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.

[4] 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 Dutch Republic, which was inclined to France, and re-establishing the stadtholder William V, Prince of Orange in his dictatorial powers.

The arrest of Princess Wilhelmina, the wife of the stadtholder, on 28 June 1782, gave Prussia and Great Britain an opening to muscle in on this diplomatic mediation, and eventually offered an excuse to intervene militarily.

"[10] 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".

[4] 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.

[13] 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.

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.

[15] 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.

[18] 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".