Flora Macdonald: The Most Loyal Rebel

Flora MacDonald never sought the fame that her contemporaries and history bestowed on her. She seldom spoke of the journey over the sea to Skye with Bonnie Prince Charlie and rarely used her popularity to benefit herself during her hard life. Because of this reticence and the fact that she and her husband lost everything in North Carolina during the American War of Independence, it is difficult to write a conventional biography of her. Little was recorded of the appalling suffering of women and children during this bitter war and its aftermath, despite their hardships being much worse than that of the men who were directly involved in it. Flora endured as much as anyone, but she suffered it in silence. As a result her biographers have either ignored this period or glossed over it, but Hugh Douglas has carried out research in Scotland, North Carolina and Nova Scotia to build up a picture of these "lost years". Consequently, this book is at once a biography, a social history and a detective story which is a tribute to a clan and a remarkable family within that clan.