Pretty young rebel who helped the bonnie prince

Pretty Young Rebel Flora Fraser

Bloomsbury €31.50 ★★★★★

On June 27, 1746, under the cover of night, the pretender to the British throne escaped from the Scottish Outer Hebrides – dressed as a woman. In a tale that has been memorialised in folklore, a year earlier the Stuart heir, Bonnie Prince Charlie, had landed in Scotland, raised an army and attempted to take back the crown.

But, defeated at the Battle of Culloden, he took refuge in those far-flung islands where Catholic Scots were sympathetic to his cause.

With the English army on his heels, he sought the help of a young woman, Flora MacDonald. He would pose as her Irish maid under the name Betty Burke, and escape in a small rowing boat to the Isle of Skye, from where he could find passage to France.

The plan worked, and would make Flora MacDonald, the subject of this biography, one of the most famous women in Britain.

She was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London for a time. But sympathetic aristocrats were struck by her statement that she had acted out of Christian charity, not political sympathy, and she was released and fêted as a Romantic heroine.

Her celebrity persisted for decades: Dr Samuel Johnson visited her in 1773 and her story became an icon of grace and virtue for dozens of painters.

Flora Fraser’s new biography stylishly updates MacDonald’s story for a 21st Century that has slightly forgotten it.

And she also covers MacDonald’s later life: her marriage, emigration to South Carolina and involvement in the American Revolution.

But it is telling that, while Fraser makes a passionate and personal (she was named after the ‘pretty young rebel’) case for understanding the whole of her subject’s life, over half of her book is taken up with MacDonald’s role in Prince Charlie’s escape.