Flora MacDonald's farewell to Charles Edward

Flora Macdonald assisted Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, to flee after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. She was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London, but was later released in the general amnesty of 1747. The Jacobite cause thereafter crumbled, and there was no further challenge to the Hanoverian throne. The Catholic subject may have appealed to Calderon owing to his parentage: born in Poitiers his father was a renegade Spanish priest who later became Professor of Spanish Literature at King’s College London. (He would there have encountered Rossetti’s father who was Professor of Italian Literature). Scotland was a place of romance to the British public throughout the 19th century, popularised not only from the novels of Sir Walter Scott, but from Queen Victoria’s residence at Balmoral. Calderon was adept at imagining scenes from its history that appealed to popular taste.