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."