00:03:41.100I'm really delighted to be talking to you about this book and about the character of
00:03:47.080Flora MacDonald, the main heroine of the story.
00:03:51.840Could you start by situating us in a place and a time just so we can understand the importance
00:03:57.160of her story, what was going on in the world around her?
00:04:01.960Sure. So we're in the highlands of Scotland, and in fact, in the islands off the West Coast.
00:04:10.380And a prince known today in the UK where I live as Bonnie Prince Charlie, but he's a
00:04:21.080a steward prince who's come from Europe to try and take back the English crown for the Stuarts
00:04:32.400because there are now, in 1745, which is the time, there's now George II, the grandfather of
00:04:44.580George III, the Hanoverian monarch, we all know, who lost the Americas. And he's on the throne.
00:04:52.020And so Bonnie Prince Charlie comes, and no one thinks that his venture will succeed,
00:04:59.360but he rallies the Highland clans, names we all know today, McDonald's, Campbell's, McLeod's,
00:05:08.220Many of these, of course, have since emigrated to Canada and the States.
00:05:15.540And they sweep down victorious against the Hanoverian army or the Redcoats until they get near London, only 100 miles from London.
00:05:28.980And the king, of course, George II, everyone's freaking out in London.
00:05:34.060But the king's son, the Duke of Cumberland, is the general in charge who pushes Charles Edward Stuart, or Bonnie Prince Charlie, back up to the Highlands and on a moor outside Inverness called Culloden Moor.
00:05:53.280The Redcoats, the Hanoverians, utterly defeat this Highland army, and Charles Edward, or Bonnie Prince Charlie, flees from the battlefield, which is on the east coast in the Highlands, to the west coast, and he's trying to get from there back to France and Italy.
00:06:18.340He grew up in Rome because the Stuarts were exiled in the previous century.
00:06:25.760And he is thinking that he's going to manage it.
00:06:32.320And then, and he's on an island way out in the Atlantic, really, the Western Isles or the Outer Hebrides.0.91
00:06:44.320And then the Redcoats arrive on the island. And in desperation, he comes to the shepherd's hut at midnight, where this young gentlewoman, Flora MacDonald, is minding her brother's cattle.
00:07:03.420And he says, please help me. And a plot is concocted. And Bonnie Prince Charlie, who's six foot four and six foot and incredibly well known with this long oval face, is dressed up as Flora's Irish maid, Betty Burke.
00:07:24.120and Flora and Betty Burke, the prince in disguise,
00:07:48.460Because from Sky, an island nearer the West Coast, Bonnie Prince Charlie hopes to get to the mainland where a French ship can come in and get him away.
00:08:07.060But meanwhile, he, as Betty Burke and Flora, spend a week in the most sort of desperate situation with redcoats on all around them.
00:08:22.240The prince eventually gets away, but Flora is imprisoned.0.51
00:08:30.800She's taken on board a Royal Navy vessel, and she's taken a prisoner down to go on trial in London.
00:08:42.180So she was just a gentlewoman minding her own business on this small island, and suddenly she's involved in this situation.
00:08:52.240Yes. Although she is minding her own business, everyone in the Highlands has been involved over this past year.
00:09:03.760Either they've gone with the Highland army or down to try and take the throne from George II in London, or they've been commandeered as local militia by the government.
00:09:23.760And the truth is that everyone's talking with a forked tongue, which is very much the Highland way.
00:09:29.340And so Flora actually knows very well that he's on the island, but she wasn't expecting him to come to her.
00:09:41.020And as she's very reluctant to get involved, because this is a young, handsome and gallant prince who's already had numerous love affairs during his year in Scotland.
00:09:56.980And she fears for the loss of her reputation because in those days, if you were a gentlewoman or even in the Western Isles, you needed to be pure or a virgin in order to get married.
00:10:16.180And she was of marriageable age now in her early 20s.
00:10:21.660But with her, with the prince, goes at all points a cousin of hers.
00:10:31.320But it's an extraordinary story of Flora and a chief's wife secretly sewing this maid's costume for this enormous man.
00:10:46.180And then the prince makes a very, very bad woman because he's not used to having all these skirts.
00:10:55.400And his father had been called the old pretender, like a pretender to the throne.
00:11:01.760So the government, the Hanoverians, call Charles the young pretender.
