James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury

Early life (1746 – 1768)

Born at Salisbury, the son of James Harris, an MP and the author of Hermes, and Elizabeth Clarke of Sandford, Somerset. He was educated at Winchester, Oxford and Law and History at the University of Leiden (1765-1767).

Early diplomatic career: Spain (1768 – 1771)

Harris arrived in Spain in December 1768 and became secretary to the British embassy at Madrid, and was left as chargé d'affaires at that court on the departure of Sir James Grey in August 1769 until the arrival of George Pitt, afterwards Lord Rivers. This interval gave him his opportunity; he discovered the intention of Spain to attack the Falkland Islands, and was instrumental in thwarting it by putting on a bold countenance. As a reward he was appointed minister ad interim at Madrid.

Envoy-extraordinary in Berlin (1772 – 1776)

In January 1772 Harris was appointed envoy-extraordinary to Prussia in Berlin, arriving on 21 February. Within a month of his arrival he became the first diplomat to hear of Frederick the Great's partition of Poland with the cooperation of Russia. His service in this office was undistinguished but he made an impression on Frederick, who requested that he be reappointed.

Marriage (1777)

Harris married Harriet Maria Amyand (1761 – 20 August 1830), the youngest daughter of Sir George Amyand MP (1720 – 1766) and Anna Maria Korteen. They had four children together:

Envoy-extraordinary in St Petersburg (1777 – 1783)

In autumn of 1777, Harris travelled to Russia to be envoy-extraordinary to Russia, an office he held until September 1783. At St Petersburg he made his reputation, for he managed to get on with Catherine II, in spite of her predilections for France, and steered adroitly through the accumulated difficulties of the first Armed Neutrality. He was made a Knight of the Bath at the end of 1778; but in 1782 he returned home owing to ill-health, and was appointed by his friend, Charles James Fox, to be minister at The Hague, an appointment confirmed after some delay by William Pitt the Younger (1784).

The Hague (1784 – 1788)

He did very great service in furthering Pitt's policy of maintaining England's influence on the Continent by the arms of her allies, and held the threads of the diplomacy which ended in the king of Prussia's overthrowing the Patriot republican party in the Netherlands, which was inclined to France, and re-establishing the Prince of Orange. In recognition of his services he was created Lord Malmesbury, Baron of Malmesbury, in the County of Wiltshire on 19 September 1788, and permitted by the King of Prussia to bear the Prussian eagle on his arms, and by the Prince of Orange to use his motto "Je maintiendrai".

In 1786 he told Pitt that France was "an ambitious and restless rival power, on whose good faith we never can rely, whose friendship never can be deemed sincere, and of whose enmity we have the most to apprehend." He also wrote to Robert Murray Keith: "...from everything I hear and observe, there is not the least doubt that France is working hard at the formation of a League, the object of which, is the Destruction of England."

The historian Paul Langford has claimed that Harris "proved brilliantly effective as a focus for Orangist and anti-French feeling, and as the agent of Anglo-Prussian cooperation".

Wilderness (1788 – 1793)

He returned to England and took an anxious interest in politics, which ended in his seceding from the Whig party with the Duke of Portland in 1793.

French Revolutionary War (1793 – 1797)

In that year he was sent by Pitt, but in vain, to try to keep Prussia true to the first coalition against France. In 1794, he was sent to Brunswick to solicit the hand of the unfortunate Princess Caroline of Brunswick for the Prince of Wales, to marry her as proxy, and conduct her to her husband in England. For once his diplomatic skills seem to have failed him: confronted with Caroline's bizarre manner and appearance, he sent no advance word to the Prince, who was so shocked by the sight of his future wife that he asked Malmesbury to bring him brandy.

French peace missions

In 1796 and 1797 he was in Paris vainly negotiating with the French Directory, and then in Lille in summer 1797 for equally fruitless negotiations with the Directory's plenipotentiaries Hugues-Bernard Maret, duc de Bassano, Georges René Le Peley de Pléville and Etienne Louis François Honoré Letourner.

Due to bad roads in France, Malmesbury reached Paris on 22 October 1796, a week after leaving London. This led the foremost opponent of peace with France, Edmund Burke, to quip that his journey was slow because "he went the whole way on his knees".

Later life (1798 – 1820)

After 1797, he became partially deaf, and quit diplomacy altogether; but for his long and eminent services he was on 29 December 1800 created Earl of Malmesbury and Viscount FitzHarris of Hurn Court in the County of Southampton.

He now became a sort of political Nestor, consulted on foreign policy by successive foreign ministers, trusted by men of the most different ideas in political crises, and above all the confidant, and for a short time after Pitt's death almost the political director, of Canning. Younger men were also wont to go to him for advice, and Lord Palmerston particularly, who was his ward, was tenderly attached to him, and owed many of his ideas on foreign policy directly to his teaching. His later years were free from politics, and till his death on 21 November 1820 he lived very quietly and almost forgotten.

Legacy

As a statesman, Malmesbury had an influence among his contemporaries which is scarcely to be understood from his writings, but which must have owed much to personal charm of manner and persuasiveness of tongue; as a diplomatist, he seems to have deserved his reputation, and shares with Macartney, Auckland and Whitworth the credit of raising diplomacy from a profession in which only great nobles won the prizes to a career opening the path of honour to ability. One historian called him "the greatest English diplomat of the eighteenth century." Paul Langford has claimed "was by any standards a brilliant diplomat as well as an experienced one. Though he was not disposed to undervalue himself, neither were others; Talleyrand considered him the ablest British diplomat of the age and certainly his achievement at the Hague was to sustain such a judgement".

Malmesbury remarked that it was "a truth inculcated into John Bull with his mother's milk, viz. that France is our natural enemy". He said on another occasion that "The history of the present century afforded repeated proofs, that the English fought and conquered less for themselves than for the sake of their allies, and to preserve that equilibrium of power, on which the fate of all Europe depends".

Malmesbury did not publish anything himself, except an account of the Dutch revolution, and an edition of his father's works, but his important Diaries (1844) and Letters (1870) were edited by his grandson.

He was a Member of Parliament (MP) for Christchurch from 1770 to 1774 and from 1780 to 1788.