Abstract
In the long years of the French wars of 1792–1815, there can have been few more gloomy moments for the British than the spring of 1808. In Europe Napoleon reigned supreme. Following his defeat of the much-vaunted Prussians in 1806, and then the Russians in 1807, the Emperor had met Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit, and signed a treaty of alliance with his former enemy. With Austria still hors de combat after her defeat in 1805, Prussia occupied and humiliated, the Confederation of the Rhine, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Naples, Spain, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw all in alliance with France, Britain’s only friends on the continent were Portugal, Sicily, and Sweden. Of these, Portugal was occupied by the French and Spaniards in October 1807, Sicily was too poor and weak to be able to do more than provide Britain with a Mediterranean base, and Sweden was under attack from the Danes, French and Russians. Nor were Britain’s efforts to meet the crisis uniformly successful: if the Danish fleet had been effectively neutralised by an attack on Copenhagen in September 1807, the joy of victory had been undermined by the news that a British expeditionary force that had been sent to invade South America under General Whitelocke had been forced to surrender at Buenos Aires in July.
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Notes and References
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Cf. Canning to Castlereagh, 29 August 1808, Correspondence and other Papers of Viscount Castlereagh, Second Marquess of Londonderry (hereafter CD), ed. Marquess of Londonderry (London, 1848–53) vol. VI. pp. 416–18.
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© 1990 Charles J. Esdaile
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Esdaile, C.J. (1990). An Unhappy Alliance. In: The Duke of Wellington and the Command of the Spanish Army 1812–14. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20702-2_1
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