This article attempts to reconstruct the lives of three women of Scottish origin -Maria Benita de Rozas y Drummond (1719-1801), Jean Woodrow (1720-1792), and Maria Felipa Campbell y Woodrow (1744-1820)- who displayed prestige and influence in different spheres (the court, diplomatic, government, religious, etc.) in eighteenth-century Madrid. Coming from Jacobite circles, the three women were united by strong ties of solidarity, friendship, and family. Their biographies, each distinctly individual, reveal their strategies of mutual support and protection in the face of their own and their families' precarity. They took advantage of their social status and ability to move in courtly circles in order to advance their interests, using the game of favors and loyalties that characterized ancien regime society. These trajectories visualize the role that women were able to take in the least known and most limited network of Scots in eighteenth-century Spain and their adaptation of the exercise of patronage, well-established among exiled Jacobite women in France, to the Spanish context. The reconstruction of the biographies of these women and their family members drew on resources from various public and private archives, especially those in Madrid, where letters, notary documents, personal records, ecclesiastical certificates, etc., have been consulted, as well as manuscripts and printed documentation of the period conserved in Spanish and foreign libraries and available in digital repositories. This has allowed us to sketch out the lives of these three women with a great deal of accuracy in spite of the inevitable biographical silences.