00:11:07.980And someone says, well, he's picking up his skirt sort of up to his waist to get over a burn, as they call the little streams.
00:11:20.160He says, if you're a pretender or the worst pretender I've ever seen.
00:11:24.720This all, I'm not sure what the direct relationship is, but it does remind me of his distant ancestor, Charles II, who also went on the run in disguise and was a very tall man.
00:11:36.280Absolutely, and hid in the tree and all. Yeah, absolutely. You know, there are definite parallels. And in fact, later, they never meet again after Flora has got Bonnie Prince Charlie safely to the inn or the pub at Portree on the Isle of Skye, where they part and he takes a boat so as to get to the mainland.
00:12:03.760and then she's later discovered and taken south.
00:12:07.260But he never again leads an expedition like this
00:12:15.120to try and restore the Stuarts to the throne.0.97
00:12:20.380But having dressed up as an Irish maid,
00:12:25.120it seems he gets quite keen on being in disguise
00:12:50.900And, you know, although some thought because the French hadn't supported Bonnie Prince Charlie's attempt on the throne.
00:13:00.500So many thought that it was doomed to failure, which indeed it was.
00:13:07.740But nevertheless, it was absolutely key to all the Highland chiefs and all those on their lands not to have Bonnie Prince Charlie taken when they were on their lands.
00:13:24.060This was the great dishonor that everyone feared to have the prince taken, and that didn't occur, and he did get away.
00:13:35.840So there were kind of two halves to what is in Scotland called the 45, referring to this assault on the throne marching south to London, but also referring to the feet of the Jacobite army, as it was called, the Stuart army, after Charles's father, James, would be Jacobus in Latin.
00:14:03.780And so it's the Jacobite that meets the steward army.
00:14:08.580But the defeat at Culloden Moor took place, in fact, the next year in 46.
00:14:16.820And Flora helping Bonnie Prince Charlie to escape took place in the next year also, 1746.
00:14:25.200But it's referred to always as the 45.
00:14:28.000I was wondering if you could speak about the legend of Flora MacDonald. You were named after her, right?
00:14:36.840Yes, I grew up the other side of Inverness from Culloden Moor, which of course is still a very numinous place to visit, as are locations in the highlands where battles or even the massacre of Glencoe is a numinous place to visit.
00:15:01.460And so I grew up and knowing her story, I mean, from, you know, as early as I can remember, and I also knew that Samuel Johnson, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who wrote the Great Dictionary,
00:15:24.420He came to visit Flora in Skye when she was now a matron of 50 and married with seven children.
00:15:34.100And he and his great friend and biographer, Boswell, made this great journey from London.
00:15:40.500And Dr. Johnson was old and gouty, but he longed to see Flora and hear this story from her own lips.
00:15:51.020and they stayed with Flora and Johnson slept in the bed
00:15:56.840in which Bonnie Prince Charlie had slept.
00:16:00.260It was the only bed, in fact, in which he slept.
00:16:04.700He slept one night in a bed in all the time from April
00:16:08.940when a Jacobite army was defeated to the end of September
00:16:18.300all the rest of the time he was hiding in you know cow sheds or or just lying on the moor in
00:16:25.840his cloak and and kilt I mean the highland dress which um was pretty good I mean the highland dress
00:16:33.240in those days was a lot more voluminous if you like than it is it wasn't just a kilt if you know
00:16:40.080what I mean it was a full plaid which you could wrap yourself up in and so yes so I grew up with
00:16:45.900that. And I knew that Dr. Johnson and Boswell had made this journey, and they both wrote about it.
00:16:53.700But I never thought about something that Flora said to Dr. Johnson. And she was pleased as
00:17:04.000punch to know him too. It was two great characters of the 18th century meeting. And she said,
00:17:10.720you were lucky to find me because I'm off to America. And at the time growing up,
00:17:17.560reading Boswell and Johnson about the journey to the Western Isles, I didn't inquire any further.
