Flora MacDonald is remembered in statues and song as the romantic Jacobite heroine who saved Bonnie Prince Charlie. The record tells a different story. Born in 1722 on South Uist to a Protestant family of minor gentry, she was raised in a household loyal to the government in London. Her stepfather, Hugh MacDonald, commanded a pro-government militia. When a relative asked her in 1746 to smuggle the fugitive prince off Benbecula after Culloden, she hesitated, then agreed for a practical reason: if he were caught on her clan’s land, her family would pay for it.

This episode follows the whole of her life, not just the boat to Skye. Arrested for treason and taken to London, she charmed high society, collected more than 1,500 pounds, and went free under the Act of Indemnity in 1747. Rising rents and failed harvests later drove her and her husband Allan to North Carolina in 1774, where they sided with the Crown in the American Revolution and lost everything. She returned to Scotland in 1780, lived out her days on a tenant farm, and died in 1790 at 68, before Victorian writers remade her as a legend.

• The travel permits used for the escape came from her own stepfather, the militia commander hunting the prince, who appears to have known exactly what was happening.
• The prince was disguised as an Irish spinning maid named Betty Burke and managed his skirts so badly that a steward on Skye told him to take the dress off.
• Asked by Frederick, Prince of Wales, why she had helped a rebel, Flora said it was Christian charity and that she would have done the same for him.
• Allan raised a Loyalist force of about a thousand men that was crushed at Moores Creek Bridge in 1776. He was taken prisoner, and Flora was evicted from their plantation.
• Sailing home on a privateer in 1779, she broke her arm during an attack by a French ship. In 1878 her granddaughter published a fabricated autobiography that fed the myth.