The Johnsons hadn’t been a poor family, but hardly rolling in wealth either. Alan Johnson had practised as a gastroenterologist at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh and his wife Susan had taught history at a local comprehensive school. Susan Johnson had been an excellent teacher and an even better storyteller, and her only child had grown up listening to his mother’s spellbinding tales of their country’s rich and romantic past, from the coming of the Romans to the reign of Arthur; from Robert Bruce to Mary Queen of Scots; and the Scottish Wars of Independence from the time of the celebrated freedom fighter William Wallace through to the later bloody battles waged by the Scots Jacobites versus the English Redcoats and the adventures of the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, more popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie. The man who’d tried, and failed so gloriously and somehow magnificently, to claim the British throne for a Scottish king to sit on. What a moment that would have been.

Peter had been enthralled by those stories and soon began delving into the history books to learn more for himself. It would set him on a course that would change his life.

Susan Johnson’s fascination with history, and especially the turbulent times of eighteenth-century Scotland, went beyond simple academic interest. Her maiden name prior to marrying Peter’s father had been Stuart, the French form of the ancient Scottish dynastic surname Stewart. The clan’s ancestral origins dated all the way back to a Breton knight who had come to Britain soon after the Norman invasion of 1066 and quickly established an Anglo-Norman noble house. Centuries later, Sir John Stewart of Bonkyll died fighting alongside William Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298.

In the modern age there were more than seventy thousand people in Britain bearing the name Stuart or Stewart, all of them potentially eligible to claim descent from Scotland’s royal dynasty. But Susan Johnson, née Stuart, had been more tenacious than most in tracing back her genealogy through a centuries-long forest of family trees, and convinced herself beyond a shadow of a doubt that she, and hence her son also, belonged to the line of the noble Stuart clan.