For much of 1803 and 1804, even as a state of war existed between France and the U.K., no battles occurred. The London government was busy pursuing alliances, and the army in France was busy building up an invasion fleet. A large army numbering 200,000 trained at Boulogne, Brues, and Montreuil. French engineers and soldiers, along with allies from the Batavian Republic, designed and built invasion barges.

Knowing this, the U.K. army fortified their defenses along the coast nearest France, including augmenting existing fortifications and building new ones and cutting the Royal Military Canal, a 28-mile obstacle to any enemy army. As well, U.K. ships continued their blockade of French coastlines and even raided the port of Boulogne in October 1804.

Spain had joined France during the War of the Second Coalition and had fought against British forces in the West Indies, with little success; Britain had furthered its dominance by instituting a blockade of Spain as well as of France. The Treaty of Amiens resulted in the lifting of that blockade, but the declaration of war in 1803 brought it back. As a result, Spanish ships sailed with French ships in an extensive feint designed to remove the U.K. Royal Navy from the English Channel.

The plan was for the fleets, one French and the other Franco-Spanish, to break through the blockade and cross the Atlantic, to threaten U.K. interests there (much like Bonaparte's plan to divert Britain's attention in 1798 by invading Egypt). One of the fleets made it to its destination, but the other did not; as a result, the U.K. ships shadowing the Franco-Spanish fleet had less to worry about. Another part of the plan that fell through was a planned invasion of Ireland on the way back: When the rendezvous didn't happen, the Franco-Spanish fleet sailed straight back, breaking through the blockade again in order to put in at port. The naval sorties accomplished a whole lot of nothing for France, and Bonaparte, who had overseen an unsuccessful test of the invasion barges some weeks before, abandoned the plan to invade the U.K. and instead directed the large number of troops that had been dedicated to that purpose to pack up and head east.

Those orders came in August. The French and Spanish fleets, meanwhile, were still in the west, still hemmed in by the British blockade. The French and Spanish ships that had made it through the British blockade had to put in at Ferrol, in the south. Their new orders were to sail north, to the northern port of Brest. Villeneuve instead sailed south, to the Spanish harbor of Cádiz, ostensibly to put in for repairs.

U.K. Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, who had shadowed Villeneuve's fleet through the Atlantic after first assuming that it was had headed back to Egypt and then been blown off course by a sudden storm, had been on shore leave when he heard that the Franco-Spanish fleet was massing in Cádiz. A large number of ships from the Royal Navy under the command of Vice-Admiral Robert Calder were already en route; these ships had been the ones to go into battle against the Villeneuve's returning ships. Calder's ships reached Cádiz on September 15, and Nelson arrived 13 days later.

In the resulting Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson inflicted a crippling blow on the French naval force (even though Nelson himself lost his life). In practical terms, the U.K. blockade of France and Spain continued. The naval strength of those two nations was not again able to sustain any kind of large-scale battle against the U.K. or any other naval power.

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