America's wealthiest men, a connection which gave rise to several lucrative transactions. Government adviser Baring's work from 1782 as an adviser on commercial matters to cabinet ministers propelled him from relative obscurity to the inner circles of British political life, underlining how his influence had grown. The catalyst for this advancement was his Devon connections. His brother John was elected to parliament as a member for Exeter in 1776; more importantly, in 1780 his sister, Elizabeth, married another MP and fellow Devonian, John Dunning. A rich and influential lawyer, Dunning was allied to Lord Shelburne, a powerful Whig politician who held progressive views on political economy and whose borough of Calne Dunning represented in Parliament. In July 1782, following Shelburne's promotion to Prime Minister and Dunning's appointment as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Baring fulfilled the new Prime Minister's need "to have recourse from time to time to mercantile advice". Baring, by instinct a Whig, became Shelburne's confidential adviser on commerce, or his "handy City man", according to a discontented William Cobbett. Baring's ideas on political economy and commerce were well ahead of his time; in 1799 he defended the Bank of England's decision (in 1797) to suspend specie payments as both correct and inevitable, in the face of hostile opposition from many of his peers. Baring's knowledge of North American merchants and trade made him especially useful in the closing years of the American War of Independence when Shelburne, anxious for a liberal settlement, invited his comments on commercial aspects of the proposed peace treaty with the United States. Shelburne introduced Baring to Isaac Barré, his paymaster-general, and to such leading luminaries as William Pitt the Younger, Henry Dundas, Jeremy Bentham, Edmund Burke, Sir Samuel Romilly, and Lords Erskine, Camden and Sydney. However, Baring's friendship with Lord Lansdowne (as Shelburne became in 1784), Dunning, and Barré ran particularly deep, and in 1787 he drew public attention to it by commissioning their triple portrait from Sir Joshua Reynolds. A private financial connection also existed. For six years from 1783 Baring loaned Lansdowne £5,000, on security of a debt owing to Lansdowne. In 1805, on Lansdowne's death, Baring became a trustee of his estate, charged with the task of liquidating debts of £90,000. Baring was not nearly as close to the Tory leader William Pitt, who followed Lansdowne as Prime Minister and who held office almost continuously until Baring's retirement