00:17:25.480But it was after I'd, while I was writing my previous book about the marriage of George and
00:17:33.940Martha Washington, The Washingtons, I was looking for illustrations for the book. And as you can
00:17:41.460imagine, there are many revolutionary portraits to draw on. And I suddenly found among the portraits
00:17:49.120of Washington, Martha, Hamilton, all of them, there was a portrait of Flora MacDonald. And I
00:17:56.060thought, what is Flora MacDonald, who belongs to the 45 and Culloden and Sky and the boat song,0.91
00:18:04.800you know, what's she doing among these? And then I remembered that she had said to Dr. Johnson,
00:18:10.420I'm off to America. And just before the Revolutionary War, quite a lot of Scots from0.99
00:18:21.720the west coast of Scotland, from the islands, emigrated, large numbers of them, to North
00:18:30.400Carolina. And she went too. And they went because the rents were being racked up and up and up
00:18:41.280by the chiefs who had, many of them, gone south and the government had encouraged or in some cases more or less blackmailed the chiefs to make sure and have the heirs educated in the south.
00:19:00.060So where once these chiefs had been educated at Aberdeen University, Glasgow University, Edinburgh University, all ancient seats of learning, now they were being sort of pushed down to English schools and then from there to English universities like Oxford or Cambridge.
00:19:23.560And then instead of marrying Scottish heiresses, if they could manage it, they were marrying English heiresses, if they could manage it.
00:19:34.640And so guess what? They stayed in London and it was rather more expensive.
00:19:40.300So they wrote to their factors or land agents and said, we need some more money.
00:19:46.840They didn't inquire where it came from and the factors upped the rents.
00:19:52.060So they were really being squeezed all over the highlands.
00:19:59.820And in addition, just before the Revolutionary War, there were several outbreaks of cattle disease, really serious cattle disease.
00:20:11.480And that's what they sold at a market on the mainland.
00:20:20.180And in addition, there was something they referred to as the Black Spring, where everything froze and the cattle died.
00:20:29.980So, you know, it conspired together to make for quite a wholesale emigration, not for long, but it meant that when Flora and her family decided to up sticks and they were all wanted to buy, however small, they didn't want to pay rent, you know, with the uncertainty of the rent rises.
00:20:51.740So when Flora and her husband and family arrive in North Carolina, they quite logically go up the Cape Fear River to this town settled by Scots, which was then called Cross Creek, is now Fayetteville.
00:21:11.560And they inhabit this sort of Scots community where really everyone's doing very well.
00:21:20.420And there are several industries in North Carolina.
00:21:26.420There's a particular, the longleaf pine supplies pitch and tar for Royal Navy hulls and ropes.
00:21:35.480So, you know, they're going into a colony where there's many going concerns.
00:21:43.560But unfortunately, Flora and her husband, Alan, buy in the spring of 1775.
00:23:19.660So they thought there was, you know, there was no question.0.70
00:23:23.500But for stability, they joined up for the crown and that all went horribly wrong, really, really wrong.
00:23:33.040And the patriots just took them all out in one fell swoop before they could even get weapons down on the on on the coast from British ships who were bringing them.
00:23:47.180And now we're just going to take a break for a word from our sponsors.
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00:27:24.180I just the coincidence of going from one revolution to another.
00:27:29.560I know you couldn't make it up and be on the wrong side both times.
00:27:36.220But it's so extraordinary because she, when she goes down to London and she is tried and for effectively for high treason, for hiding the prince, for not, but she manages alone of the Jacobites to become a popular figure.0.82
00:28:01.340As I said, most of them are vermin and rabble, whether they're a chief or whether they're a private, because she says, and she was very canny, which is, I mean, she was canny in that she knew what to say to whom.0.71
00:28:21.360And she said to the officer who arrested her and brought her on his ship, he said, what made you do it? Because she had been through, I mean, although it was just a week, it was harem scarum, adventures, alarms.0.80
00:28:38.700And she said, I would have done the same for you had you been in distress.
00:28:47.400And he writes that in a letter to a friend, a high society lady in London.
00:28:55.060And this remark of hers whips around London.
00:28:58.840And everyone, you know, even before she's arrived, when the ship puts in at Edinburgh to the port there, Leith, people are coming on.
00:29:11.820And when she is released without, she's judged to have been guilty of treason, but is not punished for it because there is, the government is so, I mean,
00:29:25.300London is choked with Highlanders who are sort of being tried or they've, you know, they just say,
00:29:32.380this is enough. They've got to all go home. This is the year after. So this is two years after1.00
00:29:39.360the prince came over. And so she's released. But, you know, she, this quiet gentleman from
00:29:47.880the Western Isles. She has the leading portrait painters take her likeness because she has these
00:29:57.920rich patrons. They get together a fund for her to take home of £1,500. Well, I mean, minimum,
00:30:07.780you used to, about 40 years ago, you used to multiply by 50, but you get the feeling,
00:30:16.560Get the picture. She's going back. A celebrity. There are pamphlets and books and engravings everywhere. And throughout her time, living quietly when she marries and they buy with, I mean, they don't buy, but they lease. They use some of her money to lease this house from the chief.
