[5] His parents hoped he would study law, and David Garrick thought he had potential as an actor and offered to hire and train him, but Barré decided on a military career and entered the British Army in 1746.

[6] The regiment was based in Flanders during the War of the Austrian Succession, and Barré gained his initial army experience prior to the end of the conflict in 1748.

During the French and Indian War, he served under his patron General James Wolfe on the Rochefort expedition of 1757, when he first met Lord Shelburne, and afterwards in Canada where he was appointed adjutant-general, fighting at both Louisbourg (1758) and Quebec (1759).

[10] Returning to England in September 1760, despite many years of commendable service, Barré was denied promotion by William Pitt the Elder[11] and turned to Shelburne for help.

After undertaking a tour of Shelburne's Irish estates, he was advanced to lieutenant colonel of the 106th Foot, and in 1763 he was appointed to the lucrative posts of adjutant general of the British Army and Governor of Stirling Castle.

[12] Shelburne introduced Barré to Lord Bute and brought him into parliament for his borough of Chipping Wycombe (1761–1774),[9] having selected him as a "bravo" to take on Pitt.

[13] This caused a sensation, and set the tone of a long and colourful parliamentary career in which he acquired a fearsome reputation as an orator.

His 1782 appointment as Treasurer of the Navy, which carried a pension of £3,200 a year at a time when the government was ostensibly advocating stringency, caused great discontent.

Nominally responsible for maintaining records of all Exchequer income and payments, the Clerk of the Pells was paid on a percentage system, which enabled Barré to accumulate a sizable fortune.

They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable country where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable, and among others to the cruelties of a savage foe, the most subtle, and I take upon me to say, the most formidable of any people upon the face of God’s earth....