Today, Scotland stands on the edge of the most important
event in her history for 300 years, the vote on whether to end her union
with the rest of the United Kingdom and become, once again, independent.
Through the centuries of Union, Scotland's greatest writers
have struggled with questions of national identity and I've chosen
a handful of the sharpest,
whose voices are still so clear and so resonant.
From a bestselling novelist, who cast an enduring
and seductive spell over popular culture,
selling stories of tartan-clad clans and noble chiefs,
to a rebel poet who fought ferociously
to lay the foundations for a new form of Scottish nationalism.
But in this film I want to begin closer to home,
not with novels or poetry, but with the father of modern journalism.
We are all of us laughable, lovable, and often ridiculous creatures,
and James Boswell writes it like it is.
His self-portrait is unflinching and often unflattering.
He writes what it was like to be a young Scot
in the green years
of the Scottish/English Union like nobody else.
It's James Boswell's life
and work that capture the spirit of the age.
Torn between pride in his noble heritage
and a lusty appreciation of everything the Union had to offer.
And above all, it's his friendship with one of the most famous,
iconic Englishmen of the age, which represents the best that
can happen when a prickly Scot and a proud Englishman work together.
THUNDER RUMBLES
Historians have, for centuries, pored over ancient texts to shed
light upon nations and their people.
"Now I behold the chiefs, in the pride of their former deeds!
"Their souls are kindled at the battles of old,
"at the actions of other times.
"Their eyes are flames of fire.
"They roll in search of the foes of the land.
"Their mighty hands are on their swords.
"Lightning pours from their sides of steel.
"They come like streams from the mountains,
"each rushes roaring from the hill."
These are the words of the great Gaelic bard Ossian,
whose stories of heroes, and heroines, kings and princes
and battles, had been passed down, generation by generation.
Who were the original people of the British Isles?
Forget Stonehenge, forget King Arthur and Camelot, forget all
the English history that is merely game of thrones. The original
people were the Gaels of Scotland, and the poems of Ossian proved it.
Brought to light in the 1760s, these myths and legends allowed
the Scots to hold their heads up high -
ancient, superior, noble.
In fact, Ossian himself was a myth, and the poems were a complete fraud.
They had been invented by a modern writer, James Macpherson,
and they tell us absolutely nothing at all about the real
Scotland of the middle of the 18th century,
just a few decades into its union with England - for that we have
to turn to a very different writer, a friend of Macpherson's,
and a hero of mine, but not perhaps an entirely conventional hero.
James Boswell - the father of modern journalism,
inventor of the literary biography, and a prolific diarist.
He has, however, been quite overlooked
as a Scottish literary giant,
and the reason lies not in his skills as a writer
but because of his most famous subject.
You see, Boswell didn't write about Scottish heroes
but an all-too-real Englishman -
Samuel Johnson,
and the legendary creator of the English Dictionary casts
a very long shadow.
After Shakespeare, Johnson remains the most quoted man
in the English language,
famous for his caustic aphorisms about every part of life.
What people don't so readily recall is that it's Boswell's busy pen
that preserved them for us.
When a man is tired of London,
he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.
Sir, I have found you an argument,
I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Sir, a woman's preaching...
BOSWELL JOINS IN: is like a dog walking on his hind legs.
It is not done well,
but you are surprised to find it is done at all.
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
So why is James Boswell such a great writer in English prose?
The answer lies in his epic Life Of Dr Johnson.
This is the first edition.
Nothing like this book had ever been written in English before.
We'd had lots of biographies, of course, but they tended to be
rather generalised, windy, moralistic volumes. This is
the first one which tries to give the reader
everything about the subject -
the cadences of his speech, how he dressed, what he looked like,
his little ticks and mannerisms, his table manners.
"When at table, he was totally
"absorbed in the business of the moment. His looks seemed riveted to
"the plate, nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word,
"or even pay the least attention to what was said by others,
"till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged
"with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins in
"his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible."
To those whose sensations were delicate, this could not but be
disgusting, and it was doubtless not very suitable to the character
of a philosopher, who should be distinguished by self-command.
As a writer, Boswell didn't deal in myths but in real men
and women with real passions and real appetites.
He wanted to record their actual words -
the insults, the anecdotes, the beliefs.
And as a result, if you want to know the pith of the period,
the essence of the times,
you shouldn't go to any great poet or novelist of the period, you need
to go to the diaries, the scribbled journals of wee Jimmy Boswell.
But first it's vital to understand the world in which they were
written - defined by an event that took place 30 years
before Boswell was even born.
In 1707, the streets of Edinburgh were a flurry of pamphleteers,
campaigners, and naked nationalism, as Scotland faced a monumental
vote on the Act of Union with England.
