Barré’s father was a Huguenot refugee who settled as a merchant in Dublin c.1720, and his mother was also a Huguenot. In 1757 Barré served with James Wolfe and Lord Fitzmaurice on the expedition to Rochfort. In 1758 he went to Canada with Wolfe, who appointed him adjutant-general; served at Louisbourg; and in the attack on Quebec (September 1759) was wounded and lost an eye. Though a major in America, his substantive rank was still only that of captain. ‘For want of friends’, he wrote to Pitt on 28 Apr. 1760,
He renewed his friendship with Fitzmaurice, who introduced him to Bute and recommended him for a seat in Parliament:
I speak without reserve when I say that I may be an honest, but I fear greatly that a life of dissipation in my first setting out, has prevented me from being a very acceptable representative of your friends at Wycombe. I have not been sufficiently habituated to great objects to undertake this affair with ease to myself.
He was ‘a good deal uneasy’ about his qualification, and went over to Ireland to consult his father. From Dublin he wrote to Shelburne on 13 Aug.:
My father ... has by no means proved himself able in the management of his own affairs ... His income arises from houses mostly ... ’tis clear about £300 a year, and may (including a little lodge in the country, which I don’t now estimate), sell at certain times for near £4,000.
Lansdowne mss.
Presumably Shelburne provided him with a qualification, and on 5 Dec. 1761 he was returned to Parliament.
On 10 Dec. he made a sensational début. Walpole, who entered the House just as Barré was beginning to speak, writes:
My ear was struck with sounds I had little been accustomed to of late, virulent abuse on the last reign, and from a voice unknown to me. I turned, and saw a face equally new; a black, robust man, of a military figure, rather hard-favoured than not young, with a peculiar distortion on one side of his face, which it seems was owing to a bullet lodged loosely in his cheek, and which gave a savage glare to one eye. What I less expected from his appearance was very classic and eloquent diction, and as determined boldness as if accustomed to harangue in that place. He told the House that in the late King’s reign we had been governed solely by Hanoverian measures and councils; and ... he proceeded with the same vociferous spirit to censure all ministers but Lord Bute; and for Mr. Pitt, who was not present, he received the appellation of a profligate minister, who had thrust himself into power on the shoulders of the mob.
The next day, when Pitt was present, Barré repeated his attack. ‘Insult of language, terms, manner were addressed, and personally addressed, to Mr. Pitt by that bravo’, writes Walpole;
He attacked Mr. Pitt’s political principles, and said his life had been a series of change and contradiction from the beginning to the end; that after the most violent protestations against continental and Hanoverian connections, when he had thrust himself into the ministry, chameleon-like, he took the colour of the ground he stood on. He then ridiculed his figure and action, saying he was amazed to see the gentleman, with solemn looks, with eyes uplift to heaven, one hand beating on his breast, and formally contradicting and disowning the principles he had maintained the day before.
‘You know I never was partial to Pitt’, wrote Lord John Cavendish to the Duke of Devonshire,
Barré subsequently revealed in the House of Commons that he had been instigated to make these attacks on Pitt by Henry Fox.
Colonel Barré set out in a flaming, scurrilous speech as usual, but was discountenanced by the House. Many gentlemen as soon as he rose went out of the House; many of those who stayed shuffled about from their places, talked with one another, coughed, and would not hear him. And as he proceeded to talk in an unbecoming manner of the late King, abusing him for his German measures, Lord Barrington rose up in indignation and called him to order.
On the conclusion of peace Barré’s regiment was disbanded, and Shelburne asked Bute to make him surveyor of the Ordnance:
This would be rewarding him very nobly certainly, but upon weighing it I am clear he would be able to return it in the execution of the office and in the credit he would do your Lordship in a Board which, you may depend upon it, wants reformation more than any other.
Barré refused the offer because it would put him out of the way of promotion in the army—‘what I cannot help calling my freehold’.
On 25 Nov. 1763 Barré, together with Shelburne’s other friends in the Commons, voted against Grenville’s Administration over Wilkes; and was turned out of his military employments. He subsequently estimated that he lost £1500 a year,
The hero of the day was the famous Colonel Barré, a man, or I am mistaken, whose fame will not stop here. He spoke with infinite wit and humour, and with that first of merits to me, novelty: his manner is original. He spoke too with extreme bitterness.
Harris described his speech as ‘street dirt upon Lord Sandwich’; without doubt Barré excelled in virulence and abuse.
In 1764 he was engaged with Shelburne and Laurence Sulivan in East India Company affairs,
made a full and masterly speech, and went at large into a state of the Company’s affairs, showed and with plausibility the danger of changing the Company from a trading one into a fighting one, the motives it gave their servants to avarice and ambition, the experience and knowledge of war it taught the natives, the cruel incidents ... to which it exposed our countrymen, opposed Lord Clive’s party and their schemes, yet artfully contrived to give Lord Clive his due praise.
Harris’s ‘Debates’.
He corresponded with friends in America and remained in touch with American affairs.
They planted by your care? No! your oppressions planted them in America ... They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect of them ... They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence ... God knows I do not at this time speak from motives of party heat, what I deliver are the genuine sentiments of my heart ... The people I believe are as truly loyal as any subjects the King has, but a people jealous of their liberties and who will vindicate them if ever they should be violated.
