Flora Fraser - Flora Macdonald: Pretty Young Rebel: Her Life and Story

I cannot remember a time when I did not know the story of Flora Macdonald. I was named after her and grew up at Eilean Aigas, a house on an island in Scotland with palace doors and wooden thrones carved by the Sobieski Stuarts. Occupants during the reign of Queen Victoria, these brothers claimed to be legitimate descendants of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Loaned this remote retreat on the river Beauly by the Lord Lovat of the day, the better to research their claim to the British throne, the Sobieski Stuarts dressed in full Highland regalia and were rowed in a royal barge to worship in the local Catholic church, which we attended in our turn.

Not only on the Island, as we termed our home, but everywhere around in my childhood and adolescence there were reminders of the Forty-five, the civil war that raged in Scotland in 174546 when the Stuart prince roused support for his bid to wrest the British throne from the House of Hanover. Stones on Culloden Moor, the other side of Inverness, marked the battle positions of Frasers and other local clansmen who fought under Charles Edward in a last and fatal reckoning in April 1746 with troops commanded by William, Duke of Cumberland. Disdain for the latters butchering ways in that engagement was later expressed by the naming of a weed seen in every hedgerow as Stinking Willy. Bonnie Prince Charlie, by contrast, appeared, in a portrait often reproduced in books, a pale and lovely Prince Charming. Flora Macdonald, who came to his aid at a time of great need, was a local heroine: her statue stood outside Inverness Castle, and her grave face and neat figure provided an image familiar to me from childhood on tartan boxes, on postcards, and in engravings.

At Beaufort Castle nearby loomed a Hogarth painting of the Old Fox, a Lovat forebear whose son was out in the Forty-five with the prince. Westward in Glen Strathfarrar, this clan chief lurked in the wake of Culloden, hoping, like the Stuart prince, to escape government detection. Lovat, apprehended, became the last peer to be executed on Tower Hill; Charles Edward, with the aid of Flora Macdonald and others, escaped to the Continent, where he was to die in 1788 without ever returning to Scotland.

I imbibed Robert Louis Stevensons Kidnapped and other books focusing on the prince or on his supporters skulking in the heather. Flora Macdonalds bravery in voyaging with Charles Edward disguised as her Irish maid between the Western Isles and Skye attracted my attention. When I came to read, however, the works of John Prebble and others that dispelled romantic myths about the prince, I turned away from Jacobite history and shifted to other realms of the past. Had I not chanced upon her image when looking for illustrations for my book The Washingtons: George and Martha (2015), I might never have been drawn back to consider the life of Flora Macdonald. There, among a sheaf of American revolutionaries portraits, was an image of Flora Macdonald familiar to me as hanging in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. What had she, a Jacobite heroine of 1746, to do with these patriots across the Atlantic in the 1770s and later?

Dimly I remembered Dr. Johnson and Boswell visiting Flora on a journey they made to the Western Isles, and her telling them that they were lucky to catch her, as she was off to America. My curiosity aroused, I looked up the date and found that she acted as hostess to the pair on the Isle of Skye in September 1773, eighteen months before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. A quick search revealed that Flora emigrated to North Carolina the following year and was subsequently also in New York and Halifax, Nova Scotia, during that conflict. Furthermore, while Flora had been imprisoned as a Jacobite rebel in the Forty-five, her husband and four of her sons fought as loyalist officers for George III .

I returned to my task of securing illustrations for The Washingtons, but my mind was made up. I would next write about my namesake. What I discovered and what I present here is almost stranger than the Jacobite fiction I read as a child. It has caused me to think deeply about Scottish and American nationalism and the nature of loyalism as a function of emigration. Most of all, while as a child, I hero-worshipped Bonnie Prince Charlie, now I admire Flora Macdonald unreservedly.