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 John Skey Eustace and the Directory's plenipotentiaries Hugues-Bernard Maret, 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