Not a popular vote back then, mind you, no referendum in 1707,
but the choice of a privileged few politicians.
The old Scottish Parliament of nobles and landowners
tore themselves in two over the question of the Union.
Huge feuds, great speeches, massive emotion.
And then, in 1707,
the old Scots Parliament voted itself into oblivion.
Sitting here in the empty chamber,
it's hard not to be swept up
by the mythic significance of that decision -
a noble alliance forged, or a nation lost?
But, like Boswell, I'm more interested in focusing
on the facts.
And for that, I've come to see rare documents
that chart the rocky road to Union.
So what we have here, Andrew, is a volume containing
the minutes of the proceedings in the Scots Parliament,
moment by moment,
debating all the different Articles of Union.
And here you have these very rare examples of the votes
and here you see all the nobility, the barons,
all those people who had a vote, their names are listed here
and whether they voted yes or no, aye or nay.
It's hard to have a view about the Union
until you've really read these very closely.
What's very interesting to me is that this is the practical,
detailed, tough negotiations
that people say would follow a yes vote now.
It's about how do we negotiate these practical details
of living together or living a little bit further apart?
How is it done? Here we are.
Absolutely amazing, Bill, I can't believe I'm actually
reading this stuff. But what we have here, Andrew, in another
volume, is very exciting,
it's a similar collection of the minutes, with other material,
but it's the Boswell copy.
The Boswell family copy, fantastic!
It's the book that Boswell would have
pulled off the shelf in the library to really understand what
this union was about. If you don't know what's happened in the past,
you won't necessarily know how to look forward to the future.
True then, true now - this is not history, this is current affairs.
But it's hard to imagine what,
if any, answers Boswell would have found amongst these dry pages.
While they outline in minute detail what happened,
they offer very little clue as to why.
Unless you know a little of the bigger picture, which is
an even more familiar story, of greedy bankers
and dodgy investments and the risking of other people's money.
A few years before, a scheme to open up a Scottish trading
outpost in Panama, called Darien, attracted huge investment -
it proved disastrous.
The Darien scheme was supposed to be the beginnings
of an independent Scottish empire and a wave of enthusiasm
coursed through the country,
but the scheme was destroyed by three formidable enemies -
the Spanish, disease, and the English.
The failure of Darien cost Scotland a quarter of her entire wealth
almost overnight, and powerfully reinforced the argument at
the time of the Union that Scotland was simply too poor to go it alone.
The Union had, in fact, merely accentuated division...
..between a desire to go it alone
and the need to somehow make it work together.
But Scotland had long been a country divided - by religion,
by politics and by geography.
It can be clumsily split into two distinct parts.
The Highlands - wild, untamed, and unruly.
And the Lowlands - a place of civilisation, privilege
and education, where, in 1740, James Boswell was born to landed gentry.
Boswell was brought up here on their grounds at Auchinleck.
It's kind of undistinguished rolling farmland with some trees planted by
the family, but right in the middle of it there is plonked down this.
It's like a slice of Jane Austen slap bang in the heart of Ayrshire.
This quintessentially English country house was, in fact,
designed by Boswell's father, Lord Auchinleck, in the late 1750s,
but stands as the perfect monument to the man -
formal, austere, Georgian.
A respected judge and a devout Presbyterian,
he was sober and serious.
His son was the polar opposite in every way.
Boswell's early years were anything but idyllic.
Boswell was a nervous, sickly, lonely child,
haunted by fears of damnation and over-protected by his mother.
Around the age of 17, he seems to have gone through
something like a nervous breakdown, but he emerged from this
with his personality miraculously transformed,
like a gorgeous butterfly emerging from a little green caterpillar.
He was now flamboyant, colourful and gregarious.
By now, he was attending Edinburgh University, where
he enjoyed his first, addictive tastes of freedom.
At the time, the city was the hub of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Home to the greatest economists and philosophers of the age.
Boswell must have been exposed to radical new ideas.
It was here he developed a passion for literature
and the theatre,
hanging out with actresses and arty types.
None of which would have exactly delighted his father,
Lord Auchinleck.
Disappointed fathers and wayward sons - that is an old story,
but this one is a cracker!
The old man is austere, abstemious and self-controlled,
his son not so much.
Now, Lord Auchinleck designed this house himself
and on the front he put a slogan expressly aimed at his son.
What this means is, roughly speaking,
"This may be the back-end of beyond,
"but if you have a sober disposition,
"everything you seek is right here."
Boswell came to love this house later on in his life, but his
early years were spent as a kind of living heckle on that slogan.
"Everything I need is here? Old man, you must be mad!"
The differences between father
and son went right to the heart of the Scottish psyche.
