Successful Napoleonic Invasion of Britain

How's this navy look without naval supplies from the Baltic? With the UK economy in a severe recession, and Luddites rising to the level of low resistance?

Well they still had naval supplies from Canada and due to a quirk of protectionist history which preferred the Canadian sources despite the lower quality from the duration of transport.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Suppose the British mutinies in the Royal Navy were so mishandled as to provoke a revolutionary attitude.
Given that the mutineers were expressly making it clear that they were still willing to defend the country - and that the Admiralty listened OTL - you'd need for the RN to be quite a different institution, I suspect. (Or at any rate you'd need time for a complete moron to work his way up to high command, which is rare in wars.)
 
Given that the mutineers were expressly making it clear that they were still willing to defend the country - and that the Admiralty listened OTL - you'd need for the RN to be quite a different institution, I suspect. (Or at any rate you'd need time for a complete moron to work his way up to high command, which is rare in wars.)

I wonder if the Russian and German naval mutineers said they would defend their coutnries.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
I wonder if the Russian and German naval mutineers said they would defend their coutnries.
I doubt it was this minor:

Spithead
The mutineers maintained regular naval routine and discipline aboard their ships (mostly with their regular officers), allowed some ships to leave for convoy escort duty or patrols, and promised to suspend the mutiny and go to sea immediately if French ships were spotted heading for English shores.


It was a mutiny expressly and only for:

1) Better pay to reflect inflation.
2) Better conditions to reflect the increase of voyage duration due to coppered bottoms (specifically, the abolition of the Purser's Pound where 1/8 of any pound of meat was kept by the ship's purser)
3) The dismissal of a handful of particularly badly disliked officers.


They didn't even take issue with impressment - or flogging.

They essentially got their demands, complete with a pardon for the mutiny.



The Nore mutiny was a little different, being a bit more violent and having wider demands, and that one unravelled completely because even people in the middle of the mutiny felt it went too far.

...so you'd need both mutinies to be worse than the Nore, not the Spithead, and for the Admiralty to handle it horribly, and probably a couple of other things too...
 
You just need too keep the French pre revolution fleet workable.


Avoiding the Terror works well enough for this I think given plenty of French nobles fought under the tricolour without too much complaint.


For it to be successful you need a few years of peace to get the junior sailors capable and also a change in doctrine which allows the French to actually aim to kill the enemy crew and damage their ships instead of taking down the rigging.


The RN wasn't destined to be so much larger and better than the French in the right conditions it could and had been handed some sharp defeats less than a generation before.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
You just need too keep the French pre revolution fleet workable.


Avoiding the Terror works well enough for this I think given plenty of French nobles fought under the tricolour without too much complaint.


For it to be successful you need a few years of peace to get the junior sailors capable and also a change in doctrine which allows the French to actually aim to kill the enemy crew and damage their ships instead of taking down the rigging.


The RN wasn't destined to be so much larger and better than the French in the right conditions it could and had been handed some sharp defeats less than a generation before.
Yep - that would work to keep the French Navy competitive, and then you can have the war eventuate... but that would make it really hard to have Napoleon nevertheless rise to power.
 
Yep - that would work to keep the French Navy competitive, and then you can have the war eventuate... but that would make it really hard to have Napoleon nevertheless rise to power.

Him rising to be Emperor seems unlikely but premier general is rather possible given he established himself as a hero pretty early on and tended to end up where needed to have a dramatic impact. Skilled young officers tend to rise rather high in mass armies and Napoleon had been a professional soldier before the Revolution so him getting a few lucky breaks and being of humble enough origins to become the premier general of France doesn't seem impossible especially if political leadership is lacking as it was OTL.


You basically need the murderous parts of the revolution halted early but having it generally be accepted that some drastic changes were necessary (easy given that was what happened OTL its just the popular solution was to be as radical as possible) and have France go through various political and military solutions to its problems ending up by chance in one that favours Napoleon.

Hmm a moderate meteoritic France with a compromise between conservative and liberal elements and Napoleon at the head with some checks and balances and a navy that would probably encourage a colonial outlook as well and a wider world view than kicking armies about in Europe... Vive le Francewank.
 
Well, as Nappy said, he only needed a couple days to cross. History has had a lot of accidents, especially with the invasion of Britain. What about a reverse 1796? Instead of the storm keeping the invaders down and wrecking their ships, it's the RM that gets impeded by it?

One could imagine a repeat of an Irish rising, a dozen ships sent there, decoy invasion maybe in Wales. The RN gets sent there but in the meantime, the real invasion leaves from Calais. A particularly bad storm breaks out in the Irish sea giving the French more time to cross without interference.

Does it sound that unlikely?
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Well, as Nappy said, he only needed a couple days to cross. History has had a lot of accidents, especially with the invasion of Britain. What about a reverse 1796? Instead of the storm keeping the invaders down and wrecking their ships, it's the RM that gets impeded by it?

One could imagine a repeat of an Irish rising, a dozen ships sent there, decoy invasion maybe in Wales. The RN gets sent there but in the meantime, the real invasion leaves from Calais. A particularly bad storm breaks out in the Irish sea giving the French more time to cross without interference.

Does it sound that unlikely?
It would require the RN to be completely hoodwinked by what is, in fact, a pretty simple trick.
 
Okay, forget invasions, but what about random terror raids? Was John Paul Jones an ASB or something, because how is it so difficult to do it and run attacks against the British coast?
 
Okay, forget invasions, but what about random terror raids? Was John Paul Jones an ASB or something, because how is it so difficult to do it and run attacks against the British coast?

There's a long history of random raids against the british isles. I mean even in OTL french revoloutionary troops did land in Britain.

But that's not an invasion.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
Whoa. I want to hear more about this.

There was the Irish expedition, and an event where some really poorly trained and equipped French troops were sent on a raid to Wales for the sole purpose of banditry and pillaging. Both were failures.

The Irish one never got off the ground, and the revolt was crushed, like all Continental expeditions to join with Irish rebels, while the Welsh one was a bizarre disaster in which most of the troops used were actually convicts pressed into service, with morale so poor that an entire squad was rounded up by an old Welsh peasant woman with a pitchfork.
 
Taking the discussion in another direction

so let's think the other way round. Napoleon HAS landed in the Welsh countryside and established a beachhead far enough from any major English city to deploy his army in relative peace. How big would his army need to be to take London? To leave London alone and take Manchester and Liverpool? To throw the English out of Ireland? Out of Scotland?

If this were his aim? How much of Britain must he take and how close to London must he get to be able to start peace negotiations and replace the current English government with a friendlier one. Could a friendlier English government even be possible? Could he get one while leaving the King in power, even nominally?

How much support would there be for the French revolutionary ideas? For a legal system based on the Napoleonic code? How widespread were the pre-revolutionary philosophers and their writings? Would they be popular enough for the learned class to support a French-style regime if they could get one without actual French troops? Would they mind French troops bad enough to start a resistance? What about -by lack of a better word- the proletariat?

And harking back to the actual invasion, considering all this, how many troops would Napoleon need to land in Britain in order for his conquest to have any chance? Under the best of circumstances? In order to be absolutely sure? Disregarding right now HOW they would get there? Just asking how many men, or how many ships...
 
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