Macdonald, FLORA, 'a name,' said Dr Johnson, 'that will be mentioned in history, and, if courage and fidelity are virtues, mentioned with honour.' Born in 1722 at Milton in South Uist, she lost her father, a tacksman, at two; and her mother four years later was abducted to Skye by Hugh Macdonald of Armadale. Flora stayed behind in Uist with her only surviving brother, Angus, and at thirteen was practically adopted by Lady Clanranald, the wife of the chief of the clan. To this Flora owed her gentle upbringing, her three years' schooling at Edinburgh. She had not long returned to the Hebrides when the rebellion of the '45 broke out; and in June 1746, ten weeks after Culloden, she conducted Prince Charles Edward, disguised as 'Betty Burke, the Irish-woman,' from Ormiclade in Benbecula to Monkstadt in Skye, and thence by way of Kingsburgh to Portree. That she was in love with the 'young hero' is absolutely false—she was not even a Jacobite; but those three short perilous days endeared her to more than Jacobites, and she was much fêted during her twelvemonth's captivity on the troopship in Leith Roads and at London. In 1750 she married the son of Macdonald of Kingsburgh, and at Kingsburgh in 1773 she entertained Dr Johnson, who describes her as 'of middle stature, soft features, gentle manners, and elegant presence.' In 1774 her husband emigrated to North Carolina, and in 1776, on the outbreak of the war of independence, he became a brigadier-general (his five sons, too, were all British officers). He himself was made prisoner; and Flora, returning to Scotland in 1779 with her younger daughter, got her arm broken during the voyage in a fight with a French privateer. After two years at Milton, she was rejoined by her husband, and they settled again at Kingsburgh; but it was at Peinduin, a neighbour's house, that she died on 5th March 1790. Shrouded in a sheet that had wrapped Prince Charles Edward, she was buried at Kilmuir, in a grave now marked by an Iona cross (1880) of Aberdeen granite, 28½ feet high.
The so-called Autobiography of Flora Macdonald (2 vols. 1869) is a silly forgery; but reference may be made to Flora Macdonald and Prince Charles, by the Rev. Alexander MacGregor (1882), and to Flora Macdonald in Uist, by W. Jolly (1886).