guished but more influential officers. Smarting under the sense of injustice he appealed to Pitt, describing his past career and the misfortunes he had suffered. "The trophies," he wrote, "I can boast, only indicate how much I suffered, my zealous and sole advocate killed, my left eye rendered useless, and the ball still in my head."[1] Pitt, with the strange recklessness which on more than one occasion was the cause of his losing valuable support, refused the application, and Barr, sarcastically declaring himself "bound in the highest gratitude," returned to England. After a stormy scene with Lord Barrington, Secretary at War,[2] he went to Ireland on a tour of inspection of the estates of Lord Shelburne, and while in Dublin engaged himself in a controversy with his father on the subject of the pecuniary arrangements between them.[3] Meanwhile, returning to England, notwithstanding some intrigues of Lord Melcombe, he had been elected for Chipping Wycombe, and was now awaiting the meeting of Parliament, the members of which were soon to become very familiar with the Colonel.[4] He is described at this period as 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."[5]
"It so happened," says Lord Shelburne, "that the election of Colonel Barré was the occasion of my becoming perfectly acquainted with Lord Melcombe's true character at my very first entrance into life. He was professedly devoted as well as myself to Lord Bute when my father died. From motives of propriety I stayed a month with
- ↑ Chatham Correspondence, ii. 41. Colonel Barré to Mr. Pitt, New York, April 28th, 1760. Sir Joshua Reynolds turns the wounded side of Colonel Barré's face away from the spectator (T. Taylor, Life of Reynolds).
- ↑ Barré to Shelburne, February 7th, 1761. Barré to Shelburne, August 13th, 1761.
- ↑ Barré to Pitt, October 8th, 1760.
- ↑ Barré was at length promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel on January 29th, 1761.
- ↑ Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George III., i. 109. Mr. Symmers to Sir Andrew Mitchell, January 29th, 1762, describes Barré's parents as being of a mean condition; his father and mother from France, and established in a little grocer's shop by the patronage of the Bishop of Clogher, whose child the mother nursed.
