Clan MacDonald · 1746
Flora MacDonald and the prince
After Culloden, with a price of £30,000 on his head, Bonnie Prince Charlie was rowed to Skye disguised as Flora's Irish maid.
Charles Edward Stuart was a fugitive in the heather of the Outer Hebrides for ten weeks after the wreck of the rising at Culloden in April 1746. Government patrols closed in. The price on his head was £30,000 — a fortune.
Flora MacDonald, twenty-four years old and a stepdaughter of the militia officer commanding South Uist, was persuaded to obtain a pass for herself and an Irish spinning-maid named 'Betty Burke' to cross to Skye. Betty Burke was the prince in a printed gown.
The crossing on the night of 28 June 1746 — 'Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, over the sea to Skye' — became the founding image of Highland romance. Flora was arrested within weeks and held in the Tower of London until the general amnesty of 1747. She later married, emigrated to North Carolina, lived through the American Revolution on the Loyalist side, and returned to Skye to die in 1790. She was buried in a sheet that had once held the prince.