00:30:40.200She's using her connections in this very 18th century way of patronage.
00:31:04.640And so for each of her five sons, she got a different patron to pay for them to go into the Marines, that was one, pay for them to go out to the Bengala army in India, that was another.
00:31:20.520So, you know, and she knew how to work her fame without ever compromising on the principles.
00:31:31.900And she was always a strong Presbyterian.
00:31:36.080So she was a woman of principle, but that didn't stop her doing the very best she could.
00:31:42.440And she needed to because her husband.
00:31:47.700Alan just I mean you just wanted to have a portrait of Alan hanging there because he was so handsome
00:31:56.920and you know Boswell says Mr. McDonald was the very picture of a Highlander with his bonnet and
00:32:06.220the cock feather and his plaid and and he was but unfortunately money didn't stick to his hands
00:32:17.560And he had schemes. And that was, and those schemes, you know, for, you know, and in the 18th century, it was an age where people were experimenting new forms of agriculture more. And Alan experimented, but you really couldn't experiment on the scale that he had to. You just actually had to rear the cattle and sell them.
00:32:44.340And so Flora did all the work, and it was she who wrote to the patrons, whereas normally it would have been for the father to write.
00:32:55.000And all the way through their time in North Carolina, and then Flora in New York, who knew, and Flora in Nova Scotia, because her husband taken prisoner for two years, a prisoner of war in Pennsylvania.
00:33:12.100She worked with her son-in-law, who was a man of caliber, and so they worked to eventually get her husband to join his regiment in Nova Scotia, which when he'd been exchanged for a continental or American officer, he was very reluctant to do and wanted to stay in New York.
00:33:42.100sort of fitting out a volunteer corps.
00:33:45.240And his commanding officer in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said,
00:34:02.520But Flora had to constantly pick up the pieces.0.78
00:34:08.260And then she winds up back in Scotland.
00:34:10.000Yes, that's right. And by now, she's in her 50s. And she makes her way back to Skye. And by her son-in-law, who was, I mean, 20 years a Marine, a very capable officer, and also an illegitimate son of the McLeod, one of the two local chiefs, I mean, two big chiefs, rather, on Skye.
00:34:40.000Her son-in-law and daughter are occupying Dunvegan Castle with their children.
00:35:59.100And on top of that, just a couple of years before, in fact, she would die in 1790 at the age of 68, her case came to the attention of the Prince of Wales, who would later go on to be the Prince Regent and George IV.
00:36:19.060And was actually the first of the Hanoverians to be really interested in the Stuarts in Scotland. One thinks today, of course, there's Balmoral, but that was much later. Queen Victoria made Balmoral an amazing place and focus for the royal family in Scotland.
00:36:40.440But he had many faults, but he was the first one to see that you could embed the Hanoverian dynasty more, better, in the United Kingdom if you kind of grab the Stuart history too.
00:36:58.060So he sends her a pension of £50 a year. And it's rather marvellous to think that the great-grandson, as he was, of George II, who in effect Flora had been in opposition to, he's now taking care of her in her old age.
00:37:28.060that's another twisted you just can't believe it it just seems so improbable yeah
00:37:35.500i know no i mean it's it's very improbable but it really is all true and it's backed up
00:37:44.960by papers in the royal archives in the national library of scotland in edinburgh in the um
00:37:55.840Colonial and state records of North Carolina.
00:38:17.560You had to be a peer of the realm to be imprisoned in the tower on the whole.
00:38:22.300and that she and Bonnie Prince Charlie were lovers, no.
00:38:28.660I mean, she had a, who wouldn't have a soft spot for this incredibly handsome
00:38:34.460and at that time very brave prince and cheerful despite the failure of his plan.
00:38:44.800And if he showed the best of himself during the time he was in the United Kingdom, this strange sort of year and a bit, I think managing by sheer charisma to get the clans to join up when the French weren't there and everyone was saying, oh, no, no, and the charisma.
00:39:11.040And then this period when Flora observes him, who bears any adversity with absolute, you know, son-fra or doesn't pay discomfort, anything like that, any attention.
