foreign policy. No doubt Caratacus' resistance to the Roman invasion of ad 43 and his alliance with the Silures could be regarded as foreign policy, but it scarcely seems a helpful term. As long as monarchs wielded great personal power, it is hardly possible to divorce foreign policy from the individual circumstances and character of each king and treat it as a separate category. Nevertheless, at an early period, certain themes emerged. The connection with France that came about in 1066 was fortuitous in that William the Conqueror took advantage of the fact that Edward the Confessor had no sons in order to claim the throne of England, but it introduced a pattern that survived for 500 years. From the days of William Rufus to those of Henry VIII, English monarchs attempted to retain or extend their French possessions. Not until the loss of Calais in 1558 did this aspiration come to an end, and even then it was another 200 years before they relinquished the title of ‘king of France’. This, in turn, had profound effects upon another object of English policy, which pre-dated the Conquest—the ambition to turn a southern English kingdom based upon Wessex into a kingdom of Britain, which should include the north, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. So demanding a programme may have been beyond the resources of a small kingdom, yet it should be remembered that one object of these policies was to augment those resources. English possessions in France included some of the most fertile and prosperous regions, while it was a constant complaint of English monarchs that the Pale in Ireland, far from being a source of profit to the crown, drained men and money. Foreign affairs necessarily interlocked with domestic. Weak rulers like John, who lost Normandy, or Edward II, beaten at Bannockburn, were heading for disaster, but even successful rulers like Edward I and Edward III could expect opposition at home if their demands were too great.

Even within the limits of so general a context, other patterns may be discerned. The principle of supporting one's enemy's enemy is elementary, yet it had important consequences. The Scots, in their long struggle for independence, soon perceived the advantages of an understanding with France, and the ‘Auld Alliance’ survived from the treaty of Paris of 1295 until 1560. This also had domestic consequences. When Philip VI of France was at war with Edward III in 1346 he urged David II to cross the border by way of diversion, which led to his capture at Neville's Cross. During the Great Schism from 1378 to 1417 one reason for Scotland's recognition of the Avignon popes was that the English were supporting the rival popes at Rome. Likewise, the desire of James IV of Scotland to take advantage of Henry VIII's absence on campaign in France in 1513 led to his death at Flodden. England pursued a similar policy, supporting Brittany and Burgundy against France. Balance of power also came into consideration centuries before the phrase was invented. In the 16th and 17th cents., when Spain and France disputed European hegemony, the choice was which side to take—unless England was prepared to run the risk that, by staying aloof, she would facilitate the establishment of a universal monarchy. It was left to the monumental incapacity of Charles I to contrive to be at war with both great powers at the same time.

Two other factors were also of increasing importance. The growth of England's trade, particularly in cloth, gave its rulers concern to protect it, which could not be divorced from foreign policy since embargoes and tariffs were easy diplomatic ploys. A special interest in Flanders and the Low Countries, reinforced by strategic considerations, lasted until the 20th cent. Linked with growing prosperity was the use of England's financial resources to eke out a small population by subsidizing continental allies, a policy operated by Edward III, who supported the small German states and Savoy on France's eastern border, and reaching its climax in the five coalitions needed to overcome Napoleon Bonaparte in the 19th cent.

The rift in Christendom in the 16th cent. introduced a new factor into foreign policy, but one which was rarely decisive. Monarchs certainly supported their co-religionists in other countries when it served their purposes, and some rulers like Philip II of Spain showed more than common zeal, but the co-religionists were well aware that the commitment was fragile and that they could find themselves abandoned. Catholic unity did not prevent the long struggle between France and Spain, nor protestant commitment three wars between England and the Dutch in the 17th cent. It is true that the Spaniards gave support to their fellow-catholics in Ireland in the 16th cent., but so did atheistical French revolutionaries in 1798, and realpolitik Germans in 1916. Nor, at a later stage, did ideology outweigh national interests. Burke maintained that the war in the 1790s against revolutionary France was an ideological crusade and quite unlike any previous conflict, but Pitt, who was in charge of affairs, was more low-keyed and would have made peace with the revolutionaries if they could demonstrate that their regime was stable and that they were sincere. Churchill, in 1941, reproached with commending the Bolsheviks, is said to have replied that he would speak well of the devil if he would take up arms against the Nazis.

