Riding for a fall | 8 March 2018

On 20 July 1805, just three months before the battle of Trafalgar destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet, the Emperor Napoleon ordered his chief-of-staff to ‘embark everything’ for the invasion of England that he had been dreaming of for two years. ‘My intention is to land at four different points,’ he explained to Berthier, ‘at a short distance from one another… Inform the four marshals there is not an instant to be lost.’

While there is possibly no saga in his whole astonishing career — Russia included — that so vividly exposes the curious and almost wilful blind spots in Bonaparte’s make-up, his enemies would have done well to pay closer attention. It is impossible to say if the invasion was ever more than fantasy; but those two years since the collapse of the Treaty of Amiens had not been wasted, and just a month after that letter to Berthier, the Army of the Ocean Coast, which for month after month had been trained and drilled and hardened and forged into the greatest army Europe had ever seen, turned its back on its channel camps and England to march on a world hopelessly ill-prepared to face it.