Elizabeth Fletcher

Elizabeth Fletcher later Elizabeth Wedderburn (December 1731 – 18 December 1758) was a Scottish scholar educated in Edinburgh. She had a short, but important life introducing many of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment to people of influence. She was mainly known as Miss Betty Fletcher.

Life Fletcher was born in 1731. She was the penultimate child of eight born to Lady Elizabeth (born Kinloch) and Andrew Fletcher, Lord Milton.

She had no formal education but she was clever. She had spent three years at Miss Aylesworth's school in Chelsea, but it is reported that she would have learned singing and about music but nothing more academic. In 1745 she finished in Chelsea and in Edinburgh she was given further education by private tutors.

In 1747 the family moved from Saltoun Hall to Brunstane House east of Edinburgh. Each summer she would be invited to Inveraray Castle, as this was the family seat of her father's business fiend Lord Ilay.

She knew the historian William Robertson, the historian, David Hume and Adam Ferguson the philosophers, Adam Smith the economist, and John Home. Because these men knew Elizabeth Fletcher, she introduced them to her father, Lord Milton. Via Lord Milton they met Lord Ilay, and Ilay had the ear of Sir Robert Walpole. and he would have fourteen more children and in the last year of his life he became a Halkett baronets and he changed his name to Halkett. Elizabeth's daughter was brought up knowing that she a different mother to step-brothers and sisters. Her step-brother would become Sir Charles Halkett, 5th Baronet of Pitfirrane.