The development of a modern context for foreign policy dates from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when three factors combined to change the context of diplomacy. First was the steady spread of representation at foreign courts, which made policy more of a regular activity and less of a response to occasional crises or particular problems. The change had begun in Italy in the 15th cent. Henry VII had a permanent representative only at the Vatican, and though he added one at Madrid and Henry VIII added a third at Vienna, by 1568 there was only one permanent representative left, at Paris. William III, after 1688, had twelve resident ambassadors as well as envoys and agents. The existence of a network of representatives and the flow of information provided facilitated a more coherent foreign policy. The second factor was the changed importance of Parliament after 1688 which initiated a move away from a personal towards a national foreign policy. The Stuarts had often been at odds with their parliaments over foreign affairs but the annual meetings of Parliament after 1688 made it harder for subsequent monarchs to take an independent line. Monarchs and ministers certainly struggled to prevent Parliament from being informed, pleading that public disclosure could inhibit diplomacy, but in 1701 ministers were impeached for not placing the partition treaties before the council or Parliament. After 1688 ambassadors rarely reported directly to the monarchs and a highly personal policy like Charles II's secret treaty of Dover would have been difficult to sustain. The process was completed with the creation of the post of foreign secretary in 1782. The third factor was the growth of empire. In 1600 England had no overseas colonies: by 1700, in addition to the twelve American colonies, there were valuable possessions in India, the West Indies, and Africa to be protected.

The importance attached to foreign affairs in the 18th cent. may be gauged from the fact that, until the reorganization of 1782, the two secretaries of state were categorized according to the areas of Europe which they dealt with—north or south. The broad outlines of 18th-cent. foreign policy, for all its complexities and variations, are simple. After the swift collapse of Spanish power and rapid rise of France under Louis XIV, there was no question which was the dominant power in Europe, and the fact that France was also a major colonial competitor helped to bring about what has been called the second Hundred Years War. Between 1689 and 1815 Britain and France were at war for nearly half the time. France's much greater population and resources were a substantial handicap, but to build restraining alliances was far from easy. Spain was no longer an adequate counterweight and for much of the period was in the French camp in a Bourbon alliance. The Dutch, though they had an obvious interest in preventing French aggrandizement, were in rapid decline. The Habsburgs, whose possession of the southern Netherlands placed them in the front line, had very heavy commitments in eastern Europe to consider, and, after the reversal of alliances of 1756, moved temporarily into the French orbit. Russia and Prussia, two emerging powers, were purchasable, but their despotic regimes made them unpredictable. After 1714 there was a further complication that Hanover, virtually defenceless against a determined French onslaught, had either to be protected or taken out of pawn at the peace settlement. The rivalries and ambitions of the continental powers made the construction of grand coalitions difficult. Napoleon bought off Prussia in 1806 with the offer of Hanover, while at the peace settlement in 1814 Prussia and Russia were near to conflict over the fate of Saxony.

These factors dictated Britain's overall foreign policy. It was an accepted point that she must have a continental ally and, on the one occasion when she did not, she lost the American colonies. Indeed, the 1780s, at the end of the American War, were exceptionally difficult. Britain's gains at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 had cast her in the role of overmighty power and made the balance of power operate against her: Spain, France, and Holland, at war with Britain in 1780, were supported by Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Portugal, and the empire in the League of Armed Neutrality. Continental alliances also demanded heavy subsidies and finance ministers from Newcastle to the Younger Pitt sweated to supply the sinews of war and diplomacy.

The peace which brought the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to a conclusion in 1815 was based essentially on balance of power considerations. France was made to disgorge the enormous gains she had made under Napoleon, but there was no attempt to reduce her to a second-rate power and she was speedily welcomed back into the comity of nations. Austria and Prussia both made substantial territorial gains but it was still considered essential that they should balance each other in Germany. Britain retained the Cape of Good Hope, taken from the Dutch, Mauritius, and a number of West Indian islands. In only one respect did the peace clearly fail. The new united kingdom of the Netherlands, intended, with international help, to bolt the door against any future French aggrandizement, lasted only fifteen years before collapsing in the face of Dutch and Belgian hostility.