‘These sentiments’, wrote Ingersoll, ‘were thrown out so entirely without premeditation, so forcibly and so firmly ... that the whole House sat awhile as amazed, intently looking and without answering a word.’
In the summer of 1765 Barré went to Italy, and while there the newly-formed Rockingham Administration sent him an offer, first of a seat at the Board of Trade, and next of the place of joint vice-treasurer of Ireland.
I have not the honour of knowing many others of his Majesty’s new servants, and at this distance it cannot be supposed that I am well informed of the measures which they choose to adopt. Besides, in the very extensive change which has taken place I have not been able to find the names of those for whom (or rather for whose principles) I bear the highest respect.
‘You know best, my Lord’, he wrote to Shelburne on 23 Oct., ‘whether I have acted sensibly as a politician, but I know I have acted as a gentleman and your friend.’ A further offer in December 1765 of ‘rank in the army or anything else added to the vice-treasurership’ was also declined.
On 3 Feb. 1766 he spoke against the declaratory bill,
All colonies have their date of independence. The wisdom or folly of our conduct may make it the sooner or later. If we act injudiciously this point may be reached in the life of many of the Members of this house.
On 24 Feb. he spoke for the repeal of the Stamp Act—‘as well as I ever heard him’, wrote George Onslow to Newcastle.
Barré accepted from Chatham the vice-treasurership he had refused from Rockingham, and was sworn of the Privy Council. His silence during the early debates on Chatham’s East India inquiry was unfavourably noticed by the King; who wrote to Conway on 18 Feb. 1767:
Barré resigned, following Chatham and Shelburne, on 31 Oct. 1768.
During the Parliament of 1768 Barré was one of the most frequent Opposition speakers. Two questions particularly concerned him: India and America.
On India he followed the line laid down by Chatham in 1766: the Company had no right to the territorial revenues, and should pay an annual tribute to the state.
If it was intended to take revenue and patronage into our own hands I should make my stand there, and resist such a step as highly dangerous to the constitution. The finger of Government to direct, aid, and control upon extraordinary occasions might be useful, but the strong hand of Government would ruin us all.
He spoke for Burgoyne’s motion against Clive, 21 May 1773, and refused North’s offer of a place on the Bengal council.
His attitude towards America remained the same. The colonists, he said on 26 Jan. 1769,
The proposition before the House, he said, he could not help giving his hearty and proper affirmative to; that he liked it, harsh as it was ... He wished ... to see a unanimous vote in the first onset of this business, that when Boston saw this measure was carried by such a consent they would the more readily pay the sum of money to the India Company ... Now is your time to try, in a civilized manner, your power over the Americans; other of your enemies are not in a condition to take part with them.
Contemporaries supposed that Shelburne and Barré were making overtures to the court,
I am not in office that my advice can be taken, if I was I should give it freely. If office comes to me it comes as an atonement for repeated and unmerited affronts. I shall at all times speak the language of a free and disinterested Member.
Barré, like Chatham, was not prepared to relinquish British supremacy over America. ‘If it is necessary’, he said on 23 Mar., ‘I have no doubt but that a small part of our force would reduce the Americans.’ But this situation should not be allowed to develop. ‘As we are about to punish we should heal also’, he said on 19 Apr.;
Barré, contradicting many of the assertions he had previously made, was one of the severest critics of the American war. Even before Saratoga he warned Administration that the conquest of America was doubtful and ‘the holding of it without the affection and goodwill of the natives’ impossible;
Jeremy Bentham wrote about Barré in 1781:
Barré ... abounds in stories that are well told and very entertaining. He really seems to have a great command of language; he states clearly and forcibly; and upon all points his words are fluent and well chosen.
‘In his younger days’, wrote Walpole,
Melodramatic charges and threats abound in his speeches. Here are a few examples from one session: 15 Mar. 1779, he said that North and Sandwich had behaved ‘like traitors to this country’ and threatened them with impeachment; 22 Mar. 1779, he accused them of ‘aiming like assassins at the life of Admiral Keppel’; 21 June 1779, he said of North that his crimes ‘were black enough ... to have warranted the suspicion of treachery’; etc.
that he supposed the large minority of that evening had inspired the right honourable gentleman with courage to abuse him. He had always held forth to him such language as was not decent, but now he had been insolent and brutal.
Barré, though professing to esteem North ‘as a private gentleman’, claimed that ‘as a minister he had a right to use and treat him with as severe epithets as parliamentary form would allow’.
On the formation of the Rockingham Administration Barré obtained a well-paid office, and a pension of £3200 p.a. if removed from his place. When the pension was criticized in Parliament, Barré defended it as compensation for being dismissed from his military offices in 1763.
Barré did not vote on Fox’s East India bill, and in Robinson’s list of January 1784 and Stockdale’s of March is classed as ‘absent’. About this time he became totally blind. On 14 Mar. 1785 he made his first speech since July 1782, in opposition to the extensive fortifications proposed in the Ordnance estimates. On 18 Apr. 1785 he voted for parliamentary reform. His last big speech in the House was on 27 Feb. 1786 against Richmond’s fortifications plan.
Barré died 20 July 1802.