Lady Ardsheal (Stewart)

 

AI depiction based on son's painting.

Mrs Stewart of Ardsheal

In September 1751, a small group of people arrived in Scotland from France. Among them was Mrs Stewart of Ardsheal—Isobel Haldane Stewart, the wife of Charles Stewart of Ardsheal.

The government was already watching the Jacobite movement closely. Women were not necessarily regarded as harmless travellers. Jean Cameron of Dungallon, travelling under the name Mrs Chalmers, had previously been employed as an emissary, carrying communications between the Jacobite exiles abroad and their friends in Scotland. When Jean returned in September 1751, the authorities were waiting for her. She was eventually arrested and examined in Edinburgh.

Isobel arrived at almost exactly the same time.

Lieutenant Archibald MacLachlan reported that Mrs Stewart of Ardsheal had arrived in Scotland about the twentieth of September, together with Dr Cameron's wife, a Stewart of Appin, and a Cameron who had deserted from Fort William, joined the Jacobites, and was now a lieutenant in Ogilvie's Regiment. MacLachlan was receiving intelligence about the arrivals and about the dispatches associated with them. He described the newcomers as “this gentry now come over.”

Unlike Jean Cameron, however, Isobel does not appear in the surviving evidence as having been arrested or brought before the authorities.

Perhaps that was precisely the advantage of her position.

She was not travelling under an assumed name. She was a Highland gentlewoman returning among people who could plausibly have been family, friends, or acquaintances. Yet she had spent years within the Jacobite world. Her husband was an exiled Jacobite officer, and she herself had experienced the destruction of Ardsheal and the upheaval that followed Culloden.

We cannot prove from MacLachlan's report alone that Isobel personally carried a particular dispatch. But the circumstances are striking: she arrived from France in the same period as known Jacobite emissaries, among people whom government intelligence associated with communications from the exiles.

And Isobel's connection with France was not temporary. The National Library of Scotland preserves four letters written by Isobel herself to her sisters Anne Forrester and Margaret Bontine from Boulogne and Dunkirk, dating from 1757–1777. Her correspondence shows that France remained part of her world long after Culloden.

So perhaps Mrs Stewart of Ardsheal was not merely a Jacobite wife returning home.

Perhaps, like other Highland women whose roles have been hidden behind the activities of the men around them, she was carrying something more than her own belongings across the sea.

A letter.

An instruction.

A piece of intelligence.

A dispatch.

We may never know exactly what she carried in September 1751. But we know that women were being used as emissaries, we know that Jacobite communications were moving between France and Scotland, and we know that Isobel Stewart of Ardsheal arrived in Scotland in the midst of that activity.

For now, that is where her story becomes interesting.

Memorial Inscription

Isobel Stewart died from the complications of dropsy in an Inn, located in Northampton, England on 8 April 1782. She was 69 years of age. A plaque was erected with an inscription written in Latin, describing her sufferings during the '45. Please visit the profile of Isabella Haldane Stewart, on Find a Grave to view the plaque. The inscription reads as follows: 

At an inn, she finished her blessed course, Isabella Haldane, Daughter of John Haldane of Lanrick, Widow of Charles Stewart of Ardsheal.

To whom, in the most difficult turns of life, A heart truly well prepared For after civil war, Her home was plundered and destroyed by soldiers, To give birth in a very poor hut, And even on the very next night, Accompanied by her tender children, To flee through the snows, Innocent, she was forced.

After eleven years of love and exile, Left a widow in slender circumstances, She nourished a numerous offspring, And successfully sustained them by untiring labor.

At last, suffering from dire dropsy, A most heavy, fatal blow to the mother, With pious fortitude she received repeated blows.

For she trusted that she and her excellent children, Who had gone slightly before, Would see each other again in Heaven. Therefore, traveler, against hostile things, Be not too fearful.

May piety conquer the hard journey. She died on April 8, 1782, in the 69th year of her age.

Credit: Damn' Rebel Bitches: The Women of the '45.