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, and his second wife Marion. Her father died when she was small; her mother was abducted some years later by Hugh MacDonald of Armadale on Skye and married him under what the records call protest but the local memory called arrangement. Flora was raised partly at Milton, partly at Armadale, and from her early teens in the household of the chief's lady on Mongusdail, where she learned music, English and the courtesies of a Highland gentlewoman. She was twenty-four in the summer of 1746, taking her stepfather's sheep up to the high grazings of Benbecula, with no political stake in the rising and no notion that she was about to walk into the most-told story of her century.

Charles Edward Stuart, two months after Culloden, was a fugitive in the islands with a price on his head of thirty thousand pounds. The plan that came to her through an Irish Jacobite officer named Felix O'Neill was to disguise him as her maidservant, a stout Irish spinster named Betty Burke, and put him in her boat to Skye under her stepfather's militia pass. She thought about it for a night and agreed. 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 handed the prince over to Lady Macdonald of Sleat and rode on. She was arrested two weeks later, taken to London on HMS Furnace, held in the Tower and on a hulk in the Thames, and after eighteen months released under the Act of Indemnity. She returned to Skye in 1747 and married Allan MacDonald of Kingsburgh in 1750.

Twenty-three years on Skye followed. She and Allan raised seven children at Flodigarry and then Kingsburgh, ran the farm, hosted travellers who came in growing numbers to see the woman who had saved the prince. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell slept under her roof at Kingsburgh in September 1773 and Johnson recorded the conversation in his Journey to the Western Isles: 'Her name will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour.' The Highland economy was failing by the early 1770s. Rents rose, kelp prices collapsed, the tacksmen who held land from the chiefs faced ruin. In 1774, with two sons already on the way, Allan and Flora sold up at Kingsburgh and emigrated to North Carolina, joining the wave of Highland Loyalists settling along the Cape Fear River.

Like many Scots displaced by the failed Jacobite rising and the long economic collapse that followed in the Highlands, Flora and Allan went to North America to rebuild. The plantation they bought in Anson County (later Cumberland County) sat in the heart of the Cape Fear Highland-Scots settlement, and the household inventory of 1776 records the enslaved people who worked it by name. This is the chapter of Flora's life that the modern reader reckons with, and that her biographers, until recently, often left thin: she rebuilt her family on Carolina ground that, like the plantations beside it, was held up by the labour of people who had not chosen to be there. She was fifty-two, a year into the second life, when the Revolutionary War began. Allan raised a Loyalist Highland regiment for the Crown and led it at Moore's Creek Bridge on 27 February 1776, where the Loyalists were broken and Allan was captured. Flora was harassed by Patriot militias through 1777, lost a horse-riding fall that broke her arm and never properly mended, watched the plantation house ransacked, and in 1779 was given safe-conduct to the coast and a passage home. The voyage was attacked by a French privateer and she was wounded in the action. She reached London that autumn having lost the property, the household, and the second life she had crossed an ocean to build.

She returned to Skye in 1779 and lived her last decade there, joined eventually by Allan after his exchange in 1784. She died on 4 March 1790 at Kingsburgh and was buried at the old graveyard at Kilmuir, wrapped, by her own request, in the sheet that Charles Edward Stuart had slept in at her house in 1746. Five thousand mourners are said to have come to the funeral. The Macdonald name today carries her memory primarily for the 1746 crossing: the twenty-four-year-old who put a dynasty's last hope in her boat and rowed him through a storm to the next chapter of his life. Her American years sit alongside that headline as the part of her story that the modern reader has to take in alongside the romantic one. She was a woman of her century who took the risk of saving a prince and, twenty-eight years later, the risk of rebuilding her family on a Carolina plantation that held enslaved people. Both choices belong to the same life, and the controversy of the second is part of how her name is now remembered alongside the romance of the first. The Kilmuir grave is marked by a tall Iona cross raised by public subscription in 1880.