Lord Auchinleck was pro-Union and supported King George
and the Hanoverian dynasty.
His son romanticised Scotland before the Union and admired
the deposed Catholic, King James.
Now, while it may seem odd for the younger man to hanker after
the good old days,
this was all still very much fresh in the memory.
Boswell would have been just five years old
when King James's grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie,
led the Jacobites against the government forces here at Culloden.
Government casualties were light
but the Highlanders suffered severe losses.
The young prince turned tail and fled.
Those he left behind were butchered.
The biggest casualty of Culloden wouldn't be the Jacobite cause
but the Highland way of life itself.
From now on, Gaelic culture was to be suppressed at all costs.
For a very long time, Culloden was misunderstood as
a straightforward battle between the Scots and the English.
It wasn't.
There were, in fact, plenty of Scots fighting on the government side.
This was really a battle between the old and the new,
between the rising Britain of merchants, lawyers and shopkeepers,
and the old, romantic world of the clans and ancient Gaelic culture.
Scots of Boswell's time were
profoundly confused about the meaning of Culloden.
When Boswell himself was a small boy, he declared that he was
a Jacobite and would pray for King James.
One of his uncles shook his head and said, "No, no, no,
"I will give you this coin if you change your mind
"and pray for King George and the Hanoverians."
Boswell instantly trousered the coin and changed his position,
which tells you a great deal about James Boswell,
and quite a bit about Scotland.
Boswell struggled between his head and his heart, but he ultimately
did what he was told, following his father's path into the law.
Serious study, however,
was never going to be enough to keep his attention.
In 1760, aged 19, he fled to London in search of adventure.
I was all life and joy.
I repeated Cato's soliloquy on the immortality of the soul
and my own soul bounded forth a certain prospect of happy futurity.
I gave three huzzahs, and we went briskly in.
'This is not an unfamiliar story - an ambitious young man leaving
'Scotland behind to make his name amongst the bright lights.'
I love Boswell and I always have done since my mother gave me
a copy of his London journal when I was still very young
and impressionable, and ever since then I've been compelled by
his ambition, by his wild-eyed naivety,
his enthusiasm, and by his courage.
And, of course, I can relate to a man torn between patriotism
and the excitement of the big city -
in our case, between love of Scotland and lust for London.
In the 18th century,
London was overrun with ambitious Scots determined to make
the most of the opportunities the Union had brought them.
But what many of them soon discovered was the accent had to go.
Societies were formed and how-to guides were published,
all aimed at removing the dreaded Scotticism.
Don't say "wee", say "little".
Never say "bairn", say "child".
Don't say a "chest", a coffin.
Don't say "youthy", say "youthful".
Don't say "geck" "gawk" or "gawky", say "a foolish fellow".
Don't say "lug", say "ear", even for those of us who do have big lugs.
It is a very strange thing to do.
Language is intimately involved with our sense of who we are and
here are the pro-Union Scots ripping out from their own throats the old
traditional words of Scotland that had been there for generations.
All this is enough to send a shudder through any proud Scot,
but arguably the biggest betrayal was perpetrated in an attic
right in the heart of London,
where a group of Scotsmen were working for Samuel Johnson on his most ambitious undertaking...
..an English dictionary.
This rather bare garret is the very room where Johnson's
dictionary was composed,
and while it has to be admitted
that his Scots workers were essentially cheap,
migrant labour, there is a delicious irony in the fact that they
were employed at all by a man whose view of the Scots was so plain.
"Oats, a grain which in England is generally given to horses.
But in Scotland appears to support the people.
The noblest prospect a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that
leads him to England.
Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.
Johnson was bullish and opinionated.
The arrogance of formalising an entire language epitomised
a man with a supreme confidence in his own ability.
Coupled with a physical presence that ensured he was as imposing
in person as he was in print, he became feared
and revered in equal measure,
the very embodiment of an Englishman.
Young Boswell was happily establishing
an altogether different reputation.
Like most 22-year-olds loose in the big city,
Boswell was here to find himself and have fun.
He wanted the three great gets - get famous, get drunk and get laid.
Fame would come later on, but when it came to the drink
and the women he was triumphantly successful.
We know about his huge alcoholic excesses and hangovers,
and his dirty encounters with prostitutes in London parks,
and the resultant gonorrhoea, because he wrote it all down,
confessions which, in the 21st century would be meaty,
but, in the 18th century, were quite extraordinary.
"I came softly in the room and in a sweet delirium slipped into bed
"and was immediately clasped in her snowy arms
"and pressed to her milky white bosom."
Good heavens! What a loose did we give to amorous dalliance.
The friendly curtain of darkness concealed our blushes.
In a moment, I felt myself animated with the strongest powers of love,
and from my dearest creature's kindness had a most luscious feast.
