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their Bavarian contest. The War of the Bavarian Succession, 1778-79, occasioned by the extinction of the electoral house of Bavaria upon the death of Maximilian Joseph.
Lord North. Frederick, Lord North (1732-1792), eldest son of the first Earl of Guilford; M.P. for Banbury; First Lord of the Treasury, 1770-82; succeeded as second Earl of Guilford, 1790; see Introduction, passim.
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a great Character. William Pitt, Lord Chatham.
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Col. Barré. Isaac Barré (1726-1802), M.P. for Calne. Barré, who had served with Wolfe in America, was a devoted friend of the colonists and in Parliament was regarded as a master of invective and the special antagonist of Lord North. North had his revenge in Anticipation; see Introduction, p. 12.
the Indians, headed by Col. Butler, began their rapine in Cherry Valley. John Butler (1725-1796), Indian agent under the Johnsons in the Mohawk Valley; Lieutenant-Colonel of Militia, 1768; Major in command of Butler’s Rangers, 1777. Under his leadership parties of Loyalists and their Indian allies of the Six Nations systematically harried the back settlements in New York and Pennsylvania during the Revolution. Their raids reached a peak of frequency and destructiveness in the early summer of 1778, the notorious “Wyoming Massacre” occurring 3-4 July. None of the settlements mentioned by Barré had been attacked at the time his informant is supposed to have written; but rumors were rife on the frontier as well as at the Poughkeepsie headquarters of the Continental Army; and the worst fears of the settlers were realized when Butler’s son, Captain Walter Butler, together with the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, sacked the village of Cherry Valley on the 11th of November. See Howard Swiggett, War out of Niagara: Walter Butler and the Tory Rangers, New York, 1933, chs. vi-vii.
Gen. Carlton. Guy Carleton (1724-1808), Lieutenant-General; Governor of Quebec, 1775-78; requested his recall because of differences with Lord George Germain, May 1777; cr. Baron Dorchester of Dorchester (Oxford), 1786.
Miss Macrea. Jane MacCrea, daughter of a Tory clergyman residing near Fort Edward on the upper Hudson, was scalped by a marauding party of Burgoyne’s Indian allies, 27 July 1777. This incident, about which a mass of romantic legend soon grew up, proved highly embarrassing to Burgoyne and the Administration.