holland?

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 36:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 36:53Tom Holland?

  So they asked over 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 37:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory and keep thinking.

• 37:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is History. It is the 30th of August, 1773. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell have left Inverness. They have left the world of stagecoaches and comfortable inns and civilised company. And they are riding west into the Highlands and their destination, Tomlochness.

• 37:37Tom 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."

• 37:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exciting.

• 37:50Tom Holland?

  So they don't spot the monster.

• 37:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  What? Oh, disappointing.

• 37:54Tom Holland?

  Nobody knows the monster exists.

• 37:55Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 38:00Tom Holland?

  Yes, and you can hear our episode about 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.

• 38:31Tom Holland?

  And so they all pile in and inside it, they find a pot filled with goat meat bubbling over a peat fire. And Johnson, he's like Louis III or someone, he's kind of interviewing this woman, even though she doesn't speak English, she only speaks Gaelic or Earth, 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 Earth, i.e. Gaelic. She spoke with a kind of high tone. He told us she was afraid we wanted to go to bed to her. This cocket tree, or whatever it may be called, of so wretched a like being was truly ludicrous.

• 39:14Dominic 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 him he consorts on Westminster Bridge.

• 39:24Tom Holland?

  But maybe his reputation had gone before him.

• 39:26Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 39:31Tom Holland?

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

• 40:14Tom Holland?

  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 Gaelic. And Boswell writes, Mr. Johnson was pleased at seeing for the first time such a state of human life. So.

• 40:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 40:31Tom 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.

• 41:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Tom Holland?

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

• 41:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Reminds 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.

• 41:22Tom Holland?

  Yes, get eaten by Native Americans.

• 41:24Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 41:29Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 41:30Dominic 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

• 41:40Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Dominic 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.

• 41:45Tom 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, you know, they've been travelling over wild, thinly inhabited upland regions. And they they climb down and they arrive in Glen Moriston, 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.

• 42:29Tom Holland?

  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 stye.

• 42:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Tom Holland?

  But it's intermingled with a sense of romantic pride at how magnificent the scenery is and how 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. Um, 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 travelling from the wincott 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.

• 43:35Tom Holland?

  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 who 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

• 44:13Tom Holland?

  massive Scottish patriotism jag. Um, 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."

• 44:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 44:41Tom 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. Um, 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'd said that his blood was stirred, now his mind is stirred. But basically, he's very, very stirred by all of this.

• 45:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  But.

• 45:18Tom Holland?

  But yeah.

• 45:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's had a massive row with Johnson. What's going on?

• 45:21Tom 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 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.

• 46:06Tom Holland?

  A common ignorant horse hire 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.

• 46:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because Johnson's dignity has been completely undermined by this, right? He can't ride the pony. The pony is 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.

• 46:30Tom 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 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 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 think no moron.

• 47:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, I'm glad they made up anyway.

• 47:12Tom Holland?

  They do make up.

• 47:14Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 47:17Tom Holland?

  No, that's what they really want.

• 47:19Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 47:27Tom Holland?

  Yeah. So he's married to Elizabeth Boswell, who's a distant cousin of Boswell's. So Boswell knows Sir Alexander McDonald. And had actually met with him in London and there Sir Alexander had issued a formal invitation because Boswell had said, oh, 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.

• 48:07Tom Holland?

  In the wake of Caladan, it had been prescribed for everyone except for Highlanders serving with the British Army.

• 48:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 48:13Tom Holland?

  And so the fact that Sir Alexander McDonald has turned up in the traditional Highland dress, this portends tremendous, tremendous entertainment. What's even better is that Lady McDonald, 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.

• 48:40Tom Holland?

  Except that, this is not what they get.

• 48:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, no.

• 48:43Tom Holland?

  Sir 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 clanssmen, there are no claymores, um, kind of no outlander vibes in any way. The dinner is a shocker. It's kind of undercooked. It's boring. Sir Alexander hasn't brought his chef with him to the island. The punch, there's almost no alcohol in the punch at all.

• 49:12Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 49:15Tom Holland?

  And Lady McDonald, whom Boswell remembered as being absolutely enchanting.

• 49:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 49:20Tom Holland?

  Seems, I mean, Johnson, Johnson says she seems cut out of cabbage. This woman would sink a ninety gun ship, she is so dull and heavy.

• 49:32Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 49:37Tom 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, you know, it's not what he wants at all.

• 49:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sir Alexander MacDonald has let Scotland down.

• 49:49Tom Holland?

  He has a blazing row with Sir Alexander.

• 49:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Get a better wife, for God's sake.

• 49:53Tom 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 Rossay. 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.

• 50:36Tom Holland?

  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 Rossay. 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?

• 51:12Dominic 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, but it has been destroyed or it's being lost. And that's what really is on his mind.

• 51:35Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so he will write in his book, we came there 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.

• 51:56Tom Holland?

  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. Yeah.

• 52:37Tom Holland?

  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 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.