Proud of my godlike vigour, I resumed the noble game.
I was in full glow of health.
Sobriety had preserved me from effeminacy and weakness
and my bounding blood beat quick and high alarms.
A more voluptuous night I had never enjoyed.
Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture.
Clearly Boswell and Johnson lived very different lives in London and
it was, frankly, quite unlikely they would ever have reason to meet.
Boswell wanted to hang out with the in-crowd,
the celebrities of the day.
And 18th century London was very different from London now.
Now if you want to be a celebrity, you have to have a tattoo or
wear a dress with holes in it, then you actually had to achieve
something, write great poems or essays on Shakespeare.
And there was no bigger celebrity than Samuel Johnson.
But even Boswell's puppyish self-confidence was
put to the test when the two men's paths finally crossed.
Here, in what was once a bookshop called Davies, Boswell was
taking tea when Johnson unexpectedly arrived.
I was much agitated
and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch,
of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell him
"where I come from!" "From Scotland," cried Davies, roguishly.
"Mr Johnson," said I, "I do indeed come from Scotland,
"but I can't help it."
That, sir, I find, is what a very great number of your countrymen
cannot help.
"This stroke stunned me greatly,
"and when we were sat down I found myself not a little embarrassed
"and apprehensive of what might come next."
And what happened next was quite unexpected.
Over the coming weeks, a firm and famous friendship was forged.
Johnson loved vigorous debate and youthful exuberance
and Boswell was more than happy to supply both.
Although it's hard not to feel uneasy at Boswell's haste
in denying his Scottishness to oil up to the great bear.
Reading his diaries it's easy to wonder
if Boswell had forgotten himself altogether.
There's nothing more from the rebel who wanted to break up the Union.
Instead, it's pages and pages of pleasure seeking.
And yet there are moments when Boswell casts
a light on the darker side of being a Scot in the big city,
most searingly exposed one evening
when he was indulging in one of his favourite pastimes.
Just before the curtain rose on a new production of a comic opera
at a Covent Garden theatre, Boswell noticed that two
Highland officers, just back from serving abroad, had arrived.
A mob from the upper gallery roared out, "No Scots! No Scots!
"Out with them!" Hissed and pelted them with apples.
My heart warmed to my countrymen. My Scotch blood boiled with indignation.
I jumped up on the benches and roared out, "Damn you, you rascals!"
Hissed, and was in the greatest rage.
I'm very sure at that time I should have been the most
distinguished of heroes. I hated the English.
I wished from my soul that the Union was broke and that we might give them another battle of Bannockburn!
This was the first time Boswell really let his own feelings show.
He didn't want to end the Union. He was enjoying its fruits
far too much for that, but he was a divided, even a torn, man.
Boswell was acutely aware that he was an outsider.
He struggled to choose between the freedoms of his British future
and the obligations
of his Scottish past.
Finally, in 1763, his father made the decision for him,
when he told his son to stop messing about
and travel to Utrecht in Holland to further his study in the law.
Boswell, deprived of Johnson and the distractions of London,
fell into a deep depression.
He took comfort in an ambitious and surprisingly serious project.
"The Scottish language is being lost every day
"and in a short time will become quite unintelligible.
"It is for that reason that I have undertaken to make a dictionary
"of our tongue through which one will always have the means of learning it,
"like any other dead language."
Tantalisingly, we've only known of the dictionary through
scattered clues in Boswell's writing.
The dictionary itself has never been found until recently,
quite by chance.
Buried among the books
and manuscripts of the Bodleian Library in Oxford,
an enthusiastic researcher came across an unattributed manuscript.
For Boswell, of all people, to write this,
the first ever dictionary of the Scots language, was an act
of perhaps surprising, patriotic assertion at a time when
so many other Scots were trying to lose their own culture,
because the words people use, the language,
is the essence of a people.
This is the dictionary of conversations in streets,
in fields, in villages, between living Scotsmen
and that gives it a kind of directness, a sort of shock
earthiness which perhaps Johnson's dictionary often lacks.
It's full of words like "bubbles" for snot,
and "dowp" for backside, and, above all, "mappin" for "harlot",
a word that Boswell, as we know, needed to use quite frequently.
Boswell was clearly attempting to impress his hero, Samuel Johnson.
But he was also treading on the territory of that other
looming figure in his life, his father.
Lord Auchinleck was a scholar of Scottish language
and yet Boswell never seeks out his help or his advice.
He must have fantasised about the moment he returned home
and finally presented his great achievement.
Frustratingly but predictably, Boswell got distracted.
He abandoned his task in favour of heading off on a Grand Tour
across Europe, ticking off along the way the great
intellectual capitals of Geneva and Rome.
