ABSTRACT
Once peace was negotiated with France and Spain, there was no sense of calm, security and order among British policymakers or in the public debate. Continental counterparts argued that the British had overthrown the balance of power outside Europe while pressing for it prominently in Europe, a contrast seen in terms of Perfidious Albion. Alongside the sense that Britain, like some latter-day imperial Rome, risked corruption and weakness through expansion, came the idea that France and Spain would seek to reverse their recent defeat because they had an inherent opposing stance to British policy. British isolation in the American War of Independence apparently fits into a pattern that had begun with George III's rejection of the Prussian alliance in 1761-2. And that had continued with a subsequent refusal to accept Russian requirements for an alliance, as well as with the rebuff of French approaches for joint action against the First Partition of Poland of 1772 by Austria, Prussia and Russia.
