Although the Battle of Trafalgar ended any realistic chance of a French invasion of England it was many years before Napoleon entirely abandoned his invasion plans. As late as November 1811 he was instructing Decrès, his Minister of the Marine, to keep 500 of the landing craft in good repair because he thought that the invasion threat would always be a powerful means of influencing Britain. He frequently spoke of the invasion of England during his voyage to Elba in 1814, and continued to dwell on the subject when he was exiled to St Helena. In one of his conversations on that remote island he said that he would have lured the British fleet away to the West Indies as originally planned but would have held command of the Channel with seventy ships of the line for two months rather than the two or three days he thought necessary when he was at Boulogne in 1805. He said he would have landed as near Chatham as possible, with twice as many men as the number he actually assembled at Boulogne, and would have reached London in four days. 'I should have proclaimed a republic, the abolition of the nobility and house of peers, the distribution of the property of such of the latter as opposed me amongst my partisans, liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people. I should have allowed the House of Commons to remain; but should have introduced great reforms.' When the British fleet came back, 'they would have found their capital in the hands of an enemy, and their country overwhelmed by my armies.'
More ominous than the invasion threat in the autumn of 1805 was the manner in which Napoleon swept aside all opposition on the continent. Two days before Trafalgar he had defeated an Austrian army under General Mack at Ulm. On 14 November he entered Vienna. At Austerlitz on 2 December a French army of 70,000 men routed an army of 86,000 Austrians and Russians. More than 18,000 Russian bodies were counted on the field after the battle. William Pitt, who had patiently assembled one coalition of allies after another to fight Napoleon's armies, saw his work in ruins. His famous remark, 'Roll up the map of Europe: it will not be wanted these ten years' proved to be all too true.
In July 1806 Napoleon became Protector of the newly created Confederation of the Rhine. In October he defeated the Prussians and Saxons at Jena and entered Berlin. He was now in a strong position to attack Britain by another means. On 21 November he issued the Berlin Decrees which inaugurated the Continental System. All the countries in the French Empire, including the subdued German states, were forbidden to trade with Britain. In January 1807 Britain retaliated with Orders in Council, which forbade neutral ships from trading between French ports. In view of Britain's command of the seas this was likely to do more harm to France than the Berlin Decrees were to do to Britain, but in June 1807 Napoleon's Grand Army crushed the Russians and Prussians at Friedland. The humiliated rulers, Alexander I of Russia and Frederick William II of Prussia, met Napoleon on a raft on the River Niemann to discuss terms. On 9 July France, Russia and Prussia signed the Treaty of Tilsit which extended the Continental System and meant that most of the ports of northern Europe, including those in the Baltic, were now closed to British ships. This was the most serious blow of all because it struck not only at Britain's rich trade with the continent, but also had the potential to cripple her navy.
Although the hull of the Bellerophon and those of most British warships built in the 1780s were entirely constructed of British oak and elm, their masts and spars came from the Baltic. Indeed for more than a century Britain had been dependent on foreign imports of masts and spars as well as other essential naval supplies such as hemp, sailcloth, tallow, turpentine, tar and pitch. Most of the timber came from the vast forests of Russia. The logs were hauled on sledges drawn by horses or oxen to the nearest river and were floated downstream to the ports in the form of huge rafts. The port of Riga had the reputation for shipping the best timber for masts but fine timber was also shipped from Memel, Danzig and elsewhere. The trade in mast timber and other naval stores was immense and Baltic convoys frequently consisted of anything between 600 and 1,000 merchant ships.
All the Baltic convoys had to pass through the Sound, the narrow entrance to the Baltic which was commanded by the guns of Copenhagen. So concerned was Britain by the threat to her navy that within weeks of the Treaty of Tilsit the British Admiralty despatched a massive fleet under Admiral Gambier to Denmark and laid siege to the Danish capital. Confronted by a force of 25 ships of the line, more than 40 frigates, sloops and bomb vessels, and 377 transport ships with 27,000 troops on board, the Danes had no chance. Once subjected to a bombardment which threatened to set the city on fire, the Danes surrendered their entire fleet and the dockyard at Copenhagen on 7 September 1807. The following spring Admiral Saumarez was sent to the Baltic with a powerful fleet to ensure the continued protection of the Baltic convoys. He remained there for much of the next four years, only returning home in the winter months when most of the Baltic ports were closed by ice. The Bellerophon joined the Baltic fleet during the summer of 1809 and her crew took part in two cutting-out expeditions. These were attacks made with boats on enemy shipping which, for sheer heroism in the face of enemy fire, might be straight from the pages of the Hornblower books or the novels of Patrick O'Brian.
On 8 June 1808 Captain Samuel Warren had taken over command of the Bellerophon from Captain Rotheram and the ship was ordered to join the North Sea fleet. The North Sea station extended from Selsey Bill to the Shetlands and the various squadrons of the fleet operated from the Downs, the Nore and Great Yarmouth. With most of northern Europe now dominated by France, and with Napoleon's brother Louis Bonaparte installed as King of Holland, a key role for the North Sea fleet was to blockade the ports of Holland and Belgium and prevent the Dutch Navy from putting to sea. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1808 the Bellerophon was stationed off the sand dunes of Holland between Camperdown and Texel Island. This was an area which had seen some famous naval actions in the past but it proved an uneventful time for the Bellerophon's crew. They could see the masts of the Dutch fleet moored in the Texel anchorage and watch the distinctive Dutch fishing boats being launched off the beaches, and then it was back to the Yarmouth or the Downs to take on water and provisions.
The following year the Bellerophon sailed to the Baltic and joined the fleet commanded by Admiral Saumarez. In these waters Russia was now the enemy and, because Russia had invaded and annexed Finland in February 1808, this meant that any vessels encountered along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic were likely to be hostile. During the evening of 19 June 1809 the Bellerophon was cruising off Hango on the coast of Finland, in company with the Minotaur, when three suspicious-looking luggers were spotted in an anchorage sheltered by offshore islands. The waters were too shallow for the two British warships and so they dropped anchor in 21 fathoms and a party of armed men was despatched in the ships' boats to attack the luggers. It was a calm night and they encountered no opposition until they had boarded and taken possession of the three vessels. They then discovered they were in a trap. Overlooking and protecting the anchorage was a Russian gun battery which began to bombard them with round and grape shot. There were other batteries on the more distant islands and a number of Russian gunboats anchored in the vicinity.