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| - By 1841, New Spain was rebounding from the Mexican Revolution well, they continued to build up a powerful fleet and comparable army, they knew they would soon be able to retake Spain from the British, but their was one thing they didn't have, allies. The obvious answer was they turned to the Portuguese and Dutch governments who had been put into colonial exile by the British as well and had the resources of their own to make a comeback, and in early 1838, they signed a secret document which merged a majority of their armed forces together to create a unified force against the British. By early 1841, they were ready to strike back against the British, and so they did, on March 17, 1841, the unified armed forces and their exiled governments declared war on Britain and the Iberian peninsula a
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| abstract
| - By 1841, New Spain was rebounding from the Mexican Revolution well, they continued to build up a powerful fleet and comparable army, they knew they would soon be able to retake Spain from the British, but their was one thing they didn't have, allies. The obvious answer was they turned to the Portuguese and Dutch governments who had been put into colonial exile by the British as well and had the resources of their own to make a comeback, and in early 1838, they signed a secret document which merged a majority of their armed forces together to create a unified force against the British. By early 1841, they were ready to strike back against the British, and so they did, on March 17, 1841, the unified armed forces and their exiled governments declared war on Britain and the Iberian peninsula and the Netherlands were invaded. The British army was moderately stretched out in the Iberian, usually they would be on the north side of the peninsula to defend from a possible French invasion, making the reaction to the invasion slow and somewhat ineffective. On the other hand, the British army in the Netherlands was easier to control and more flexible, but the number was far smaller than the number of Dutch troops. One thing the British had an obvious advantage of was their navy was larger and more well-equipped than the invaders, and using their naval power they were able to bring in more men in the last few months of the year via sea. The French, obviously against the British, opted out of fighting the British in Europe, instead they decided to help out the invaders in their own way, by invading eastern Canada, which was mostly French-speaking and felt separatist sentiment towards the British. They began this operation in April of 1841 when an army of 100,000 men, including cavalry, cannons, and the emperor himself, Napoleon II, to lead the army against the overstretched British army and navy. They landed in Halifax in early May and took the city without much of a fight, and then the army, little diminished by the trans-oceanic crossing, moved north to push on in order to capture Quebec and the majority of western Canada . The Canadian summer made for a perfect campaigning season as the French not only marched through Canada almost unopposed, but by the time the British found out, they had already captured the entire east coast of Canada, spare the north islands. When 1843 came around, the war was looking grim for the British, they were quickly losing land to the invaders fast and Canada was being consumed by the French more and more each day, and worse, in April 1843, the United States declared war on the British and moved to invade western Canada themselves. In the Iberian peninsula, Lisbon had already been recovered by the Portuguese, but Madrid, the traditional capital of Spain, was still now under British hands, as it had been switching sides constantly during the last year, but was now secured by the British. News was looking slightly grimmer in the Netherlands as British reinforcements arrived in late 1842 from Britain and now were set to fight the Dutch with a united and well-controlled army that had defeated the Dutch several times in northern Holland and they now controlled Amsterdam. Luck was the opposite in Canada, the French have moved west to conquer more and more of Canada in the east, while the Americans had been taking more and more land in the western part of Canada. When came around, the war seemed lost for the invaders in Europe, but they both were ready for one final, desperate, push against the British that was a huge gamble, and would likely have a low success rate. In March of 1844, as soon as the Dutch and Spanish-Portuguese armies could, they moved against the British, pushing with amazing speed towards Madrid and Amsterdam, the British were stunned on both fronts and both cities fell after a short siege, and by September, the British were forced to make peace. In Canada, more and more of it was being taken by the Americans and the French, but the arrival of British reinforcements in mid-1844, brought the advances to a halt, and the ensuing stalemate forced a peace later in the year. In the, what would soon be called, Treaty of Copenhagen, Britain was forced to recognize Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands as independent states, while also being forced to give chunks of Canada to America and France. The Americans also struck a deal with the French and the British, the French would be given Quebec City and Montreal as major cities for the new French colony of Quebec, and the British would be given back Ottawa and Toronto as to have proper cities for Canada back in British hands, though the amount they had to pay the Americans for the deal wasn't cheap, it made up for some of the losses of men and land during the war, one the British would not soon forget.
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