The Fernandine Gambit
"...it matters little what Spanish law actually says or suggests; our sea power determines practically what Spanish law is."
- Lord Liverpool
Britain's "Wismar Insult" was taken as an affront in France and when the terms of Canning's initial offer - with its robust list of demands and sparse number of compromises in turn - were distributed to other European capitals by Napoleon's agents, most other monarchs and their courts were surprised that Britain was not willing to settle for a white peace to end the seemingly endless wars against Napoleon. But so long as Russia was content, and she was indeed content for now, there was no chance of revanchist Prussia or cunning Austria joining another Coalition. Paris's gamble that Britain would refuse to compromise on their counter-terms, and the perception on the Continent that it was now Britain being unreasonable and choking European commerce, gave Napoleon an opening - the reform of the Continental System and its replacement with a more lenient policy. In Toulon, he revoked the Berlin and Milan decrees and replaced it with a new one, namely stating that "neutrally flagged" transshipment would now be permissible, a move that simultaneously continued to twist the screws to Britain while giving "neutral" states such as Holland, Russia, Austria and Portugal the ability to move transit goods
[1]. The early 1810s, then, saw an explosion in commerce in European, with Russia once again redounding the most as it formally formed the Baltic League, a successor to the League of Armed Neutrality, now dominating the Baltic and its ports with its navy and merchant marine. By 1815, indeed, St. Petersburg was one of the busiest ports in Europe.
"We must not starve just because we are strangling Britain," Napoleon remarked, and indeed he was not wrong; the Toulon Decree would do as intended, giving the rest of Europe a sigh of relief, improving the continent's economy and allowing relations with the skeptical United States to flourish once more, with Britain now viewed definitively as the villain in Washington. Of course, the move was not a total masterstroke - the other side always gets a say, after all.
Effectively denied any foothold on the Continent or European partner besides Bourbon Sicily and Savoyard Sardinia, hardly allies who could help defeat Napoleon's vast (and now well-rested) armies, Britain's focus since 1808 had been on a series of campaigns to probe Spanish America. The Wellington expedition to the Orinoco that year had helped create a substantial republican rebellion in Venezuela that threatened the whole of New Granada; Fireland in the Southern Cone had been occupied by the Royal Navy, as had the Chiloe Archipelago, in order to completely command trans-oceanic trade. But after the debacle in Buenos Aires in 1807, Cabinet was leery of a full invasion of Spanish America, and was beginning to doubt their ability to sustain control there in a society that was densely populated, with its own traditions and ways, and which would have been nakedly hostile to an Anglican government seizing control of a fervently devout Catholic polity.
Liverpool had a solution, what he called a "gambit," and spies paid out of his own pocket had journey to Rome - where the locals were not huge fans of Napoleon to begin with - to feel out its intended target. Infante Ferdinand of Spain had been in self-exile there since he was denied at Bayonne and replaced by his father; under Spanish law, Napoleon's re-imposition of Charles IV, effectively negating his abdication as void, was dubious. Though the pro-Ferdinand segment in Spain was not insubstantial, and was particularly concentrated in Madrid, the exile of the hated Godoy to France had tempered many of the passions, and the shrinking bloc opposed to Charles had simply resigned themselves to waiting for the old, unpopular King to die and then have one of his sons take power. That Ferdinand had attempted to overthrow his father twice and been humiliated was of little import to them, especially as his rigidly dutiful and traditional younger brother, Infante Carlos, would have refused any attempted usurpation out of order for the throne out of hand.
The reality on the ground in New Spain was murkier, though. The Spanish Navy had been effectively eliminated as a global force after Trafalgar and her armies were trapped in Iberia by the Royal Navy effectively cutting the lines of communication, with Spanish ports a particular focus of the British blockades after Charles was placed back on the throne. Without peninsular authority, local
juntas had been formed in the absence of Spanish control. This arrangement, ad hoc at first, had actually worked rather well; and though New Spain and New Granada would never have deigned to revolt in the name of liberty the way the United States had, the elite criollos of Mexico and Bogota were beginning to wonder if this arrangement perhaps did not work better than staying forever under Madrid's control. The seed of an opportunity had been planted.
Britain's plan, then, was to smuggle Ferdinand out of Rome and sail him to Mexico via Barbados (Havana was still fairly loyal to Spain), where he would declare his father an illegitimate puppet of the French, the Bayonne Abdication an illegal usurpation, and that he was the rightful King of Spain, in the same sense/legal fiction that the Braganza court in Rio de Janeiro was the rightful court of Portugal. Liverpool, Canning and Perceval saw no particular downside to this gambit; there were a number of ways to measure success, all of which damaged Spain to their benefit. "We have identified the weak underbelly of Napoleon's continental network of despots," Liverpool announced to the Cabinet. "It is in Iberia, and that is where pressure shall be applied. It matters little what Spanish law actually says or suggests; our sea power practically determines what Spanish law is."
Ferdinand was smuggled out of Rome in early December, 1810. Stopovers in Gibraltar, the Canaries, Barbados and Jamaica preceded his arrival in Veracruz, where he made his anticipated declaration as Ferdinand VII, the rightful king of Spain, setting up an exile court in Mexico, and endorsing the
juntas in his name...
[1] Credit to
@alexmilman for this suggestion