mostly white or pinkish, never yellow, the leaves radiate-veined, and more or less lobed or cut. Three species are natives of Britain. The musk mallow (Malva moschata) is a perennial herb with five-partite, deeply-cut leaves, and large rose-coloured flowers clustered together at the ends of the branched stems, and is found growing along hedges and borders of fields, blossoming in July and August. It owes its name to a slight musky odour diffused by the plant in warm dry weather when it is kept in a confined situation. The round-leaved dwarf mallow (Malva rotundifolia) is a creeping perennial, growing in waste sandy places, with roundish serrate leaves and small pinkish-white flowers produced in the axils of the leaves from June to September. It is common throughout Europe and the north of Africa, extending to western and northern Asia. The common mallow (Malva sylvestris), the mauve of the French, is an erect biennial or perennial plant with long-stalked roundish-angular serrate leaves, and conspicuous axillary reddish-purple flowers, blossoming from May to September. Like most plants of the order it abounds in mucilage, and hence forms a favourite domestic remedy for colds and sore throats. The aniline dye called mauve derives its name from its resemblance to the colour of this plant.
The marsh mallow (Althaea officinalis), the guimauve of the French, belongs to another genus having an involucre of numerous bracts. It is a native of marshy ground near the sea or in the neighbourhood of saline springs. It is an erect perennial herb, with somewhat woody stems, velvety, ovate, acute, unequally serrate leaves, and delicate pink showy flowers blooming from July to September. The flowers are said to yield a good deal of honey to bees. The marsh mallow is remarkable for containing asparagin, C4H8N2O3, H2O, which, if the root be long kept in a damp place, disappears, butyric acid being developed. The root also contains about 25% of starch and the same quantity of mucilage, which differs from that of gum arabic in containing one molecule less of water and in being precipitated by neutral acetate of lead. It is used in pâte de guimauve lozenges. Althaea rosea is the hollyhock (q.v.).
The mallow of Scripture, Job xxx. 4, has been sometimes identified with Jew’s mallow (Corchorus olitorius), a member of the closely allied order Tiliaceae, but more plausibly (the word מַלּוּחַ implying a saline plant) with Atriplex Halimus, or sea orache. In Syria the Halimus was still known by the name Mallūh in the time of Ibn Beitar. See Bochart, Hieroz. iii. 16.
MALMEDY, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine Province, lying in a wild and deep basin, on the Warche, 20 m. S. of Aix-la-Chapelle by rail via Eupen. It contains two Roman Catholic churches, a modern town-hall and a classical school. Its industries include tanning, dyeing and paper-making. Pop. (1900), 4680. Malmedy was famous for its Benedictine abbey, founded about 675, which was united with that of Stablo, the abbot of the joint house being a prince of the empire. In 1802 the lands of the abbey passed to France, and in 1815 they were divided between Prussia and Netherlands.
See Kellen, Malmedy und die preussische Wallonie (Essen, 1897).
MALMESBURY, JAMES HARRIS, 1st Earl of (1746–1820), English diplomatist, was born at Salisbury on the 21st of April 1746, being the son of James Harris (q.v.), the author of Hermes. Educated at Winchester, Oxford and Leiden, young Harris became secretary in 1768 to the British embassy at Madrid, and was left as chargé d’affaires at that court on the departure of Sir James Grey 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, and in January 1772 minister plenipotentiary to the court of Prussia. His success was marked, and in 1777 he was transferred to the court of Russia. At St Petersburg he made his reputation, for he managed to get on with Catherine 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 Fox to be minister at the Hague, an appointment confirmed after some delay by Pitt (1784). 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 republican party in Holland, which was inclined to France, and re-establishing the prince of Orange. In recognition of his services he was created Baron Malmesbury of Malmesbury (Sept. 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.” 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; and 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 for the prince of Wales, to marry her as proxy, and conduct her to her husband in England. In 1796 and 1797 he was at Paris and Lille vainly negotiating with the French Directory. After 1797 he became partially deaf, and quitted 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 the 21st of November 1820 he lived very quietly and almost forgotten. 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. He was succeeded as 2nd earl by his son James Edward (1778–1841), under-secretary for foreign affairs under Canning; from whom the title passed to James Howard, 3rd earl of Malmesbury (q.v.).
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.
MALMESBURY, JAMES HOWARD HARRIS, 3rd Earl of (1807–1889), English statesman, son of the 2nd earl, was born on the 25th of March 1807, and educated at Eton and Oriel College, Oxford. He led a life of travel for several years, making acquaintance with famous people; and in 1841 he had only just been elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative, when his father died and he succeeded to the peerage. His political career, though not one which made any permanent impression on history, attracted a good deal of contemporary attention, partly from his being foreign secretary in 1852 and again in 1858–1859 (he was also lord privy seal in 1866–1868 and in 1874–1876), and partly from his influential position as an active Tory of the old school in the House of Lords at a time when Lord Derby and Mr Disraeli were, in their different ways, moulding the Conservatism of the period. Moreover his long life—he survived till the 17th of May 1889—and the publication of his Memoirs of an Ex-Minister in 1884, contributed to the reputation he enjoyed. These Memoirs, charmingly written, full of anecdote, and containing much interesting material for the history of the time, remain his chief title to remembrance. Lord Malmesbury also edited his grandfather’s Diaries and Correspondence (1844), and in 1870 published The First Lord Malmesbury and His Friends: Letters from 1745 to 1820. He was succeeded as 4th earl by his nephew, Edward James (1842–1899), whose son, James Edward (b. 1872) became the 5th earl in 1899.
MALMESBURY, a market town and municipal borough in the Chippenham parliamentary division of Wiltshire, England, 9412
m. W. of London by the Great Western railway. Pop. (1901),