J. A. Cannon

Where did Britain stand in the decades after Waterloo? Victorian foreign policy conjures up a vision of a John Bullish Lord Palmerston in the middle of the century; of Britain dominating world trade by her economic strength; a liberal, constitutional Britain, which supported national and liberal movements on the European continent against the declining forces of despotism; a Britain which, at the end of the century, was to rule the greatest empire in the world, with Queen Victoria reigning over a quarter of the world's population. The picture is not entirely false but it owes too much to the image which clever politicians like Palmerston and Disraeli wished to project to the British public. Historical study since the 1930s has revealed a more complex picture. Britain had only firmly established her right to be considered a European great power in the 18th cent. and had come close to forfeiting that status as a result of the American War of Independence. In the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Britain's naval strength had been of enormous importance but her lack of a large standing army had made the other European powers see her as a minor player on the continent. Even Wellington's victories in Spain, which dazzled British opinion, were regarded as a side-show until he brought his army over the Pyrenees in 1814. Britain's (justified) fears at that time were that the other powers, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, would conclude a ‘continental’ peace with France, ignoring British interests. It is a measure of Castlereagh's stature as a statesman that he not only played a major role in holding the coalition together but that he safeguarded all Britain's vital interests in the settlement at the end of the war.

All those responsible for British foreign policy between 1815 and 1865, Castlereagh, Canning, Wellington, Aberdeen, and Palmerston, looked back to William Pitt the Younger as their mentor. They interpreted the legacy somewhat differently according to temperament and changing circumstances but the similarities were greater than the differences. The Vienna settlement of 1814–15 followed roughly the lines envisaged by Pitt in 1805 and the powers agreed to meet periodically to maintain the peace settlement, as Pitt had wished. Castlereagh felt obliged to withdraw from the resulting Congress system because he believed it was being perverted from its original purpose of maintaining international peace to the suppression of any subversion which might threaten authoritarian regimes. As late as 1863 Palmerston refused to join the revisionist Napoleon III in a congress because ‘the Treaties of Vienna … are still the basis of the existing arrangements of Europe’ and chaos would ensue if they were overturned. There was no clear division between Conservatives and Liberals among British foreign secretaries in this period. Where they did differ was in their attitude to Europe. All accepted without question that their first duty was to uphold British interests but whereas Castlereagh, Wellington, and Aberdeen believed that this could best be done by playing a full role in Europe, Canning and Palmerston took a more isolationist position.

The great issues of this period were the Eastern Question—the dangerous vacuum left by the decline of the Ottoman empire—and the rise of liberal and nationalist movements in western and central Europe. In the East, Britain reluctantly followed a policy, in the crises of 1840 and the Crimean War, of propping up the Ottoman empire to prevent Russian advances. The British public had some genuine sympathy with liberal and national movements, especially in Italy, but the government was always extremely cautious in its approach. In the great revolutionary year of 1848 Palmerston was long on rhetoric but short on action. His rhetoric convinced conservative Europe that he was a dangerous radical. It also won the plaudits of the British radicals, even though Palmerston was a strong Tory in facing the challenges in Britain and Ireland. Henceforth, Palmerston found that he could control the electorate (which in fact he feared) by this John Bull approach.

By the 1860s the balance of forces was changing. The British navy still commanded the seas but Britain's industrial lead was about to be challenged by other powers, especially the USA and Germany. Palmerston's last ministry saw Britain come close to what might have been a disastrous involvement in the American Civil War and Palmerston's bluff over Denmark was called by Bismarck. Britain stood aside from the Austro-Prussian War in 1866. Disraeli put a brave face on it. Britain's abstention, he said, was the result of increased strength, not decline. Britain was no longer ‘a mere European Power’.

There was a more real clash of ideologies between Disraeli and Gladstone than between their predecessors. Gladstone, like Pitt and Castlereagh before him, had a clear vision of how international affairs should be conducted, with all submitting to the rule of law and disputes settled by arbitration, not war. He fought a losing battle for the old self-balancing Vienna system. In Europe he was defeated by Bismarck who created his tight, and dangerous, system of alliances to protect the newly united Germany. Disraeli turned to the empire and made it a Conservative cause.

Britain's acquisition of a new empire in the late 19th cent. is usually seen as defensive, a matter of weakness rather than strength. The old colonies of settlement, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, were becoming increasingly independent. Britain still had a great empire in India and its defence sometimes required further accretions of territory. Ironically, Britain acquired more of Africa, during the Scramble period, under Liberal than under Conservative administrations. The motive was almost always a challenge by another power, usually France or Germany. The rhetoric of Palmerston, Disraeli, and their successors convinced the public of Britain's greatness. Sober statesmen, Lord Salisbury, Balfour, or Grey, knew the dangers of the situation. ‘Splendid isolation’ was not glorious. It was an uncomfortable reality. In 1902 Britain, embarrassed by world reaction to the Boer War and feeling that even the Royal Navy was now overextended in view of the growth of other, particularly the German, fleets, concluded an alliance with Japan. Over the next twelve years she shifted from Salisbury's policy of ‘leaning’ on the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy (the first two, old allies) to close relations (although stopping short of a formal alliance) with her two traditional rivals, France and Russia. The simplest explanation may be correct. Britain could not afford to see Germany defeat France again. She fought Germany in 1914 in defence of a balance of power older than the 19th cent., as she had fought Philip II, Louis XIV, or Napoleon—to stop one power dominating Europe.