• 53:19Tom Holland?

  And Johnson writes, 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. So.

• 53:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they're losing their Scottishness.

• 53:56Tom 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 mouldering Glens or on the Isles or whatever, are increasingly leaving for America, either to fight for the British Army 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 commercialising nation, a prospering nation, that there are victims.

• 54:40Dominic 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'd take your pistols, thinking this part of you that thinks, gosh, are we going to be taken prisoner by the Sioux or something? And you get there and it's all gone and it's all changed and it's partly repression and it's partly the process of you know, capitalism and industrialisation and urbanisation and all those kinds of things. And this is a preview of that, no?

• 55:07Tom Holland?

  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 judgement 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 that's true more generally. I mean, you could apply it perhaps to life in Western democracies at the moment if you wanted to.

• 55:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Tom 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. Oh, that's nice. So Boswell, actually, needn't have worried, Johnson isn't having a bad time.

• 56:36Tom Holland?

  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, he's, Johnson's expecting storms. Yeah. And the two months in the Hebrides that follow this kind of slightly unfortunate introduction to Skye, they are a triumph. So Racy, 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.

• 57:20Tom Holland?

  This is what we came to find." Oh. They come back to Skye and they travel to Kingsborough, 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

• 58:01Tom Holland?

  Again, Boswell, the documentary director, to see Mr Samuel Johnson salute Miss Flora McDonald was a wonderful romantic scene to me. And what's even more romantic is that they stay in Flora McDonald'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, I mean, you know, this is

• 58:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 58:23Tom Holland?

  incredible.

• 58:25Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 58:32Tom Holland?

  Absolute heaven. Yeah.

• 58:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 58:33Tom Holland?

  So he really is having a brilliant time. Um, and I think the final highlight for Johnson is perhaps the most moving of all. And this, they, they go to Mull and then they take a crossing, a very short crossing to, um, Iona, which is a holy island for the Scots. And indeed, I think for any British Christian, um, St. Columba, the Irish monk had founded a monastery there back in, in five, six, three. Commemorated as the great cradle of Scottish Christianity and Johnson feels

• 59:08Tom Holland?

  an immense surge of emotion visiting it. And he, he wrote about it in a very, very famous line. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.

• 59:27Dominic 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.

• 59:44Tom Holland?

  Yeah. And so all their kind of, you know, memories of rows about ponies and so on have ended 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.

• 1:00:04Tom Holland?

  And the first of these had occurred on the 16th of September. Johnson had a cold but was otherwise in fine form and he's, you know, talking away about a whole host 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 Suralio, 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 unexpected left field, Sally.

• 1:00:46Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:00:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Johnson doesn't like that.

• 1:00:56Tom 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, you know, 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 so. And the idea of being a eunuch to Johnson, I mean, it just seems so wrong.

• 1:01:41Dominic Sandbrook?

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

• 1:01:55Tom Holland?

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

• 1:01:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, he's Johnson's superfan.

• 1:02:00Tom 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-

• 1:02:17Tom Holland?

  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, Aflac.

• 1:02:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, that's risky.

• 1:02:43Tom Holland?

  It is risky.

• 1:02:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because his father, his father is, what is he? He's a Whig, he's a Presbyterian, he's a Hanoverian. He's got no sense of fun or humour. I mean, I can't see him getting on with Samuel Johnson.

• 1:02:55Tom Holland?

  I mean, he has, he has got a sense of humour, but it's very sharp and bitter and, and kind of piercing. It's not jolly. And Boswell knows this. And so he, he says, if Lord Aflac had not invited Johnson, I would not have taken him there because, you know, he'd be fearing the worst. You know, worried about fireworks. But Lord Aflac had insisted. And so Boswell and Johnson had duly arrived at Aflac 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

• 1:03:39Tom Holland?

  between Lord Aflac and Johnson. But then on the 6th of November, disaster. So Lord Aflac 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 the First and Toryism.

• 1:04:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's like when we do a thing and we end up with George Hours.

• 1:04:10Tom Holland?

  Yes.

• 1:04:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  The publisher and historian.

• 1:04:12Tom Holland?

  Couple loft.

• 1:04:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  And we accidentally praise Oliver Cromwell and he goes ballistic and starts shouting about Charles the First. This is, this is what happens, right?

• 1:04:20Tom Holland?

  This is the essence of Toryism. The belief that Charles the First should not have had his head chopped off. Lord Aflac is, is, is much more impressed by the execution and says that it reminds kings that they have vertebrae in their necks. And Johnson just explodes and.

• 1:04:37Tom Holland?

  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- But not when they've gone head to head. No. That's the difference. 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

• 1:05:18Tom Holland?

  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 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

• 1:06:01Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:06:27Tom Holland?

  Someone who actually-

• 1:06:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. 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. Bye bye.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound terzepatide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5 or 15mg injection. Zepbound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Don't take if allergic to it or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonelurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea and vomiting which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger: Fresh for Everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.