According to Father Charles MacDonald, the dispute between the Bard and Father Harrison was not only moral but also political. At the beginning of the Uprising, Father Harrison had appeared before the Sheriff of Inverary and had sworn under oath that he took no part in politics, was as loyal to the House of Hanover, "as a good Patriot should be", and that he, " regretted that any of his co-religionists should have allowed himself to be involved in an enterprise so foolhardy," as the Jacobite rising of 1745. In response, the Sheriff had given Father Harrison a pass which was shown to any militia officers who encountered him. Father Harrison's pass made him, according to Father Charles MacDonald, the only Roman Catholic priest in the Highlands and Islands who was never imprisoned or even harassed during the 1745 rising or its aftermath. To the Bard, however, Father Harrison's loyalty to the Hanoverians was nothing short of treasonous and had marked him out as a "sagairt na cuigse", or ("Priest for the Whigs").