MURRAY, SIR GEORGE.—This
gallant soldier and able statesman was the second son of Sir William Murray,
Bart., and Lady Augusta Mackenzie, seventh and youngest daughter of George,
Earl of Cromarty. He was born at the family seat in Perthshire, on the 6th
of February, 1772, and received his education, first at the high school, and
afterwards at the university of Edinburgh. Having chosen the military
profession, he obtained an ensigncy in the 71st regiment of foot at the age
of seventeen, from which he rapidly transferred himself, first to the 34th,
and afterwards to the 3d regiment of Guards. He first saw service in the
campaigns of Flanders in 1794 and 1795, and shared in the disastrous retreat
of the allied army through Holland and Germany, and subsequently, during the
last of these years, he served in the West Indies under Sir Ralph Abercromby,
until ill health obliged him to return home, where he served upon the staff,
both in England and Ireland, during 1797 and 1798. Such is but a scanty
outline of his military services during this stirring period, when war was
the principal occupation, and when it was successively shifted to every
quarter of the globe. During these changes, the promotion of Sir George went
onward steadily, so that he rose through the various ranks, from an ensign
to a lieutenant-colonelcy in the Guards, to which he was appointed in 1799.
It is well known that at this
period the military profession had few of those attractions which it
subsequently possessed, when Wellington, and the heroes whom he trained to
victory, directed the operations of our armies; in too many cases, our
commanders groped their way in the dark, while the soldiers had little more
than their characteristic bull-dog obstinacy and courage to rely upon, when
they found themselves out-marched and out-manoeuvred. This Colonel Murray
was doomed to experience in his next campaign, which was the expedition to
Holland, an expedition attended with an immense amount of loss, suffering,
and disaster, and with very little honour as a counterpoise. Of course,
Murray came in for his full share of hardship and privation during the
retreat, and was wounded at the Helder, but was able to proceed with his
regiment to Cork. A better promise of distinction dawned for him when he was
sent with his regiment from Cork to Gibraltar, to serve under the brave Sir
Ralph Abercromby in the Egyptian campaign; and in this successful expedition
he performed an important part, having been placed in the
quarter-master-general’s department, and sent forward to Egypt for the
purpose of making arrangements previous to the arrival of the British army.
Here Murray’s active enterprising spirit found full occupation; he was
present at every engagement, where he rendered most effectual service, and
had his merit acknowledged by the Turkish government, which conferred upon
him the order of the crescent.
After the termination of this
prosperous expedition, Colonel Murray’s services were transferred from Egypt
to the West Indies, for which he embarked in 1802, with the rank of
adjutant-general to the British forces in these colonies. His stay there,
however, was brief; and on returning home, and occupying for a short period
a situation at the horse-guards, he was next employed in Ireland, with the
appointment of deputy quarter-master-general. From this comparatively
peaceful occupation, after holding it for two years, he was called out, in
1806, to the more congenial prospect of active service, in consequence of
the projected expedition to Stralsund, which, like many others of the same
kind, was rendered abortive through the unprecedented successes of the
French, upon which few as yet could calculate, owing to the new mode of
warfare introduced by Napoleon, and the startling rapidity of his movements.
Colonel Murray’s next service was of a diplomatic character, and to the
court of Sweden; but its freakish sovereign, whose proceedings were
perplexing alike to friend and enemy, was not to be reasoned into
moderation; and therefore neither Murray, nor yet Sir John Moore, who was
sent out with a military force, could avert those disasters which terminated
in that monarch’s deposition. From Sweden Colonel Murray, now holding the
rank of quarter-master-general, went with the British troops in that country
to Portugal, where they joined Sir Arthur Wellesley, who had now commenced
that splendid career which scarcely encountered an interruption, and led to
such important results in the history of Europe, of which ages must tell the
termination.
It would be too much to
detail the career of Colonel Murray while he served in Spain and Portugal
under the command of Wellington. At almost every engagement he was present,
while his conduct was such as to elevate him into that chosen band whom
history will recognize as the "heroes of the peninsular war." The sense of
the value of his services was also shown in his appointment to the rank of
major-general in 1812, to the command of a regiment in 1813, and to the
honorary title of knight of the bath in the same year. With the exile of
Napoleon to Elba, when it was thought that every chance of further war had
ended, Sir George Murray was not to retire, like so many of his companions
in arms, into peaceful obscurity; on the contrary, his talents for civil
occupation having been fully experienced, he was appointed to the difficult
charge of the government of the Canadas. He had scarcely fully entered,
however, upon the duties of this new appointment, when he was advertised by
the secretary of state of Bonaparte’s escape from Elba and landing in
France, accompanied with the choice of remaining in his government of the
Canadas, or returning to Europe, and resuming his military occupations. Sir
George at once decided upon the latter; but though he made the utmost haste
to rejoin the army, such delays occurred that he did not reach it until the
battle of Waterloo had been fought, and Paris occupied by the allies. In the
French capital he remained three years with the army of occupation, holding
the rank of lieutenant-general, and honoured with seven different orders of
foreign knighthood, independently of those he had received from his own
court, in attestation of his services and worth. At his return home, also,
when Paris was resigned by the allies to its own government, he was
appointed governor of the castle of Edinburgh, afterwards of the royal
military college, and finally, lieutenant-general of the ordnance. Literary
distinctions, moreover, were not wanting; for in 1820 he received from the
university of Oxford the degree of doctor of common laws, and in 1824 he was
chosen a fellow of the Royal Society.
