It is set during the Jacobite rising of 1745, when an army of Scottish highlanders seeking to place Charles Stuart onto the English throne advanced into England as far South as Derby.

The novel opens with a framing narrative telling of the discovery in a solicitor's office of an old manuscript that sheds light on Samuel Johnson's life in 1745–1746, a period that is missing from James Boswell's biography.

Alastair Maclean, a Jacobite Scotsman who has been living in France with the exiled Stuarts, comes to England to join the Scottish army as it advances towards London.

Cornbury introduces him to the flamboyant Kitty, Duchess of Queensberry, and to her husband Lord Queensbury's agent, Nicholas Kyd, also said to be working covertly for the Stuart cause.

Dinner is interrupted by the arrival of an exhausted rider from another estate, a shambling fellow called Samuel Johnson, previously tutor to Miss Claudia Grevel.

Claudia has run away with the notorious young squire Sir John Norreys, apparently besotted with his Jacobite views, and Johnson beseeches Cornbury to ride after her.

They have been passing on to the English government letters to the Prince promising men and money, hoping to gain part of the estates that will be forfeit to the Crown when the landowners' treason is revealed.

Suppressing his own love for her, Maclean shames Norreys into giving up his mercenary activities and returning to live an honest life worthy of his wife's devotion.

Daniell called it "highly successful, being the Huntingtower of Buchan's historical novels", and he praised "the spinnings of the wheel of Chance ... and the cunning plots and counter-plots".