There were several attempts by the British and their allies to to land a sizable army in either France or the Low Countries during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. None of them really succeeded.

The most famous invasion attempt was that Quiberon Bay in Brittany in 1795. The RN escorted a group of emigre Frenchmen and associated troops along with three British regiments to the peninsula whereupon the emigres immediately began to squabble while the Republic was able to gather up a sizable force to crush the Royalist landing. The debacle as well as the Republic's mass execution of captured emigres was a significant embarrassment to the Pitt Ministry and was only one of a number of recent reverses in the British war effort.

The Helder expedition of 1799 to northern Holland fared only a little little better than Quiberon. A joint Anglo-Russian strike force assembled in the British isles and invaded the Low Countries in August. Much like at Quiberon, the forces under the Prince Frederick, the Duke of York, were able to make some initial progress and British naval superiority was unquestioned. But the expedition faltered as it moved inland as flooded dykes and stiffening Franco-Dutch resistance forced York to retreat. The Anglo-Russian force soon found itself in an untenable situation and signed a capitulation that allowed for an orderly retreat of the forces out of the Low Countries. As with Quiberon, the waste in lives and material for so little gain caused another row in Parliament. The Helder expedition possibly gave origin to the nursery rhyme "The Grand Old Duke of York" which is about the seesawing fortune.

These failures paled before the Walcheren invasion of 1809. The Castlereagh had decided to launch the most well-prepared assault of some 40000 troops on French-controlled Europe with the twin goals of both destroying the French-controlled port of Antwerp and to aid the Austrians in their fight with the French and their allies. The campaign achieved neither of these goals. Delays in getting the invasion fleet prepared meant Austria was effectively out of the war by the time the British force landed in late July. Again, a pattern repeated itself wherein British naval superiority allowed the British to land troops, but the land component of the invasion floundered after initial gains and the French regained their footing. The choice of an invasion site- the Schledt estuary- may have been suitable to knock out Antwerp, but was a poor place for sustained land operations. The marshy terrain was a breeding ground for disease and some 4000 men were killed of "Walcheren Fever," which most likely was either malaria or typhus. The prolonged and indecisive ended in September with Antwerp still intact and held by the French and the expedition's troops cut to ribbons by disease. The waste of so much treasure and lives contributed to the fall of the Portland government and a renewed interest in the only real British gains in 1809: the victories in the Iberian Peninsula. While many in the British government expected Walcheren to be decisive, it was Wellington's victories at Talavera and the establishment of a secure base of operations in Portugal that proved to be the future for British operations on the continent.

This pattern of failures underscores how difficult amphibious landings were in the age of sail. Mounting an Overlord-style landing simply was not possible with the ships of this period. They simply could not land enough men and material to be decisive on their own. Walcheren was perhaps the best organized landing of its type, and it failed completely. Part of the failure of these amphibious operations was that they all counted on some sort of political result that was not forthcoming. The Quiberon landing's leaders expected a Vendee-style Royalist uprising while the Anglo-Russian landing needed Prussian and Swedish support. The number of troops that sailing ships could land was limited and it was difficult to coordinate with would-be allies on the continent. While the British found that their naval superiority allowed them great freedom to land troops on the continent, anything more ambitious than a limited raid was simply out of their capabilities to sustain.