Sunk Cost Fallacy
"...let it be clear, His Majesty's Government intends to continue to pursue the current policies with regards to affairs both on the Continent as well as in the Spanish Americas, and there are few if any circumstances short of the terms presented at Wismar by myself being accepted by the Corsican and his regime that would reverse such a course by Cabinet..."
- George Canning, maiden speech to the Commons after becoming First Lord of the Treasury
Historians would, for decades, debate the course that Britain pursued in the first half of the 1810s and the direct effect it had on ending what is today known as the "Second British Empire," or the British colonial empire as it was constituted after the Revolution in North America severed the 13 colonies from London. Numerous paths to acknowledge reality - utter defeat by every possible coalition partner in Europe and their subsequent alienation from London through an array of economic and diplomatic missteps, the ascendance of French hegemony in Western Europe in combination with a grand detente achieved with Russia over Central and Eastern Europe, and finally the disastrous and ever-costly interventions in the Spanish Empire - were presented to Britain over the course of several years, and at every opportunity the government refused to see reason and take them.
Part of the reason was the increasing madness of George III, which had rendered the King mostly confined to his various estates and his namesake son the Prince Regent. George, Prince of Wales, could have made for a fine sovereign if the war were going well and Britain was pressing her advantages; as it were, his spendthrift style and many personal and financial scandals alienated him from the populace and made his rule both as regent for his father and later as king hideously unpopular. His presaging over the decline of Britain's influence in Europe over a twenty year period is remembered remarkably poorly. Stubborn as he was, the Prince Regent encouraged his government to press Britain's case on, viewing Napoleon no longer as a nuisance as he had been in the 1790s but now an existential threat to British commerce on the continent. Nevermind that it was Russia that had now blocked British commercial activity from the Baltic almost entirely, nor that Spain was so furious at the British Fernandine Gambit and Portugal so contemptuous of the Braganza court in Rio de Janeiro that every port in Iberia was closed to British ships; France held a unique position in the paranoid British mind.
It further complicated matters that Britain had sunk so much time, treasure and blood into casting off "that damned Corsican," as the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval called him on the floor of the Commons mere days before his assassination by a desperate and angry day-laborer, that now London could not retreat without threatening a full revolution. To admit defeat now, after the sacrifices made, with Britons starving in the streets and debt mounting? No, that would be to invite revolution! And so more men were impressed for the Navy ships that scoured the ocean waves hunting for French vessels, with the possibility of carrying out close blockades on anything but French naval ports all but impossible in the post-Continental System era, and even more men recruited to be dispatched to the slow-rolling disaster on the Spanish Main.
If canny observers of British politics of the time had thought that Perceval's shocking murder would cause a course correction, they were even more stunned that it seemed only to cause a redoubling. This was thanks to Canning, the architect of Britain's foreign policy, taking his place as head of government, narrowly beating out Lord Liverpool for the job but causing a raft of resignations from his Cabinet among prominent statesmen who disliked his person that it nearly brought the whole government down within weeks of his kissing hands with Prince George. The "Two Georges," they were caricatured as, trying desperately to swim against the tide.
The tide, as it were, in the Americas was blood red - the red of actual blood on the red uniforms of British soldiers. Venezuela was lost and the local junta had nearly driven every last British soldier fighting on "behalf" of the "true king Ferdinand" from La Plata. New Spain was the crown jewel, where peasant armies led by the preacher Miguel Hidalgo had marched on the cities and captured much of the countryside in partnership with the local criollo military class; Ferdinand was in power only thanks to a battalion of Spanish loyalists who had voluntarily exiled themselves from Europe and the
peninsulare aristocracy that sat in the capital at Mexico. That the Canning government elected to redouble their efforts to prop up their vassal in Ferdinand despite the costs two years of intervention by early 1813 had cost them stands as one of the great foreign policy blunders in history; whatever leverage they thought they may have earned with the court in Madrid was nonexistent, especially as Charles IV of Spain aged and a subset of fiercely Anglophobic advisors emerged who if anything encouraged a harder, more resolute line on the colonial question than their King or his French allies.
The only genuine success, if it can even be called that, of the Canning era was continuing to mollify an instinctively pro-French administration in America's James Madison, who having survived a closer than expected reelection had more wiggle room to cool the rhetoric with Britain and avoid a war, despite a number of small indignities. The United States, unhappy at the ever-growing British presence in New Spain, needed to be kept satisfied and so American shipping through Europe was one of the few to be unrestricted by Britain, creating a new economic boom for ports like Boston, New Haven and New York as the young democracy reintegrated her economy with that of the emerging European capitalist system...