Flora MacDonald
Flora MacDonald helped Charles Edward Stuart escape after the collapse of the Jacobite rising of 1745, an act that made her a permanent figure of Highland legend. Born on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides in 1722, the daughter of a tacksman, she was raised after her father's death by relatives, including the chief of Clan MacDonald of Sleat, and educated in Edinburgh. After the Jacobite army was destroyed at Culloden in April 1746, the prince spent months as a fugitive in the islands with a price of thirty thousand pounds on his head and government troops and ships searching for him. He reached South Uist, where the militia commanded by Flora's stepfather was among those hunting him. She was persuaded to help in June 1746. Her stepfather signed a pass allowing her to travel to Skye with a manservant and an Irish maid named Betty Burke, and the prince crossed the Minch in an open boat dressed in the maid's clothes. They landed near Kilbride on 29 June, and she arranged his onward passage. He gave her a locket, and they never met again. The boatmen talked, and she was arrested within weeks, held aboard ship and then in the Tower of London, and released under the Act of Indemnity in 1747. Her conduct made her a celebrity in London society. She married Allan MacDonald in 1750, and the family emigrated to North Carolina in 1774. In the American Revolution they took the loyalist side; Allan was captured, their property was seized, and Flora returned to Skye in 1779 after a voyage in which her ship was attacked and she was wounded in the arm. She died in 1790.
- Lived: 1722 CE – 1790 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: jacobite_figure
