irregularities when not in active service, were tranquil under the
strictest military rule.[34]
It was here, however, that the first seeds of dissension were sown
between Charles Edward and Lord George. Sir Thomas Sheridan, the tutor
of the Prince, who was allowed to "have lived and died a man of honour,"
but who was manifestly incapable of the great charge intrusted to him,
both in the education of the young Princes and as their adviser in
after-life, added to his other deficiencies a total ignorance of the
British constitution and habits of thinking. The Prince, of course, was
equally ill-informed. They were therefore in the practice, in
conversation, of espousing sentiments of arbitrary power, which were
equally impolitic and unbecoming. Sincere and shrewd, Lord George Murray
lost no time in expressing to Charles Edward his decided disapproval of
this tone of discourse. His motives in these expostulations were
excellent, but his overbearing manner nullified all the good that might
have been effected. He offended the Prince, who repressed indeed his
secret indignation, but whose pride, fostered by circumstances, could
ill brook the assumption of his General.[35]
It was not until the Prince reached Edinburgh that a regular Council was
formed; consisting of the Duke of Perth, Lord George Murray, Lord Elcho,
Secretary Murray, Sir Thomas Sheridan, and Mr. Sullivan, the Highland
chiefs, and afterwards of all the colonels in the army. But, among the
advisers of the Prince, an "ill-timed emulation," as Mr. Maxwell calls
it, now crept in, and bred great dissension and animosities. "The
dissensions," he states, "began at Edinburgh:" according to Sir Walter
Scott, they had an earlier origin, and originated at Perth.
They were aggravated, as in the Council at Perth in the time of Lord
Mar, by the base passions of an individual. Detesting the weak and
crooked policy of Mar and viewing from his calm position as an inferior
actor, with a fiendish pleasure, the embarrassments and mistakes of him
whom he hated, stood the Master of Sinclair. Blinded by a selfish
jealousy of power over the mind of him whom he afterwards betrayed to
the ruin which he was working, and "aiming at nothing less than the sole
direction and management of everything, the Secretary Murray sacrificed
to this evil passion, this thirst for ascendancy, all the hopes of
prosperity to Charles Edward--all present peace to the harassed and
perplexed young man whom his counsels had brought to Scotland. It was
he," strongly, and perhaps bitterly, writes Mr. Maxwell, "that had
engaged the Prince to make this attempt upon so slight a foundation, and
the wonderful success that had hitherto attended it was placed to his
account."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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