But it would, in fact, be one little island in the Mediterranean
that would inspire him the most.
Corsica - a small, mountainous country with an ancient,
violent and romantic past in thrall to a much larger neighbour.
It's not so difficult to see why Boswell was interested.
What is harder is to understand why its leader, General Paoli,
who is the kind of Che Guevara of the story, falls for Boswell,
of all people, because Boswell is not instantly attractive.
And yet he clearly had something, because time and time again,
famous men and women absolutely go for him.
I think he had a kind of seedy charisma
we can't quite recapture now.
At any rate, Boswell comes back to London and he publishes his journal
of the travels in Corsica and he becomes famous for the first time.
He parades around London, dressed up as a Corsican bandit.
And for most of his life he's not known as the biographer
of Johnson, he's known as Corsica Boswell.
A celebrated figure at last,
translations of his Journal sold widely across Europe.
But if Johnson was impressed, he hid it well in his letters.
I wish you would empty your head of Corsica,
which I think has filled it for rather too long.
But at all events, I shall be glad, very glad, to see you.
I am, sir, yours affectionately, Sam Johnson.
But how can you bid me empty my mind of Corsica?
My noble-minded friend, do you not feel for an oppressed nation
bravely struggling to be free?
Consider fairly what is the case.
The Corsicans never received any kindness from the Genoese.
They never agreed to be subject to them.
They owe them nothing,
and when reduced to an abject state of slavery by force shall they not
rise in the great cause of liberty and break the galling yoke?
Corsica gave Boswell the courage to state words
he would never dare utter in defence of his own country.
Fame and fortune seemed to herald a more serious
and responsible man altogether.
A qualified lawyer in Edinburgh, Boswell even got married
and started a family.
But appearances can be deceptive.
While in Scotland, he played the role of dutiful husband
and father, in England, he was playing a very different part.
Indulging in regular jaunts to London, Boswell was free
to enjoy wine, women, and, of course,
the company of his hero and mentor, Samuel Johnson.
But he wasn't the only Scottish writer making
a splash in the capital.
James Macpherson claimed to have
found and translated the ancient poems of a Gaelic bard called
Ossian, and the publication of these epic tales of heroism caused
a sensation, not just in England but across the continent.
At last, Scottish culture was not something to hide or be suppressed.
Reading them today, it's frankly hard to see why.
They are the most terrible tosh.
Nonetheless, this was the early age of Romanticism
and it appealed to something in the atmosphere,
everyone loved them.
Not everyone, not Samuel Johnson.
Johnson became convinced the poems were a complete fraud
and the trouble with Johnson is once he thought something
he couldn't help saying so.
This, not unnaturally, infuriated James Macpherson,
another big, strong man, six foot three,
and he challenged Johnson to a duel.
Johnson took to carrying a weighted stick with him
at all times for protection but none of this stopped his invective.
I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting
what I think a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian!
What would you have me retract?
I thought your book an imposture.
I think it an imposture still.
Johnson's attitude to the Scots was legendary
and merely inflamed by his feud with Macpherson.
So I think it's even more astonishing to find that
Boswell now set off upon a fresh mission -
he would take Samuel Johnson on a tour of Scotland.
Johnson was not a man easily moved in any sense
and it is a testament to his feelings for Boswell that he
agreed to set out on the journey at all.
This was a bold and risky gamble, to take the most opinionated
and influential Englishman north of the border.
The great journey began here in the relative civilisation
of central Edinburgh.
I say relative, because Edinburgh in the 1770s wasn't
quite as sophisticated as London.
When Johnson arrived he called for lemonade, the waiter brought it,
he said, "I'd like some sugar," the waiter dropped it into the glass
and then mixed it with his extremely dirty finger.
Johnson was appalled and outraged. But worse was to follow.
The Scottish habit at the time was after one had done one's business
to throw the resulting deposit out of a high window
into the street, shouting out "Gardyloo!"
which comes from the French "garde a l'eau",
or "watch out for the water",
and worse.
And the great Dr Johnson was very nearly hit
by a flying Scottish turd.
But Johnson was rarely at a loss for something to say
so he turned to Boswell, and said, "Sir, I smell you in the dark."
All right, not perhaps the most auspicious start
but Boswell was undeterred and headed to the old Parliament Hall.
Always wanting to test him, Boswell brought Johnson here
to the scene of the Scottish Parliament's suicide.
"I here began to indulge old Scottish sentiments and to express
"a warm regret that by our Union with England we were no more.
"Our independent kingdom was lost."
Would the old man soften?
He would not!
"You would have been glad, however, to have had us last war, sir,
"to fight your battles."
