As will by now be evident, Anglo-Danish political relations during the period covered by British Romanticism and Denmark were defined, to a very considerable extent, by the events of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: by the two British attacks on Copenhagen in 1801 and 1807, and by the British role in the drawing up of the Treaty of Kiel and the subsequent forced cession of Norway to Sweden in 1814 – an outcome which Murray’s Hand-Book for Travellers (1839) characterised as ‘a death blow to the prosperity of Denmark, and a transaction but little reputable to England’. To these calamities, must be added the bankruptcy of the Danish state in 1813, a consequence of the expensive war with Britain and the attendant loss of trade and overseas revenue, a scenario anticipated by, among many others, the Scottish prisoner of war James MacDonald (1771–1810), who remarks in his Travels in 1810 that ‘Denmark cannot possibly maintain, for any length of time, her present establishments. Her credit is almost annihilated, and all her resources are in rapid decline.’

As we have also seen, the flowering of Romanticism and Romantic nationalism in Denmark – the so-called ‘Golden Age’ in literature, painting and music – has been linked by scholars and historians to a turning inwards towards national landscapes and vernacular cultural forms in the wake of this diminishing Danish presence on the European stage, to Denmark having ‘lost its importance as a European power’, as Murray’s Hand-Book puts it. For all their undoubted significance, however, the events of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars do not by any means delimit the extent of British engagement with Danish political life during the period covered by this book. Conversely, before a single shot was fired on Copenhagen Roads in April 1801, British writers had expressed considerable interest in what Joseph Marshall (dates unknown) had described in his Travels (1776) as ‘no trifling kingdom’. Within this extensive British discourse about Danish politics, three main focal points are visible: the nature and effects of absolute monarchy in Denmark; the collapse and aftermath of the marriage between Christian VII of Denmark (1749–1808) and Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (1751–75), sister of the future George III of England (1738–1820); and the extent and value of Danish territorial possessions overseas, including Danish involvement with the slave trade.