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 that Malmesbury "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. Notes References Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies. Anglo-French relations in the Eighteenth Century (Duckworth, 1986) Alfred Cobban, Ambassadors and Secret Agents: The Diplomacy of the First Earl of Malmesbury at The Hague (Jonathan Cape, 1954). John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, 3 vols. (1969–96). Paul Langford, The Eighteenth Century 1688-1815 (Adam and Charles Black, 1976). Isabel de Madariaga, Britain, Russia and the armed neutrality of 1780: Sir James Harris's mission to St Petersburg during the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 1962). H. M. Scott, ‘Harris,