Such is a very scanty outline
of the history of Sir George Murray; and it gives but a faint idea of his
long military career. "Very few men," says one of his biographers, "even
among our distinguished veterans, have seen such severe and active service
as Sir G. Murray. Sharp fighting and military hardships seemed to be his
lot, from the first moment at which he carried the colours of his regiment,
till the last cannon resounded on the field of Waterloo. With the single
exception of India, he was absent neither from the disasters nor the
triumphs of the British army. France, Ireland, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, the
West Indies, Denmark, and Egypt, have witnessed the services of this able
and experienced commander. . . .It has often been remarked of the Duke of
Wellington, as of all great men, that he is singularly prompt in discerning
the particular individual who happens to be the man above all others best
fitted for the particular duties which he requires to have discharged. His
great general of division was Lord Hill, and his great cavalry officer Lord
Anglesey; his great organizer of raw levies, Lord Beresford, and his best of
all quartermasters, General Sir G. Murray."
Sir George was now to
astonish the world by equal excellence in a very different department. He
had left the university of Edinburgh for the army at the early age of
seventeen, and from that period to the close of his military career his life
had been one of incessant action and change, so that it was evident he could
have had very little time for study and self-improvement. And yet he was
distinguished throughout as an accomplished scholar, eloquent orator, and
able writer, and was now to bring all these qualities to bear upon his new
vocation as a statesman. Men who wondered how or at what time he could have
acquired those excellencies, which are generally the result of a life of
peaceful avocation and study, were obliged to settle upon the conclusion
that his mind must have been of such a singularly precocious character as to
be able to finish its education at the early age of seventeen! He commenced
his career as a politician in 1823, when he was chosen member of parliament
for the county of Perth, and in 1820 he changed his condition in life, by
becoming a husband and a father, at the age of fifty-four, his wife being
Lady Louisa Erskine, sister of the Marquis of Anglesey, and widow of Sir
James Erskine, by whom he had one daughter. In 1828 he resigned the command
of the army in Ireland for the office of secretary of state for the
colonies—and it was in this department especially that he astounded his
cotemporaries by his political sagacity, aptitude for business, and talents
as an orator and debater. "He possessed," we are told, "the power of logical
arrangement in a remarkable degree; and though his speeches did not ‘smell
of the lamp,’ they always had a beginning, middle, and conclusion; besides
that, they possessed a coherence and congruity rarely found in parliamentary
speeches, a force and appropriateness of diction not often surpassed, an
eloquence and copiousness which a soldier could not be expected to attain,
and an agreeable style of delivery which many more professed speakers might
imitate with advantage."
After these explanations, it
becomes the less necessary to enter into a full detail of Sir George
Murray’s political proceedings. His office of secretary for the colonies was
discharged with ability and success; and his ascendency in the House upon
general questions was universally felt and acknowledged. He supported the
Roman Catholic Relief Bill, and opposed the Liberal government in 1830 and
1831. In 1832, upon the passing of the Reform Bill, and dissolution of
Parliament that followed, Sir George was again candidate for Perthshire, to
which he had been repeatedly elected as representative; but on this occasion
the tide was against him and in favour of Lord Ormelie; but when the latter
succeeded to the peerage in 1834 as Marquis of Breadalbane, Perthshire again
presented a parliamentary vacancy, to which Sir George was called, in
preference to Mr. Graham, the Whig candidate. This seat he again lost under
Sir Robert Peel’s administration in 1834-5, Mr. Fox Maule, now Lord Panmure,
being the successful candidate; but Sir George held the important
appointment of master-general of the Ordnance to console him under his
defeat. Such were the political fluctuations of this stirring period, in
which the chief war that was waged by the country was one of hot and hard
words, with the floor of the House of Commons for its battle-field. In 1837,
when there was a general election, in consequence of the accession of Queen
Victoria, Sir George Murray stood for Westminster; but his political
opinions were so different from those of the many in this stronghold of
Liberalism, that he was unsuccessful. Scarcely two years afterwards he was
tempted to stand for Manchester, which had become vacant by the promotion of
its representative, Mr. Paulett Thompson, to the peerage; but here again Sir
George was unsuccessful. Still, however, he remained a minister of the
crown, as master-general of the Ordnance, to which he was reappointed in
1841. His last public effort was in a literary capacity, when he edited five
volumes of the Duke of Marlborough’s despatches, by which an important
addition was made to the historical annals of Britain.
After so long a course of
active exertion, Sir George’s strong constitution gave way, so that for more
than a year previous to his death, he was unable to leave his house in
Belgrave Square: there, however, he continued to attend to the duties of his
office until the last six months, when, unable for further exertion, he
tendered his resignation. His death occurred on the 26th of July, 1846, at
the age of seventy-four. |