What would it take to invade the British Isles?

As the question says.

I'll give 4 scenarios, to see what would be needed:

1: 1650

2: 1740

3: 1806

4: 1880

What would be involved? How would choosing one of those scenarios affect the planning?

Note that this is a hypothetical question, as you type.
 
Unite all of continental Europe into a single alliance against Britain.
In the 19th century? Yes. Before? Absolutely not. At many points during the 17th century the Dutch fleet alone was stronger the the English navy. If the French would have invested a bit more in their navy, they could have succesfuly invaded England. Total British superiority over the seas was something that occured only during and after the French revolutionary wars, not earlier.
 
The French Revolution completed gutted the French Navy of its officer corps. And unlike the army officers can not be simply replaced by a smart officer. Navies require well trained officers who have years of experience sailing and know naval mathematics by heart. And as a result France could never hope to oppose the British during the the French Revolutionary Wars and Napeolonic Wars.

But before the French Navy was quite the formidable force thanks to the naval buildup performed by Choiseul. He had realized in the aftermath of the failure of the 7 Year's War that France needed a bigger, better navy. And he accomplished that. During the ARW the French and British navy were close in number and skill.

In the decades before that the French were behind the British in both categories of skill and size. But we're no force to be trifled and with some luck could land a sizeable force on the Isles. From there France could achieve victory thanks to superiority of their army and the fact that the Feench were focused on defeating Britain not conquering it. During 1744 the French had a great chance, because had they been able to move just before the Otl storm they would have landed in England with significant force and local support from the tories. Their pretender at the time was also quite the charmismatic figure. And then when the OTL storm comes around the British fleet would be ravaged allowing a smart French admiral to tempoararily seize the Channel and ferry even more troops into Britain. Really 1744 was one of the best chances the French had.
 
In the decades before that the French were behind the British in both categories of skill and size. But we're no force to be trifled and with some luck could land a sizeable force on the Isles.

Making some good alliances would also work. i always say that a Franco-Dutch alliance would be a terrible thread for England/Britain. If Franco-Dutch relations would have been better during the second half of the 17th century, the British would be in a lot of trouble.
 
Making some good alliances would also work. i always say that a Franco-Dutch alliance would be a terrible thread for England/Britain. If Franco-Dutch relations would have been better during the second half of the 17th century, the British would be in a lot of trouble.

Considering the Dutch singlehanded let handed the Royal Navy their asses in multiple occasion a Dutch and Fewnch alliance could pull it off. But how you get that alliance is a bit hard with France's strong Catholicism and the Netherlands' strong Protestantism. And Louis XIV expansionism.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
The essential difficulty with pulling it off in the late Victorian period is, basically, that the Admiralty were a paranoid bunch. It was fairly standard for them to just order - and complete - enough ships to swamp their nearest rivals' planned ship programmes (which never got finished).

I suppose some kind of grand secret conspiracy *might* be able to pull together between them enough strength - just - to match the RN in the 1880s, but that's difficult to say the least.

Frankly it's easier with a PoD in Britain. Have HMS Excellent (the gunnery school) removed, with no replacement, and you've basically got an unnoticed major problem with the ships... combine it with intensive and secret gunnery training for the other powers, and you can start to overcome the RN as a problem.

That reduces it to the problem of invading, and in 1880 you've got a total of 124,000 men in the regulars (not counting reserves, and I assume not counting Indian establishment) with fairly modern rifles and the like. (Martini-Henry, RML 13lb 8cwt.)

Of course, if you can ship over about two million Zulu then there might be a major problem...


It'd make a great book, though.


EDIT - to follow up on that, invasion literature is a great way to judge both the perceived and real vulnerabilities of a nation. As they're basically early techno-thrillers, you get a great deal of research... and you can tell a lot from where handwaves happen.
e.g. in the Battle of Dorking the RN is destroyed by handwave and Britain ultimately loses.
In the Great War in England in 1897, the entire RN had to be ordered away by fictitious telegrams. The war is ultimately won by - among other things - German intervention against the Franco-Russian alliance.
In Red Dawn, "geopolitical shifts" handwave away NATO.
And in The Stricken Nation, the handwaves are on the other foot (hand?) - they're handwaves to allow the US to win.

Meanwhile, the War of the Worlds is very entertaining to read these days - simply because you realize the Martians which could effortlessly stomp the most mighty nation of the 1890s are pretty much cannon fodder for a post-WW2 army.
 
Last edited:

Saphroneth

Banned
To address the other three...

1650: This is fairly doable. There's internal strife going on in the ongoing Three Kingdoms Wars, and the RN is in need of reform. Tricky but not impossible.

1740: Things go wrong in the War of Jenkins' Ear and the Franco-Spanish can successfully control the Channel. This is arguably the easiest.

1806: You're going to need to go back a long way to get the French still with a good navy, and that might butterfly away the French-British enmity (since a France that doesn't ravage the Navy is a France that's okay with lesser nobles, and no Terror might mean British support for France!)

I'm also fairly sure the British Army was quite big at this time, counting all the militia. Not as big as the Grande Armee, but not bad.
 
Considering the Dutch singlehanded let handed the Royal Navy their asses in multiple occasion a Dutch and Fewnch alliance could pull it off. But how you get that alliance is a bit hard with France's strong Catholicism and the Netherlands' strong Protestantism. And Louis XIV expansionism.

