Flora MacDonald(1722–1790)

Flora MacDonald was born in 1722 at Milton in South Uist, the daughter of Ranald MacDonald, a tacksman of the MacDonalds of Clanranald. She was raised partly at Milton and partly at Armadale on Skye, and from her early teens in the household of the chief's lady, where she learned music, English and the courtesies of a Highland gentlewoman. She was twenty-four in the summer of 1746, with no political stake in the rising, when she walked into the most-told story of her century.

Charles Edward Stuart, two months after Culloden, was a fugitive in the islands with a price of thirty thousand pounds on his head. The plan, brought to her by the Jacobite officer Felix O'Neill, was to disguise him as her maidservant, a spinster named Betty Burke, and carry him in her boat to Skye under her stepfather's militia pass. She thought about it for a night and agreed, knowing exactly what the risk was.

On the night of 28 June 1746 they crossed from Benbecula to Skye in a six-oared open boat through a gale that nearly capsized them, and landed near Mogstad. She delivered the prince into safe hands and rode on. It was an act of plain physical courage and cool nerve by a young woman with everything to lose and nothing to gain, and it succeeded.

Arrested two weeks later, she was taken to London on HMS Furnace and held in the Tower and on a hulk in the Thames, and after eighteen months was released under the Act of Indemnity, having given nothing away. She returned to Skye in 1747 and married Allan MacDonald of Kingsburgh in 1750, raising seven children and running the farm. Travellers came in growing numbers to meet the woman who had saved the prince; Samuel Johnson and James Boswell stayed under her roof at Kingsburgh in September 1773, and Johnson set down his verdict in his Journey to the Western Isles: 'Her name will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour.'

In 1774 Flora and Allan emigrated to the Highland-Scots settlement on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, and in 1779 she returned to Skye, where she lived out her last decade. She died on 4 March 1790 at Kingsburgh and was buried at Kilmuir, wrapped, by her own request, in the sheet the prince had slept in at her house in 1746; five thousand mourners are said to have come. The Macdonald name carries her memory for that single night of nerve in an open boat, and Johnson's words have held: her name is remembered with honour. The Kilmuir grave is marked by a tall Iona cross raised by public subscription in 1880.