06/03/2026
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On this day in 1790, one of Scotland’s most famous Jacobite heroines quietly died on the Isle of Skye.
Flora MacDonald was 67 years old.
But more than forty years earlier, she had carried out one of the most daring acts in Scottish history.
In 1746, the Jacobite Rising collapsed in disaster at the Battle of Culloden. The Highland army was crushed and Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender to the British throne, became the most wanted man in Britain.
Thousands of soldiers were sent across the Highlands and Islands to hunt him down.
Anyone caught helping him faced imprisonment, transportation, or ex*****on.
Yet on the island of Benbecula, a young woman named Flora MacDonald made a decision that would make her a legend.
Flora was not even a Jacobite supporter. Her own stepfather actually commanded a militia that supported the government.
But when the desperate Prince asked for help escaping the island, she agreed.
Flora devised a bold and dangerous plan.
She would disguise the Prince as her Irish maid, a woman called “Betty Burke”.
Dressed in women’s clothes and keeping his face hidden beneath a shawl, Bonnie Prince Charlie boarded a small boat with Flora and a handful of companions.
Together they sailed across the dangerous waters of the Minch toward the Isle of Skye, passing government patrols that would have meant certain capture.
If the disguise had failed, they all would have been arrested.
Instead, the boat landed safely at Skye.
The Prince was guided onward into hiding and eventually escaped Scotland altogether.
Flora MacDonald was not so fortunate.
Soon afterwards she was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London for helping the fugitive prince.
But her courage had already captured public imagination.
Across Britain she became famous as the brave Highland woman who had risked everything to save a hunted prince.
She was eventually released and returned to Skye, where she lived a long life far from the drama of the Jacobite wars.
When Flora MacDonald died on 5 March 1790, she was buried beside her husband in the graveyard at Kilmuir.
Her grave can still be visited today.
And the story of the young woman who smuggled a prince across the sea, disguised as her maid, remains one of the most remarkable acts of courage in Scottish history.
