British Royals crowned on ‘worthless lump of Perthshire rock’, claims author in controversial new book
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The fabled Stone of Destiny, currently on loan from Westminster Abbey and on display in Edinburgh Castle, is a medieval fake, according to writer Andrew Neil MacLeod in his latest book.
The author's latest novel The Casebook of Johnson and Boswell Vol. II: The Stone of Destiny is the second volume of a historical fantasy series after MacLeod's critically acclaimed The Fall of the House of Thomas Weir came out last year.
In the new work, MacLeod relates how Edward Longshanks – the cruel and tyrannical Hammer of the Scots – who brought the Stone back with him to England by force, had reached the Scottish border by mid-March 1296 but that it would take his invading army three months to reach Scone Abbey.
"Plenty of time, in other words, for the wily Scots to substitute their sacred Coronation Stone for a forgery. After all, ancient chronicles depict a very different-looking object to the featureless lump of sandstone currently doing the rounds," explains MacLeod.
He says this means that the true Stone of Destiny, described as "carved from a solid block of basalt with curious hieroglyphs around its circumference", is still out there somewhere, though hidden away, and just waiting to be discovered.
"In the end," the author explains, "it didn’t really matter what Longshanks dragged back with him to Westminster. It was a symbolic act – his way of saying, ‘I am now king of both England and Scotland'.’’
It’s a controversial theory shared by a number of reputable historians, among them the 18th century literary giants Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, who find themselves swept away on a grand search for the truth from Enlightenment-era Edinburgh to the Western Isles in the new book.
"The Stone of Destiny is essentially a road novel, and so episodic in form, with an overarching quest for the lost relic that for 700 years was used to crown the High Kings of Alba," MacLeod says of his book. "Each clue drives the heroes on to the next location, where they find another set of mysteries to solve.
"However they are not the only ones searching for the sacred relic. Hot on their heels are the Culdee, a sacred order of monks who have taken vows to protect the Stone of Destiny at any cost, and will stop at nothing to keep it from falling into enemy hands."
The author says he first had the idea for a series of books when reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia, where Holmes describes Watson as the "Boswell to his Johnson". "The real Doctor Johnson took a genuine interest in the occult, and with Scotland’s rich vein of folklore, it was no great leap of the imagination to recast the two friends as paranormal investigators, embarking on their celebrated tour of the Scottish Highlands."
Described by its author as "the DaVinci Code meets Indiana Jones", The Casebook of Johnson and Boswell Vol. II: The Stone of Destiny is released on October 31.
The first of the trilogy, The Fall of the House of Thomas Weir, is available on Amazon as a Kindle edition (£2.99) or paperback (£7.64).
