Clan MacDonald · 1746
Flora MacDonald and the prince
In June 1746, two months after the disaster of Culloden, Charles Edward Stuart was a fugitive in the Hebrides with a price on his head of thirty thousand pounds, the largest reward of the eighteenth century. Government patrols closed in around him on the islands of South Uist and Benbecula. The plan that came to him through an Irish Jacobite officer was to disguise him as an Irish spinning-maid and put him on a boat to Skye in the household of a young woman with a militia pass. Her name was Flora MacDonald. She was twenty-four years old. She had no political stake in the rising. The crossing made her name a synonym for the lost cause for the next two centuries.
A cause is not always saved by those who believe in it. Sometimes it is carried, for the length of one tide, by a young woman who has no stake in the argument and every stake in the people the argument is about to destroy. She does not need to love a prince to recognise that her neighbours will hang for him. She needs only to count the cost of the alternative, and to find that the arithmetic is hers.
THE ISLAND IN JUNE
She is twenty-four, the daughter of a tacksman of Milton in South Uist who died when she was a child, raised afterwards by her stepfather Hugh MacDonald of Armadale, captain of the local government militia. The militia is, on paper, the King's. In practice Hugh has spent the past fortnight steering its patrols off the prince's track, and Flora knows it. She has not met Charles Edward Stuart. She has heard what the islands say about him, and she has heard what the people who matter say about him, and she has weighed the two without speaking. The rising is two months dead. Cumberland's redcoats have walked the length of the glens. Thirty thousand pounds sits on the prince's head, the largest sum any government in the eighteenth century has put on any man. The price has been read aloud in every kirk on the seaboard.
THE SHIELING AT BENBECULA
On the long evening of the twenty-first of June 1746 she has been up at the high grazing with her stepfather's sheep, and her hair is heavy with peat smoke when she comes down to the shieling on the Benbecula shore. The midges are bad. Captain Felix O'Neill, an Irish officer with a French commission and a half-dead horse, has been waiting for her across the peat fire for an hour. He has not let her get up. He has a pass in his hand, written for one Mistress Flora MacDonald and her Irish spinning-woman, one Betty Burke, to cross from Benbecula to Skye. The militia officer who would sign the pass is her stepfather. The Betty Burke in the printed gown is the prince, six feet four and twenty-five years old, hiding in a shealing two miles up the coast. The crossing would be by sea, in an open boat, in late June, in the prevailing weather of the Minch.
A SECOND OF TIME IN THE HEBRIDES
O'Neill talks. She lets him. The fire smokes, the midges hang in the doorway, and she works the matter the way she would work the wool: by what would hold and what would part. If she is taken with him in the boat she will not be carried back to Stirling. She will be carried to Tower Yard. She has not met the man and she has heard he is too tall for a maidservant and walks like a soldier in petticoats. And yet the count keeps running underneath. The MacDonalds of Boisdale have hidden him three weeks. The Camerons of Lochiel are already broken at Achnacarry. Her stepfather, the militia officer, has been lifting the patrols off his trail for a fortnight, and a fortnight more and someone will notice. If she refuses and another woman does this badly, the prince is taken inside a month, and the people who have kept him alive for three months are the first to hang for it. The choice is not between the cause and the Crown. The choice is between her people and a rope. She is very tired. The peat smoke has settled into her hair and into her shoulders and into her eyes. She tells O'Neill yes. He stands, kisses her hand once with formality, and goes out into the dusk to fetch the prince.
THE CROSSING
Her mother dressed him at Rossinish. He could not walk in the printed gown without scandalising her, and his feet were too big for any of Flora's shoes. They put off after dark on the twenty-eighth of June 1746, an open boat, five rowers, the Minch black under a squall that came up off the Atlantic and threw the prince's stockings into the sea. He sang to keep the boatmen at their oars. At dawn they came in under the cliffs at Kilbride on the Trotternish coast. From the strand he passed out of her keeping and into the household of the MacDonalds of Kingsburgh. She watched him go up the path in the gown. She did not see him again.
THE TOWER
Within weeks the boatmen broke under questioning and she was arrested. They took her in chains from Skye to Edinburgh and from Edinburgh by sea to London, and into the Tower, where the guards lined up at the door of her chamber to look at her. London had decided, before she arrived, what kind of woman she would be: a Jacobite Joan, a Highland Diana. She declined the part. She said only, when pressed, that she would have done the same for the Duke of Cumberland had I found him in distress, by the record of those who interviewed her. The line travelled. It was the line that disarmed them. The general amnesty of 1747 sent her home. She married Allan MacDonald of Kingsburgh in 1750, in the same house where she had handed the prince over.
THE LONG TIDE
She emigrated to North Carolina in 1774, on the eve of another rising, this one against the same Crown she had once been arrested by. Her husband raised Highlanders for the Loyalist side, was captured at Moore's Creek Bridge in 1776, and the family was driven back across the Atlantic with nothing. She died at Kingsburgh on Skye in 1790, aged sixty-eight. The sheet she was buried in, by her own request, was one her household had used in 1746, the night the prince had slept under her roof. The Skye Boat Song was written a hundred and fifty years later by an English baronet who had never met her, and it is the song the world thinks of when it thinks of her, and it is wrong about almost everything: the boat, the route, the season. It has the carry of the right thing.
RETURN
The decisive moments of a people are not always seized by those born to seize them. Sometimes they are taken up by a tacksman's daughter in a smoky shieling, who counts her neighbours instead of her cause and chooses the harder arithmetic. The MacDonalds of Skye still have the petticoat she wore across the Minch. It sits in a glass case in the museum at Armadale, the print faded, the seams holding.
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The champion at the centre of this story
Flora MacDonaldThe twenty-four-year-old South Uist woman whose courage carried Bonnie Prince Charlie to safety across the sea to Skye, and whose name has stood for fidelity ever since.Frequently asked
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More stories of Clan MacDonald
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