00:39:33.860and does seem really to regret what he has brought upon the Highlanders,
00:39:43.440which is, in many cases, death, destitution or eviction from their homes.
00:39:53.900Later, going back to Europe and the increasingly dissolute life he led there,
00:40:03.860you could say it was all disappointment he was disappointing and he was disappointed
00:40:10.740but when he was he he rose to the occasion in when he raised the clans as it was called and
00:40:19.300he rose to the occasion and was immensely solicitous all the week they were together of flora's
00:40:27.540comfort and um treated her like you know she was a his queen without them being a romantic couple
00:40:38.720so i just wanted to ask so this book that's just coming out in north america that's why
00:40:44.700why we're chatting today this is the first full biography of her in quite some time
00:40:51.240Yeah, not been one for some years. Although, you know, all the ones that have been published are all interesting. It's, you know, and there's even one, which was a wonderfully sort of inventive autobiography of Flora, which was written by her granddaughter, who had never met her. It's a wonderful story.
00:41:18.980So what you have in terms of writing this new book is access, well, the American documents. Like, I think you were looking at sides of her life that maybe hadn't been explored in this way.
00:41:30.600Yes. And I think that, I mean, certainly other biographers and historians have looked at these papers. The main, there are some Boswell papers in America, in Yale, in the Beinecke Library, which are fascinating.
00:41:52.540And although they're not physically in America, the colonial and state papers of North Carolina are part of a marvellous archival project called Documenting the American South.
00:42:10.980And so they're actually physically these papers in the British National Archives in London.
00:42:20.040It's one of those fantastic American projects.
00:42:23.120Like when I was writing about the Washingtons, the University of Virginia has the Washington papers online.
00:42:29.880And so they were being written, these papers and letters from North Carolina and about Flora or about her husband to England.
00:42:47.280And then there are other papers here which tell in detail about the lives of these Scots emigrants in North Carolina, because when they come back, you know, when effectively these loyalists are kicked out or, you know, can't remain or don't remain,
00:43:09.680They submit memorials to government with claims for what they lost in America.
00:43:18.740So you get a whole community and all of them saying that, indeed, Alan, Flora's husband, puts in his, Flora's son-in-law puts in his, but all their friends.
00:43:36.600And they're all sort of vouching in London for, I saw, you know, Alexander McLeod's 16 head of cattle and they were fine and they were strained.
00:43:49.760I was at Neil MacArthur's home and he had, you know, 12 barrels of beer.
00:44:00.300I mean, it's kind of because they'd made this this this life.
00:44:06.100I mean, totally Scottish. So fascinating.
00:46:00.660And Hamilton just made the Revolutionary War sing in everyone's imagination.
00:46:07.380And I think that Diana Cabaldon and all the actors and actresses have, again, made a different part of the Revolutionary War and also the 45 sing in our imaginations.
00:46:27.520And I'd like to think that Flora, Pretty Young Rebel, my life of Flora MacDonald will contribute to that song
00:46:39.080Well, and I mean, just bring it back to something you mentioned at the very beginning
00:46:42.260Speaking of the song, so the Sky Boat song
00:46:51.060It was like, we all knew how to play it on the piano
00:46:54.060And I mean, it was just like one of those
00:46:56.460And then that's so fascinating that it wasn't written at the time, it was actually a lady, English ladies, crossing a loch and the oarsmen, so it's a loch in Scotland, and the oarsmen are singing a Gaelic air.
00:47:19.580And she, being a musician, takes down the air and then brings it to this composer and Sir Harold Bolton.
00:47:33.540And he, by this time we're in the sort of late 19th century, puts these lyrics to it.
00:47:41.940And of course there were these, I mean, Scotland's got the fabulous songs and Gaelic airs and the dancing, but it's rather, it's being added to, if you know what I mean, it's still being added to.
00:48:04.400That the events of the 45 or earlier sort of key events that resonate down the centuries in Scotland, there are bards, there are dancers, you know, there are still new Scottish dances being invented.
00:48:22.160And it's living history. And I think Outlander is really, it's been a fantastic incarnation of living history.
00:48:36.080And I think what's really interesting and so important about the book that you wrote is you described Flora was immediately sort of a famous person, a legend.
00:48:46.300And people remember her for this boat ride, but you've written a whole book