Napoleon and Wellington

Between 1805 and 1807, Napoleon´s armies again crushed the great powers - Austria, Prussia, and Russia. He took land from them to add to his French empire. He made one of his own brothers King of Holland, and another King of Spain.

Napoleon tried to beat Britain by cutting her trade. He passed a law which said that the parts of Europe controlled by France must not trade with Britain. Since most of Europe was under French rule, this would have cut Britain´s merchants off from their markets. But smugglers got round the law, so it did not do Britain much harm.

The French invaded Portugal to make her obey the trade law. But the British sent an army to help the Portuguese. In 1812, the British troops, led by the Duke of Wellington, advanced from Portugal to Spain. In the next year, they and the Spanish drove the French out of Spain as well.

Also in 1812, Napoleon fell out with the Tsar (emperor) of Russia. He sent a huge army (500,000 men) to teach the Tsar a lesson. The Russian army did not beat the French, but the Russian winter did. Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen died in the cold on the long retreat from Moscow.

Now all of Europe rose against Napoleon. He was beaten, and had to give up his throne. The allies sent him to the island of Elba. But he escaped and returned to France. In a last battle at Waterloo, in 1815, the Duke of Wellington, with Prussian help, beat the French. Napoleon spent the rest of his life as a prisoner on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic.

Walter Robson: Britain 1750 - 1900; Oxford University Press, 1993, page 37