"We should have had you for the same price,
"though there had been no Union, as we might have had Swiss or other troops.
"No, no, I shall agree to a separation.
"You have only to go home."
If Edinburgh didn't thaw Johnson's attitude,
the wild north was an even less appealing proposition.
And yet, having journeyed for three weeks all the way to
Inverness, Boswell and Johnson would decide to spend a whole month,
more than a third of their entire tour, on one small island.
Now this is, bizarrely and unforgivably,
my first time on Skye, and it can get a bit wild and woolly.
But you have to imagine Johnson and Boswell doing this on ponies
with old-fashioned clothing, this was a genuinely daunting wilderness.
It was a bit like the first Europeans breaking through
to the American Wild West.
Bleak, beautiful, unforgiving and harsh,
this landscape would have challenged even the fittest traveller,
let alone the 63-year-old Dr Johnson.
And to make matters worse, they chose to travel in September.
THUNDER ROLLS
Their first experiences of local hospitality were mixed -
at best, charmingly rustic, at worst, primitive,
not helped by the torrential rain.
However, after a week, the clouds began to lift and they were able to
sail across to the Isle of Raasay.
At last, fortune shined on them.
Boswell and Johnson enjoyed a wonderful four days of drinking
and dancing, topped off with an invitation from the clan chief
of the MacLeods to come and join him at his castle at Dunvegan.
No surprise perhaps that while Johnson rested his weary feet,
Boswell found the energy
to climb the nearest mountain
and dance a jig!
Back on Skye, Boswell
and Johnson chose to take the long route to Dunvegan Castle.
There was an even more eminent appointment
they were determined to keep,
to meet Flora MacDonald -
a woman who has become mythologised in Scottish culture,
and even then was a living legend.
20 years earlier, she'd risked life and limb to harbour
Bonnie Prince Charlie, disguising him as her maidservant
to get him out of Scotland.
To see Dr Samuel Johnson, great champion of the English Tories,
salute Miss Flora MacDonald in the Isle of Skye was a striking sight.
We were entertained with the usual hospitality by Mr MacDonald
and his lady, Flora MacDonald,
a name that will be mentioned in history
and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour.
Boswell was almost skipping with delight at introducing
the old English Tory to the Jacobite heroine,
and Johnson was suitably impressed, not just by her soft features and
demeanour, but by the courage and loyalty she had shown to her prince.
Unlike the mythic poems of Ossian, this was a genuine modern
story of Highland heroism.
For all the mythology that surrounded her,
the circumstances that Flora found herself in were all too real.
The Highlands were an economy and a culture in decline
and it would be less than a year before Flora MacDonald herself
would emigrate to America.
The destruction of the old Highland way of life was caused by
two things coming together at the same time.
On the one hand, the repression after Culloden,
and that was real and bloodthirsty and hugely destructive
of the Gaelic culture.
But there were also big economic forces.
The owners of the glens and the hills discovered that it
was much cheaper and easier to have sheep rather than stroppy people.
And at the same time the opening up of America gave the people
here a reason to hope for a better life.
Leaving Flora behind them, Boswell and Johnson continued
on their journey to Dunvegan, across particularly tough terrain.
"We passed through a wild moor, in many places so soft that we
"were obliged to walk, which was very fatiguing to Dr Johnson.
"Once he had advanced on horseback to a very bad step. There was
"a steep declivity on his left to which he was
"so near that there was no room for him to dismount in the usual way.
"He tried to alight on the other side,
"as if he had been a young buck indeed,
"but in the attempt he fell at his length upon the ground."
So, it was with some relief that they finally saw the austere
and exposed building jutting out from the rocks.
And even more so when they breached the castle walls.
Now, the house may have changed but the effect has not.
This was an unexpected haven of sophistication and geniality,
with good food, a cracking library, and gracious company.
Rising out of the moorland and the rain,
this was a little bubble of friendship and society.
Johnson and Boswell decided to stay in Dunvegan for a whole week
and during that time a miracle happened.
BAGPIPES PLAY
"We had the music of the bagpipe every day
"at Armidale, Dunvegan and Col.
"Dr Johnson appeared fond of it and used often to stand for some time
"with his ear close to the great drone."
Samuel Johnson was quite deaf, but he had loved it here, it was a kind
of paradise for him and he couldn't bear that he had to go home.
"The kind treatment which I have found wherever I go
"makes me leave with some heaviness of heart
"an island which I am not likely to see again.
"Lady MacLeod and the young ladies have, with their hospitality and
"politeness, made an impression on my mind
"which will not easily be effaced.
"Be pleased to tell them that I remember them with great kindness and great respect.
"I am, sir, your most obliged and humble servant, Sam Johnson."
It's a remarkable letter, it's sort of splodged slightly.
