Spain Declares War on Britain
Spain declared war on Britain in June 1779 without recognising American independence. The reasoning was Bourbon and territorial rather than ideological. Charles III wanted Gibraltar back, taken in 1704 and ceded at Utrecht; Minorca; and the Floridas, lost in 1763. He also had a colonial empire of his own and no wish to endorse the principle that colonies may declare themselves independent, which is why the alliance was with France under the Convention of Aranjuez rather than with the United States. France undertook not to make peace until Gibraltar was recovered, which is an obligation that shaped the whole endgame. Spanish participation was strategically decisive without a single battle in North America mattering much. The combined fleets outnumbered the Royal Navy for the first time in the century and forced Britain to keep ships in home waters against an invasion scare in 1779, when some 30,000 troops were assembled at Le Havre and a Franco-Spanish fleet entered the Channel. The Great Siege of Gibraltar ran for three years and seven months and tied down substantial resources on both sides. In North America, Bernardo de Gálvez took Baton Rouge, Mobile and Pensacola from the British and secured the Gulf coast, and Spain supplied money and powder up the Mississippi. At the peace Spain got Minorca and the Floridas and not Gibraltar, and spent the following decades regretting the precedent, which its own colonies used from 1810. The precedent was the part Spain could not contain. Its American colonies watched a European power lose a continent to a colonial rebellion supported by rivals, and thirty years later used exactly the same conditions when Napoleon removed the Spanish king.
- Year: 1779 CE
- Category: Political