In fact this is very feasible. They just had to settle their conflict once and for all. There was an historic occasion that Louis XIV did not seize. At the beginning of the war of Holland, when the disaster fell on the United Provinces, the Dutch proposed to yield to France all their territories on the left bank of the Rhine and they would most probably have accepted this new frontier once and for all. On this precise occasion which was basically a dream coming true, Louis XIV did not have the intelligence and statesmanship to seize this incredible opportunity. He asked more and wanted to interfere in dutch religious affairs which drove the Dutch to fight to death instead of coming to terms.

In the following years, concluding peace on such terms would have made France unstoppable in its goal of gaining control of most of Rhineland. And there would not have remained big matters of conflict between the two, England being the only threat to the United Provinces vital interests and prosperity.
 
1779- Franco-Spanish Armada during the ARW could have had a chance.

In The Riddle of the Sands, the 1903 best-seller, the plan was for the French navy to launch a suicide attack on the RN, leaving a badly-weakened force that the Germans could brush aside when they used tugboats pulling barges loaded with cavalry horses to invade East Anglia. Why the French would want to do that the author doesn't say.
 
Plenty of intelligent suggestions here. The French Revolutionary one is difficult for the reason Saphroneth described in regard to the nature of the regimes France went through, but ARW, 7YW, WAS are arguably easier, and once we get earlier than the 18th century things still seem easier.

I'd hardly claim much expertise on Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, let alone a time and place with which I'm less familiar, but I would claim enough to know the following:

1880 - Fifteen years earlier, the 2nd Empire, Prussia, and Russia come to an understanding....;)

My goodness. France and the United Kingdom have just defeated Russia and are preserving a peace unfavourable to Russia. (This was the actual reason why Disraeli was unhappy about German unification in the speech oft-quoted both by deceitful determinists who deliberately take parts out of context in order to perpetuate their idiocy about British policy being as ludicrously simple as always opposing the most powerful nation in Europe and extrapolating 1914 Anglo-German relations to 1870, and by people duped by them. That reason was, briefly speaking, that France was no longer able to help the United Kingdom enforce the peace of 1856 on Russia because of the threat of Germany to France. What he actually said, for anyone who wants to read what actually happened rather than carefully selected pieces chosen to present a point of view which is flatly contradicted by the speech as a whole, can be found here.)

So, obviously, what happens next is that France and Russia decide to invade the United Kingdom together.

Right.

(I would hope that the wink emoticon implies that TFSmith121 is not being serious and this is a deliberately ludicrous assertion intended as sarcasm, but when someone uses emoticons so often it's difficult to determine what they're supposed to mean.)
 
In fact this is very feasible. They just had to settle their conflict once and for all. There was an historic occasion that Louis XIV did not seize. At the beginning of the war of Holland, when the disaster fell on the United Provinces, the Dutch proposed to yield to France all their territories on the left bank of the Rhine and they would most probably have accepted this new frontier once and for all. On this precise occasion which was basically a dream coming true, Louis XIV did not have the intelligence and statesmanship to seize this incredible opportunity. He asked more and wanted to interfere in dutch religious affairs which drove the Dutch to fight to death instead of coming to terms.

In the following years, concluding peace on such terms would have made France unstoppable in its goal of gaining control of most of Rhineland. And there would not have remained big matters of conflict between the two, England being the only threat to the United Provinces vital interests and prosperity.


That is the wrong kind of POD. After losing a war this badly to France there is no chance that an alliance could occur. Franco-Dutch relation would be too bad. A better POD would be a couple of years earlier. During the eighty year war the Dutch and the French were allies and even after there were plans to divide the Southern Netherlands. Basicly Ostend, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Mechelen and the rest of Gueldres and Overmaas to the Netherlands and the rest south of it to France. With some better diplomacy this could lead to better Franco-Dutch relations and possibly an alliances. It means France must abbandon its desire for the rhine border, which not only was a relatively recent idea (and thus relatively easily abandoned), but also a rather stupid idea that caused the rest of Europe to ally themselves against France and more trouble than it was worth.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
But of course the easiest way to invade Britain is to be called William. (Wilhelm will not do.)

Yes, I'm being sarcastic... but the Glorious Revolution is essentially an invasion, it's just one which is supported by parliament.
 

bugwar

Banned
Master Plan

Unite all of continental Europe into a single alliance against Britain.

Oh.
I wondered why the EU was pushing for illegal alien quotas.


negrosvalla-45c70f0.jpg
 
But of course the easiest way to invade Britain is to be called William. (Wilhelm will not do.)

Yes, I'm being sarcastic... but the Glorious Revolution is essentially an invasion, it's just one which is supported by parliament.
Louis has worked once too, but it didn't stay.
 
This thread is entertaining.

1880 - no chance. The two power rule puts paid to that. Plus there's no real motivation from any power to invade Britain, most of them are too busy eyeing each other suspiciously.

1806 - no chance, not without undoing Trafalgar.

1740 - not really, the RN was still the biggest in the world at this time and would need to be seriously curtailed for an invasion to succeed. The problem France (and other continental powers) always had that Britain didn't, was that the Army was always the priority due to long land borders. Britain could sink most of it's defence budget into the Navy to fight all of it's wars (or pay the Prussians to fight them for them).

1650 - the most likely, the English navy was small and weak then, but England wasn't the desirable invasion target it became later on in the mid 17th C. The Dutch Navy could achieve it, but they didn't have the Army to back it up. No chance would they ally with Catholic France to destroy a Protestant nation on their flank. That'd be like Turkeys voting for Christmas.
 
Top