Possibly because he wrote it in the rain, or possibly because
it's been pored over ever since by the family, we're not sure.
I love the idea of them
sitting there in the rain and just about making the words visible.
Now we know that Johnson was a romantic about these things
and he wanted your family to stay firmly rooted
to their rock in Dunvegan, not to move.
They weren't quite so keen, were they?
I don't think so, I think for Dr Johnson it was romantic,
I think for poor Lady MacLeod it was very difficult.
I think she didn't buy Johnson's argument that it was
given by the four corners of the earth or the heavens to achieve
and they must never ever quit the rock.
I think she said, "That's OK for you to say, you live in London."
She was quite a woman, there's a beautiful painting of her,
but she was the one that entranced Johnson.
What's interesting for me is that, you know,
with portraits they're inanimate objects and having this
incredible snapshot with Boswell's diary showing a little bit
of Dr Johnson and the dialogue between him and my family,
it really brings them to life,
and it's just lovely to hear their voices.
"At Dunvegan I had tasted lotus,
"and was in danger of forgetting that I was ever to depart."
Johnson had clearly fallen for the romantic drama of Highland life,
he even fantasised about staying far longer.
"There is a beautiful little island in the Loch of Dunvegan, called Isay.
"MacLeod said he would give it to Dr Johnson, on condition
"of him residing on it three months in the year, nay one month.
"Dr Johnson was highly amused with the fancy.
"He talked a great deal of this island."
It became a light, childish dream for Samuel Johnson.
He dreamed of building a house here and fortifying it with cannon
and sallying out and attacking other islands.
His enemies always called him "Ursa Major", the Great Bear.
And I think it's perfectly possible to imagine the bear himself
capering with delight on his own little kingdom.
It's cold and it's breezy and he'd have felt queasy
but the great Samuel Johnson nearly ruled Isay.
The archetypal Englishman his very own laird?
Boswell must have been flushed with success,
but the tour was far from over.
There remained one person Boswell felt duty-bound to introduce.
The pair finally headed south, to Auchinleck.
Here the two paternal forces in Boswell's life were to collide.
Boswell was uncharacteristically nervous.
He begged Johnson to avoid topics that would cause an argument..
..and Johnson promised he would, of course, avoid subjects
that would be disagreeable.
That was a promise that Johnson couldn't have honoured even if
he'd wanted to.
Modern opinion is that his many tics
and spasms were symptoms of Tourette's syndrome.
Effectively, he couldn't help himself.
But here in this library,
day after day, he did his best to rein himself in.
Until, right at the end, it all went catastrophically wrong.
"If I recollect right, the contest began
"while my father was showing him his collection of medals
"and Oliver Cromwell's coin unfortunately introduced Charles I and Toryism.
"They became exceedingly warm, and violent, and I was very much
"distressed by being present at such an altercation between the two men,
"both of whom I reverenced, yet I durst not interfere."
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.
Therefore, I suppress what would, I dare say,
make an interesting scene in this dramatic sketch,
this account of the transit of Johnson over the Caledonian hemisphere.
Now this is really weird because Boswell never self-censors.
There is nothing about his most embarrassing and shameful encounters
with prostitutes, or his gonorrhoea, or his bowel problems, that he
won't write down, which is why he is such an interesting writer.
But on this occasion, probably for the first and only time,
he shuts the door on us.
There's something about the confrontation
between the revered Samuel Johnson
and his own admired father which is simply too painful to write down.
One gets the sense that there are cracks or fissures running through
Boswell's personality and he simply can't bear to let us peer into them.
Despite the unfortunate clash, Boswell's gamble had paid off.
The tour had achieved the seemingly impossible and shown Johnson
a Scotland of nobility, beauty, culture and hospitality.
He said to me often, that the time he
spent in this tour was the pleasantest part of his life,
and he asked me if I would lose the recollection of it for 500 pounds.
I answered I would not,
and he applauded my setting such
a value on an accession of new images in my mind.
Now, you might take Boswell's words with a pinch of salt,
so let's judge Samuel Johnson on his actions, not on words.
When he goes down to London again, the first thing that Johnson does
is promote vigorously the widespread distribution of the Bible in Gaelic.
And thanks to Johnson, it's the Bible,
not the spurious poems of Ossian,
that's become the most important book
in the Scottish Highlands.
A great gift to the Scottish people from that alleged
Scotophobe, Samuel Johnson.
A decade after the tour, Johnson died, aged 75.
Still reeling from the shock,
the very next day Boswell was petitioned to write the life of his dear friend.
Finally, he stuck to a task, and it was published to great acclaim.
Widely regarded today as the greatest work of 18th century English prose,
it ensured Samuel Johnson would go on to become a cultural colossus.
