The tale of how Flora MacDonald helped rescue Bonnie Prince Charlie after the collapse of the Jacobite rising (see 1746:Bonnie Prince Charlie gets advice from Lord Lovat after Culloden) has often been told in books and movies, and is one of those rare stories in which little is gained by embellishment.
Charlie had found temporary refuge in South Uist, where Flora was visiting her brother. Flora opened the door one day to find one of her kinsmen standing there equipped with a prince and a plan: Charlie would be taken to safety disguised as Flora’s maid. Accounts of the meeting differ, but it seems clear that contrary to legend, Flora was not an enthusiastic Jacobite, and it also seems to have been Charlie’s personal plea that swayed Flora. She agreed to help the Prince out of charity (and later told the Hanoverian Prince Frederick she would have helped him in just the same fashion). The two of them certainly hit it off. Charlie wanted to hide a pair of pistols in his petticoat and when Flora pointed out that this would cause problems if he was searched, he replied: ‘If we shall happen to meet with any that will go so narrowly to work in searching as what you mean, they will certainly discover me at any rate’.
Flora’s stepfather, a tough soldier called One-Eyed Hugh, was a militia captain in command of the Benbecula-South Uist crossing, and he let his stepdaughter and her odd new companion – ‘one Bettie Burke, an Irish girl, who, she tells me, is a good spinster’ – travel to Skye. Hugh was probably sympathetic to the Jacobites, and was certainly taking a risk here – he probably saw it as a calculated risk that could be made to pay off in the end. The Skye clan chiefs had shrewdly kept out of the rising, and in characteristic clan fashion the Skye MacLeods inflicted some of the worst atrocities of the rising’s aftermath on the Jacobite MacLeods of Raasay.
Charlie escaped in a French ship and Flora was taken prisoner, but treated well. As the DNB points out, the Gaelic oral traditions of the Highlands largely ignored Flora’s story. Intriguingly, Irish historians had similarly ignored a Celtic heroine of another stamp (see 1593: Elizabeth I meets Grace O’Malley the pirate), but from July 1747 – when Flora was released and given £1500 raised for her in London – her reputation as a heroine to just about everyone in England was secure.
What Happened Next
Flora married a kinsman, a farmer called Allan, commonly described as a personable chap, but not much of a businessman, who had a farm in Flodigarry on Skye. They had seven children between 1751 and 1766, and were visited by Johnson and Boswell in 1773; see 1773: Dr Johnson and Boswell stay with Flora MacDonald