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Hello, in 1903 an Englishman called Charles Carruthers went sailing in the North Sea and stumbled on a German military plot. The cunning plan was to invade the British hours from the Frisian Islands using special barges. The plucky Carruthers foiled the plot and then returned to his sailing holiday.

This isn't history but fiction, an immensely popular book called Riddle of the Sands. It was a prescient vision of two nations soon to fight the First World War, but it went against the spirit of a previous century. The British and the Germans fought together at Waterloo in 1815 and it influenced profoundly each other's thought and art. They even shared a royal family.

Yet somehow, victory at Waterloo and the shared glories of romanticism became a mutual tragedy of the song. With me to discuss the highs and lows of British-Sharmonen relations across the 19th century, at Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European Pean History at the University of Cambridge, Resmiation, Kwane Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London, and Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.

Richard Evans, can we start with the Battle of Waterloo. The British and Prussian armies jointly defeated the French in 1815 and that's represented in a huge painting in the House of Lords of Wellington, shaking hands with Boucher on the field of battle at the time of victory. Can you explain the geopolitics behind that alliance?

Yes, of course Napoleon had conquered the greater part of Europe and there were various coalitions and alliances that were put together to try and defeat him. Finally, a large one succeeded, drove him out of France in 1814, he came back the next year in 1815 after the restored French monarch he had proved very unpopular.

Another coalition was put together and Duke of Wellington was put in charge of the armies to defeat Napoleon's hastily-raised forces and he was able to hold the field for the day but couldn't actually drive Napoleon off until the Prussians arrived under General Plutia and that was the signal for the general advance.

And of course, subsequently to that, Wellington rather cleverly persuaded everybody, it was just the British who'd won the Battle of Waterloo but in fact the Prussians were the decisive factor towards the end of it.

So they're part of a much larger coalition and I think we often read back later history into this period and think of the Prussians as being extremely important and powerful but actually rather small, not very wealthy nation in 1815.

It's really Austrian who are calling the shots in this kind of thing and who dominate the first half of the 19th century in the kind of re-restructured central Europe.

The great thing that happens to Prussia is the peace settlement, it gets the Rhine land which is a wealthy area and proves then decisive I think in giving them resources later on in the century to push forward to German unification.

So that's the kind of general picture and general pattern.

We're going to have to tell ourselves that we're going to call this place Germany for this program but if you explain that it wasn't Germany as we...

Yeah, Germany was not united until 1871, it's a set of different independent states which are in a loose kind of confederation.

But British people who talked about Germany of course were well aware of this and often distinguished Prussia as a rather military state from other parts of Germany like Pferia or Weston Germany which they thought would be less military and perhaps even in some ways more civilized.

And all the little principalities, there's no scores of them, aren't they?

Yes, they're satirized memorably in Thackeray's Vanity Fair of course where they bickie shop in the heroin or anti-hero in ends up in Pumpernickel and Thackeray has great fun with talking about the vanity and snobbery of the people in this tiny state to take themselves from the series and they ought to.

Nevertheless, returning to this painting, perhaps I shouldn't but it's interesting you said there was a small force that came towards the end but they were given equal prominence.

Was there a feeling there was an important kinship here that should be exemplified in this great memorial painting?

I'm not sure, I mean I'm like you Melbourne, I don't visit the House of Lords very frequently so I don't need very dimly recall this painting.

I think it symbolizes the moment of victory, that's what it's really about. It's not about some larger kind of kinship or affinity between Britain and Prussia though.

There were of course people who did in Britain who did think there was the very strong affinities particularly in terms of religion of certain kind of Protestantism and certain kind of tolerance of the Catholic minority as well within Prussia.

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