But in death, as in life, this was far from a partnership of equals.
Samuel Johnson was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey,
though, gallingly, just a few feet from the great Ossian
fraudster, James Macpherson.
But it is in St Paul's Cathedral where the grumpy, garrulous,
greedy Englishman cuts the most impressive figure.
So grand and impressive that, frankly,
it's hard to recognise him as the same man.
It was actually James Boswell who campaigned and raised the money for
this magnificent statue which makes
Sam Johnson look like a Roman boxer -
the man of letters as a beefy, meaty hero,
and even today people from all around the world
pass by to pay homage.
So how, you may ask yourself, was James Boswell remembered?
Surely I am a man of genius. I deserve to be taken notice of.
Oh, that my grandchildren might read this character of me.
James Boswell, a most amiable man.
He improved and beautified his paternal estate of Auchinleck,
made a distinguished figure in parliament,
had the honour to command a regiment of footguards,
and was one of the brightest wits in the court of George III.
SUDDEN CLICK
It didn't turn out quite as Boswell had imagined.
He became neither a soldier nor an MP.
In fact, poor Boswell died in 1795, aged 54,
of a urinary tract infection probably caused by gonorrhoea.
His body was laid to rest back in Scotland,
in the churchyard of Auchinleck.
You'd miss it if you didn't know where to look.
There are no statues here, no crowds, not even a plaque.
So, James, it's a bit derelict, it's a bit damp,
where exactly are we?
We're standing in the Boswell family mausoleum
in Auchinleck churchyard
and it is normally bolted and barred from everybody
and rarely entered.
It's almost as if Scotland doesn't really want to
remember James Boswell.
Where is the man himself?
Well, we're, I have to say, standing almost above him
because he's buried beneath this trap door.
It's like the scene from Hamlet, Hamlet's ghost.
It is indeed.
Oh, my God!
God, it's a dark and a gloomy sight.
"JB". There he is.
So this is literally a comedown.
The last burying place of a man who has been scandalously
overlooked in his own Scotland.
Poor Bozzy.
And this, you know, is just not right.
There are the mortal remains of one of the greatest journalists
who ever lived, the man who invented the modern literary biography.
He should be surrounded by the most extraordinary baroque building
you've ever seen, full of noise and dancing and laughter and the
clinking and breaking of glasses.
Not the silence, not the rain!
But times are changing, and Boswell is stepping out of the shadows.
Until a century ago, Boswell's achievement
remained very much his Life Of Johnson.
His diaries remained under lock and key, a shameful family secret.
But finally a persistent professor from Yale University
secured their publication and they soon jostled Churchill's
memoirs at the very top of the bestsellers' lists.
Today, Boswell enthusiasts can pilgrimage to the family estate
to attend an annual book festival.
You can even stay in the house.
The empty rooms are overrun by arty types.
Boswell would have been so pleased - his father, I think, less so.
Not only did he pioneer the whole modern field of literary biography with that Life Of Johnson.
You open up any newspaper with bestseller lists
and there will be biographies in that list somewhere,
and quite probably biographies of writers, which is
a strange thing when you think about it, because what do writers do?
Nothing. They sit around and write, what could be interesting about this?
It's slightly intimidating. I've got up today
and here I am sitting at an old desk in Boswell's own business room,
the very room, probably, where he wrote some of his great diary.
I write a diary as well,
I write a diary every day and have done for many, many years.
It's a kind of idiotic schoolboy diary,
"Got up, sun shining, had eggs for breakfast, very tasty" -
that kind of diary. I ask myself why I'm writing it.
I think it's a kind of act of kind of mental hygiene,
a sort of throat-clearing every day, a tic,
a habit, and also, of course, outrageous vanity.
I guess Boswell thought a bit the same,
a lot of his diary is his reflections on how much he's
messed up his life, how much he's had to drink, how much he's
had to eat, which is why, of course, it's still so readable.
Confused, inconsistent, passionate and pragmatic by turns, his is
not a heroic story, but James Boswell laid himself bare -
a real man constantly searching for his place inside the Union.
If he'd never come to London, he'd never have found his life's
great subject, and if he'd never met Johnson,
then Johnson would have seemed a thinner, duller man today.
So, less Boswell without Johnson, and less Johnson without Boswell.
This is perhaps the prime example in literature of two men,
the Scot and the Englishman, who achieved far more together
than they would ever have done had they never met.
In the next programme, a Scottish writer will prove,
once and for all, that if you really want to be remembered you don't
get bogged down by murky facts, you tell a cracking tale!
Walter Scott created a seductive and enduring myth of tartan
and chieftains, which remains, for better or worse,
the most recognisable face of Scottish identity.