In the aftermath of a generation of war a high priority for the British government was to reduce spending, and a bloated Royal Navy was one of the main targets for slimming. For the next twenty years the number of ships and men was kept low, assisted by the fact that another result of the great wars was that no other country was in the mood to issue any challenges to the navy that had performed so well, and whose politicians insisted that they ruled the waves. During those wars several eighteenth-century navies had been so reduced that they had become negligible in terms of power. The Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Spanish navies were each reduced to a few line-of-battle ships and little more. Only the French and Russian navies had a force capable of looking the Royal Navy in the eye. So in 1823 when George Canning insisted that the European powers not interfere in the South American rebellions, he did so from the knowledge that Britain had the power to stop any force attempting to cross the Atlantic – a more effective deterrent than the hot air of the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ that came from the United States. In 1830 Britain had eighty-two line-of-battle ships and a hundred cruisers; the rest of Europe (six countries) could produce only ninety-nine line-of-battle ships between them. The largest single fleet after the British was the Russian, and that was divided between two seas (thirty-one and sixteen line-of-battle ships) with France next (thirty-three line-of-battle ships).

It is therefore not surprising that it was Russia and France that largely occupied the attention of the Foreign Office. France, however, was generally friendly for several years, in part because its post-Napoleonic regime of Bourbon kings and the Orleanist Louis Philippe was unstable; British support helped the kings stay in power at least until the mid-1830s. Russia, however, by the 1830s was perceived as Britain’s primary enemy, in part because it was thought to be a threat to India.

Ambassadors and consuls and visiting naval officers kept a watch on the Russian ships, but were rarely impressed by what they saw.