Muriel Evelyn Chamberlain

After 1918 Britain was a sated and exhausted country. Though she took mandates under the League of Nations, they proved troublesome: Iraq became independent as early as 1932 and Palestine and Jordan soon after the Second World War. Britain's main concern was the search for security. The alliance which had defeated the central powers had begun to disintegrate even before the Great War ended, as Russia collapsed into revolution and civil war. The USA turned to isolationism, the Anglo-Japanese alliance was not continued after 1922, and France, Britain's main ally, was mistrusted in the 1920s as too belligerent and in the 1930s as too defeatist. The inability of the League of Nations to deal with the Manchurian crisis was an early warning that collective security might offer little protection and was followed in 1933 by the advent to power in Germany of the Nazis. The policy of appeasement, which had many facets, was accompanied by a new search for allies. Though Russia was admitted to the League of Nations in 1934, there was massive mistrust on both sides, and in 1939 Stalin preferred to do a deal with Hitler. Much effort was devoted to wooing Italy, whose strength was overrated, and appeasement of Mussolini brought down one foreign minister, Hoare, in 1935. Under these circumstances, British foreign policy lurched. Having abandoned Czechoslovakia in 1938, Britain gave a guarantee to Poland which could scarcely be honoured.

Many of the same themes re-emerged after the end of the Second World War. Churchill was not alone in wondering before 1939 whether victory, if obtained, would seem much different from defeat. Foreign policy was dogged by economic and financial weakness. In one respect policy was simplified by the pace of de-colonization—Britain shed imperial responsibilities at such speed that protecting the empire soon ceased to be a major consideration. As the shape of the post-war world unfolded, two problems emerged—security in the face of Soviet power and Britain's attitude towards Europe. The first was achieved by the nuclear deterrent, participation in NATO (1949), and a close understanding with the USA, jeopardized only temporarily by the Suez crisis. The debate on Europe, which proved protracted, was governed by three factors. First was that Britain geographically and culturally was half-in and half-out of Europe, and her connections with her former colonies gave her a perspective Germany did not share, and France only partly. Though Churchill himself had spoken in favour of some United States of Europe as early as 1945, he did not envisage Britain as part of it: it was well-meaning advice de haut en bas. The second was that European unity, which began as the simple determination of European powers never to fight each other again, moved through economic collaboration towards political integration. The debate in Britain was often stultified by refusal to identify what ‘Europe’ meant at different stages: the phrase ‘Common Market’, which the British voted to join, masked the political aspirations of many of its continental supporters. The third factor was the timing of Britain's application to join. EFTA (the European Free Trade Association), Britain's immediate response to ‘the six’—a free trade bloc of Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Britain, and Austria—was scarcely a formidable economic force, and clearly a holding operation. Britain's application to join the EEC was vetoed by de Gaulle in 1963 and again in 1967 at a time when a federal Europe was hardly on the agenda and Gaullist France would have been very suspicious. But by the time Britain entered the EEC in 1973, the movement towards political integration was gathering pace. Britain acted as a somewhat ineffective brake, usually doing enough to exasperate the anti-Europeans while not satisfying the enthusiasts for European unity. It was also paradoxical that at a time when many Scots, Welsh, and others were protesting that decisions were always made in remote London, power should be leaking to remoter Brussels. All too often, the rhetoric of British foreign policy appeared to suggest that Britain should be at the very heart of Europe in order to lead it backwards. At the start of the 21st cent., Britain's relations with Europe were still deeply contentious.

J. A. Cannon

Bibliography

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Black, J. , A System of Ambition: British Foreign Policy 1660–1793 (1991);
Bourne, K. , The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830–1902 (Oxford, 1970);
Chamberlain, M. E. , Pax Britannica? British Foreign Policy, 1789–1914 (1988);
Scott, H. M. , British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990);
Seton-Watson, R. W. , Britain in Europe, 1789–1914 (Cambridge, 1945).