Anglo-Swedish Alliance Against Napoleonic France

During the eighteenth century the Baltic, dominated by the northern powers, was an area of great economic and strategic importance. Britain had much at stake since the Baltic kept Britain's navy afloat and its population fed. In relation to Sweden, Britain's policy oscillated from outright hostility - as during the League of Armed Neutrality (1800-1) - to the alliance that began with the Austerlitz campaign in the autumn of 1805 and ended with a palace coup in March 1809. Britain's policies in the Baltic and the alliance with Sweden were part and parcel of their global reach and worldwide commitments. Once a great power herself, by the early nineteenth century Sweden was much reduced in military strength and political power. King Gustavus IV, like his father, believed passionately in Sweden's role in European politics - and as a member of the anti-French coalition. Sweden's security depended, as with Britain, upon maintaining the balance of power in Europe and that required the removal of Napoleon from power. The Swedish king's ministers viewed his policies with a mixture of distaste and fear. They wanted Sweden to remain neutral at all costs. The king's military officers did not want neutrality but favoured, like Gustavus IV, an active foreign policy in alliance with France. The king's alliance with Britain and the subsequent war against France brought the long struggle between the absolutist Swedish king and his discontented nobility to a head-on collision by 1809. The Anglo-Swedish Alliance against Napoleonic France fills a significant gap in the literature of the Napoleonic age by exploring this developing alliance and the dramatic events which shaped it.