A true heroine of romance
Andro Linldater
FLORA MACDONALD: THE MOST LOYAL REBEL by Hugh Douglas Alan Sutton, £16.99, pp.259 Few heroines can have exercised so immediate and constant a hold on popular imagination as Flora MacDonald. Within months of her rescue of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, smart society in Edinburgh and London competed to meet her, fashionable artists painted her portrait (she looked extraordinarily like Emma Thomp- son), and a public subscription raised £1500 for her. More than 200 years later her name adorns schools and colleges both here and in North America. And as this new biography demonstrates, she deserved the acclaim.
Trapped in the Outer Hebrides after Culloden by a combined force of regular and militia troops and Royal Navy ships, the Young Chevalier was hours from
'Did you know that there are only five basic jokes, and this isn't one of them'
capture when Flora agreed to help in his rescue. Disguising him as her maid, she and relays of MacDonalds conducted him through the ring of pursuers, first over the sea to Skye and then to another boat which carried him to the mainland.
At the age of 22, she had not only saved a prince's life, but saved it at the cost of her own liberty. Even before he completed the last stage of his escape by boarding a French vessel, she and her companions had been arrested and imprisoned in the bilges of a ship whose commander frequently flogged and tortured prisoners. Her captivi- ty lasted until she was taken to London. where she was released twelve months later.
What Hugh Douglas has achieved quite admirably is to place the heroine in history. Instead of the traditional tartan innocent, he shows a woman well aware of the risks, picking her way skilfully through the byzantine loyalties of the clan Donald, whose chief was ostensibly Hanoverian, while his wife was unreliably Jacobite, and whose clansmen served in the militia by day and caroused with the Prince by night. (Not for nothing do their fellow Highlanders hiss scornfully. 'Skye man, fly man'.) And he has fleshed out with painstaking research the few known facts of her subse- quent career as Mrs MacDonald.
Although she claimed to have helped the Prince out of loyalty rather than love, it can hardly be coincidence that her husband, Allan, was as feckless and bonnie as Charles or that they named their first child after him If so she paid dearly for her romantic streak.
Virtually bankrupted by Allan's experi- ments in agriculture, the family emigrated to North America in 1774, just in time to be caught up in the American War of Inde- pendence. Instead of joining the rebels, the MacDonalds like other Highland exiles took up arms on behalf of German Geordie.
Douglas's meticulous deteciive work has turned up much new material on this period of Flora's life, but still offers no adequate explanation for this strange choice. Defeated again, the MacDonalds withdrew first to Canada and then to Skye, where only subsidies from a son who had done well in the East India Company saved Flora from poverty before her death in 1790.
Such a life would seem to have been cursed by that bleak imprecation, 'May you live in interesting times', but it was in her response to these misfortunes that Flora really earned the compliment Dr Johnson paid her in 1773, 'her name will be men- tioned in history and, if courage and fideli- ty be virtues, mentioned with honour'.
This biography is deeply satisfying because it is not only lovingly researched and filled with rewarding insights, but the publishers have made it into a well-bound, handsome hook at a good price. In short it is a tribute fit for a heroine.
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