Flora MacDonald

Flora MacDonald (1722 – 5 March 1790) was a Scottish gentlewoman and Jacobite who was a member of the minor gentry from the Outer Hebrides. She is best known for helping Charles Edward Stuart evade government troops after the Battle of Culloden in April 1746. Her family generally backed the government during the 1745 Rising, and MacDonald later claimed to have assisted Charles out of sympathy for his situation. Arrested and held in the Tower of London, she was released under a general amnesty in June 1747. She later married Allan MacDonald and the couple emigrated to North Carolina in 1773. Their support for the British government during the American War of Independence meant the loss of their American estates and they returned to Scotland, where she died in 1790.