The maid was a disaster.
She was far too tall. She took enormous strides. When the party had to wade a stream she hitched her skirts up to her thighs, and when told off for it, let them trail in the water. She was wearing a flowered calico gown, a quilted petticoat, a white apron and a large hooded cloak, all run up in a hurry by the ladies of the house, and she managed them, one observer said, very awkwardly. Her mistress called her Betty Burke and said she was an Irish girl, a fine spinner, who was being taken to Skye to work for her mother. The disguise was memorable, but the clan she belonged to would later become associated with the striking MacDonald Dress tartan, a white-ground variation of the darker MacDonald sett.
Betty Burke was Prince Charles Edward Stuart. It was the end of June 1746, ten weeks after Culloden. He had been hunted through the Outer Hebrides until he was trapped on the island of Benbecula with government militia on every side and warships patrolling the sea. The only way off was a pass, signed by a militia officer, permitting a young lady to cross to Skye with a manservant and a maid.
The young lady was twenty-four. Her name was Flora MacDonald.
Over the sea
She had not wanted to do it. She said so, plainly, when the scheme was put to her. Her stepfather commanded the very militia that was hunting the Prince, though as it turned out he was the one who wrote the pass. She had no strong feelings about the Stuart cause. What persuaded her in the end seems to have been simple decency. The man would be killed if nobody helped him.
They sailed from Benbecula on the evening of 28 June, in an open boat with a crew of island boatmen, and crossed the Minch through a night of wind and rain. The Prince sang to keep their spirits up and, when Flora fell asleep in the bottom of the boat, sat guarding her head so that no one would tread on her. In the morning, as they came in to the coast of Skye, they were fired on by militia from the shore.
They landed near Monkstadt. Flora went up to the house and found, in the dining room, an officer of the militia. She sat and made polite conversation with him over dinner while the Prince crouched on the shore below. That night they reached a safe house at Kingsburgh. The next day she took him to Portree, where a boat was waiting to carry him on to Raasay. They parted at the inn. He repaid her half a crown he had borrowed, gave her his portrait in a locket, and said, “For all that has happened, I hope, Madam, we shall meet in St James’s yet.” They never met again.
She was arrested within a fortnight. She was held on a warship and then in London, part of the time in the Tower, and became, to her own surprise, a celebrity. Society ladies came to look at her. When she was released in 1747 she went quietly home to Skye.
The rest of her life
That is the famous part. The rest is just as remarkable.
She married Allan MacDonald of Kingsburgh, son of the man who had sheltered the Prince that night. In 1773 Dr Samuel Johnson, touring the Hebrides with James Boswell, slept at their house, in the very bed the Prince had used. Johnson was not a sentimental man. He wrote of her that her name “will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour.”
A year later, ruined by bad harvests and rising rents, Flora and Allan emigrated with hundreds of other Skye people to North Carolina. They settled among the Highlanders of the Cape Fear valley. And there, in the great irony of her life, the heroine of the Jacobite rising found herself on the side of King George. When the American Revolution broke out, Allan raised the Highland settlers for the Crown. They were cut to pieces by the patriots at Moore’s Creek Bridge in February 1776. He was taken prisoner. The family’s property was confiscated.
Flora sailed home alone in 1779. The ship was attacked by a French privateer on the way, and she refused to go below during the fight and had her arm broken. She remarked afterwards that she had now risked her life for both the House of Stuart and the House of Hanover and got very little for it from either. She died on Skye in 1790. It is said that she was buried in a sheet in which the Prince had slept, and that the funeral procession was a mile long.
The white ground
Flora’s clan was the greatest in the Highlands. Clan Donald descends from Somerled, the twelfth-century King of the Isles, through his grandson Donald. For two hundred years its chiefs ruled the whole western seaboard as Lords of the Isles, from a council island on Loch Finlaggan in Islay, all but independent of the Scottish crown. The lordship was forfeited in 1493. The clan survived in its great branches: Sleat, Clanranald, Glengarry, Keppoch, Glencoe.
