[BITList] Colonel Anne

[John Feltham]

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Mackintosh  [née Farquharson],  Anne  [nicknamed Colonel Anne], Lady Mackintosh  (1723-1784), Jacobite campaigner, was the eldest daughter of John Farquharson of Invercauld, Braemar, Scotland, who had himself been (coercedly) 'out' in the 1715 rising (for which he was subsequently pardoned). In February 1741 Anne married Aeneas (or Angus) Mackintosh of Mackintosh (d. 1770), whose seat, Moy Hall, some 12 miles from Inverness, was on the edge of Drumossie or Culloden Muir, where the Jacobite cause would suffer decisive defeat on 16 April 1746. While clan Chattan, of which Aeneas was captain, was predisposed to come out on the Jacobite side in 1744, Aeneas himself was less obviously committed, holding, from December 1744, a commission in one of three new companies which he had raised for the Hanoverian government's regiments. In January 1746 he raised a full company in the government Highland regiment. In character a vacillator, whether Mackintosh connived in his wife's later actions or whether Anne acted on her own initiative is unclear; such apparently divided allegiances might be less ideological than pragmatic. What is certain is that Anne raised, personally, some 600 men for the Stuart cause. Of these, 300 were retained for the protection of the Moy estate, the remainder joining Lord Lewis Gordon at Perth and thence Charles Edward Stuart's forces at Stirling.

Lady Mackintosh's other direct involvement in the Jacobite rising of 1745 occurred on Sunday 16 February 1746. Having received Prince Charles Edward and an escort of some thirty highlanders at Moy Hall, she contrived their escape on being warned of the approach of government forces commanded by John Campbell, fourth earl of Loudoun, from the garrison at Inverness, whence they would return following the rout of Moy, a successful tactical ambush by five of Lady Mackintosh's men. Following the larger defeat of the Highland regiment near Dornoch on 20 March, Lady Mackintosh was given charge of her husband and it was in their exchange on this occasion that, apocryphally, she acquired the title Colonel Anne. In the aftermath of Culloden she was imprisoned at Inverness for six weeks. Contrary to some accounts she was not taken to London, which she would not visit until 1748, when, like Flora Macdonald, she would find herself 'caressed' by sympathetic 'ladys of quality'  (Sir Aeneas Mackintosh, quoted in MacDonald, 16). In 1763 she was elected 'burges freewoman and guildsister'  (ibid.) of Inverness. Following the death of her husband, in 1770, she removed to the Edinburgh port of Leith, where she died on 2 March 1784 after a five-month illness, 'presenting the use of her reason to the last'  (ibid., 19). She had no children.

Colonel Anne was the victim both of the instant accretion of mythology surrounding the 'Forty-Five and of prevalent concepts of femininity-those of her own day and of the nineteenth century in which the Jacobite era would be represented. She has thus been variously idealized as a 'Highland Joan of Arc'  (W. D. Norie, The Life and Adventures of Charles Edward Stuart, 1901, 3.102)-from the erroneous idea, significantly taken up by nineteenth-century painters and illustrators, that she actually led in person at the battle of Falkirk the 300 men she had contributed-and demonized in the contemporary whig press in Edinburgh but especially London as an Amazonian figure, a masculine, armed 'woman of monstrous size'. A surviving portrait by Allan Ramsay, dated c.1748, bears out the contemporary observation of her husband's nephew, Sir Aeneas Mackintosh, of 'a very thin girl'  (Macdonald, 7); her alleged size and masculinity may be taken as the corollary of her masculinity of independent initiative. This was, in fact, limited. According to Sir Aeneas she 'never saw the men but once, and was at her own house'  (ibid.) during times of military engagement. Lady Mackintosh's surviving correspondence suggests a conventional domesticity and familial concern, in keeping with the cockade-sewing hinted at by the expenditure on white ribbon documented in the Moy household accounts for 8 and 11 April 1746. She was buried in North Leith: the inscription on the 1820 stone makes no reference to her Colonel Anne persona.

Eirwen E. C. Nicholson 

Sources  F. Macdonald, 'Colonel Anne': Lady Anne Mackintosh (1987) + M. Craig, 'Damn' rebel bitches': the women of the '45 (1997)
Likenesses  A. Ramsay, oils, c.1748, Moy Hall, Inverness [see illus.] · J. Macardell, mezzotint (after A. Ramsay), BM, NPG




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