James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury

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James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury bigraphy, stories - British diplomat

James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury : biography

21 April 1746 – 21 November 1820

James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury GCB (21 April 1746 – 21 November 1820) was an English diplomat.

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.H. M. Scott, ‘’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009, accessed 7 Aug 2011. He was educated at Winchester, Oxford and Leiden

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.

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.

Notes

Later life (1798 – 1820)

After 1797, he became partially deaf, and quit diplomacy altogether; but for his long and eminent services he was in 1800 created Earl of Malmesbury and Viscount Fitzharris of Heron Court in the county of Hants.

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.

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:

  • Lady Frances Harris (d. 1 November 1847)
  • Lady Catherine Harris (d. December 1855)
  • James Edward Harris, 2nd Earl of Malmesbury (19 August 1778 – 10 September 1841)
  • Rev. Hon. Thomas Alfred Harris (24 March 1782 – 15 December 1823)

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).

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.Plumb, J.H. The First Four Georges Batsford Ltd. 1956

French peace missions

Glorious reception of the Ambassador of Peace, on his entry into Paris by [[James Gillray (1796).]] 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.