The main MacDonald tartan is a dark sett of green, blue and black with fine red lines. The dress tartan is the same family of colours thrown onto a ground of white.
Dress tartans have a particular history, and it belongs to women. In the old Highlands, men wore the dark, practical plaid. Women wore the earasaid, a long wrap belted at the waist and pinned at the breast, and travellers who described it from the sixteenth century onwards agree that it was usually white, or pale, with a few stripes of colour. When the clan tartan system took shape in the nineteenth century, weavers created dress versions of many setts by opening out one band of the pattern into white, and the idea is generally held to descend from that women’s cloth.
The MacDonald Dress has better credentials than most. One version was among the samples that Highland chiefs signed, sealed and sent to the Highland Society of London between 1815 and 1822. The one woven today comes from a French collection of 1880, and the archive notes point out something unusual about it: it is asymmetric, the pattern repeating across the cloth without mirroring. Broad fields of white, crossed by fine lines of red and blue, alternate with dark blocks of blue, green and black. It is a brilliant, festive cloth, much used by Highland dancers.
Retailers generally list MacDonald Dress tartan together with the clan’s many other setts, in Modern and Ancient colours, made to order or sold by the yard.
Red Springs, North Carolina, a Saturday in October
The town of Red Springs is in the same Cape Fear country where Flora lived. For much of the twentieth century it had a women’s college named after her. Half the churchyard is MacDonalds, McNeills and McLeans.
Two brothers are getting dressed for their sister’s wedding. Their name is McDonald, the family has farmed in Robeson County since the 1770s, and their mother has decreed tartan.
Ian, the elder, is thirty-three and needed no persuading. He has worn a kilt to the Highland games at Grandfather Mountain every July since he was a boy. His is the dress sett, eight yards of it, and with a black Prince Charlie jacket the white ground looks spectacular, like a dinner jacket turned inside out.
Will is twenty-nine, works in a bank in Charlotte, and would sooner be shot. He has nothing against the family tartan. He simply does not want his knees in the photographs.
It was Ian who found the answer. The outfitter that had made his kilt, Scottish Kilt, works in more than five thousand tartans, and a shop that will make a mens plaid kilt to order in a given sett will generally cut tailoring from the same cloth. Their men’s tartan suits come in two- and three-piece cuts, made to measure, with every piece cut in one run from a single sett so that jacket, waistcoat and trousers match exactly. There is a slim cut, a classic three-piece, and a dinner suit with satin lapels for black tie.
A full suit in the white dress tartan would have been a great deal, even for a wedding. So Will did what tailors have always advised with a loud cloth, and split it. He ordered the three-piece in the dark MacDonald clan sett, green, navy and black with its fine red line, which from ten feet away reads as a sober dark suit and up close is unmistakably tartan. Then he had a bow tie and a pocket square made in the dress tartan, to tie him to his brother. Chest, shoulders, sleeve, waist and inside leg, measured by their mother with a tape from her sewing box.
They stand side by side in the mirror of the church hall, one in the kilt with its blaze of white, one in the dark suit with a flash of the same white at the throat.
“You look like a lawyer at a ceilidh,” says Ian.
“You look like a tablecloth,” says Will. “A very handsome tablecloth.”
Their mother comes in, stops, and puts her hand to her mouth.
“Your grandfather,” she says, “would have given anything to see this.” Then, because she is who she is: “Now which of you knows who Flora MacDonald was? Because the minister is going to mention her, and I will not have you looking blank.”
Courage and fidelity
Flora MacDonald did not set out to be a heroine. She did one brave thing because it was the decent thing to do, paid for it with prison, and then lived a long, hard life that took her across an ocean and back, on the losing side twice. She was, by every account, modest, sensible and extremely tough.
She would have known the white-ground cloth of her people’s women, in one form or another. She could not have pictured it on a young banker’s bow tie in a Carolina church hall, or the dark sett cut into a three-piece suit. But she of all people knew that clothes can carry more than they seem to, and that a disguise, if it must be worn, should at least be worn with some style. On that point she would probably have had a word with Betty Burke.