Hugh MacDonald (vicar apostolic of the Highland District)

[1][2][3] Hugh MacDonald was born in a wattle and daub house located where the River Meoble emptied into Loch Morar on 2 February 1699.

According to his biographer John Watts, only the larger size of the future bishop's birthplace differentiated it from the houses that surrounded it and showed his family to be of higher status.

[1][2][3] Upon learning that Prince Charles Edward Stuart had arrived from France and landed at Loch nan Uamh on 25 July 1745, Bishop MacDonald asked his kinsman, MacDonald of Morar, how many French Royal Army troops and military advisers had arrived with the Prince and panicked when he was told merely the Seven Men of Moidart and almost no military supplies or money.

[11] According to historian Maggie Craig, the 1745 rising was and often still is inaccurately, "presented as a Protestant-Catholic struggle" and it is just as often alleged that a Stuart restoration would have meant the forced conversion of all the British people to Roman Catholicism without distinction.

It is equally understandable why the Scottish Catholic laity, who, "were discouraged and much exposed to oppression", would similarly, "wish for an event that was likely to release them, and put them again into the possession of the privileges of free-born citizens.

They were seeking to capture the Bishop and high-ranking Jacobite Army leader Lord Lovat, who were correctly suspected of meeting with each other upon Eilean Bàn on 8 June 1746.

He has termed the 8 June 1746 book burning and the destruction of most of Bishop MacDonald personal papers, "an irreplaceable loss both for the eighteenth-century Church and the scholar of today.

"[25] The Bishop remained in hiding in the neighbouring countryside until, on the sixth rescue attempt ordered by the Comte de Maurepas, the French Minister of Marine, he, the prince, Donald Cameron of Lochiel, and Dr Archibald Cameron of Lochiel were all successfully evacuated from the Prince's Cairn at Loch nan Uamh to France on 19 September 1746.

[30] Based on surviving archival documents and circumstantial evidence, his biographer John Watts believes that Bishop MacDonald played a central role in the Bard's previous conversion from Presbyterianism to Roman Catholicism.