But America was bound by its league with the Bourbon Courts to make no peace save one common to its allies, and from its allies peace was hard to win without concessions which would have stripped from England all that remained of her older greatness. With the revolt of Ireland and the surrender of Cornwallis the hopes of her enemies rose high. Spain refused to suspend hostilities at any other price than the surrender of Gibraltar; while France proposed that England should give up all her Indian conquests save Bengal. The triumph of the Bourbons indeed seemed secure. If terms like these were accepted the world-empire of Britain was at an end. Stripped of her Colonies in America, stripped of her rule in India, matched on the very ocean by rival fleets, England sank back into a European State, into the England of the first Georges. And yet there seemed little chance of her holding out against the demands of such a league as fronted her at a moment when her military power was paralysed by the attitude of Ireland. But the true basis of her world-power lay on the sea. It was by her command of the sea that such an empire could alone be possible; nor was it possible so long as she commanded the sea for all the armies of the Bourbon powers to rob her of it. And at this moment the command of the seas again became her own. On the 16th of January 1780 Admiral Rodney, the greatest of English seamen save Nelson and Blake, encountered the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, and only four of its vessels escaped to Cadiz. At the opening of 1782 the triumphs of the French admiral De Grasse called him to the West Indies; and on the 12th of April a manoeuvre which he was the first to introduce broke his opponent's line, and drove the French fleet shattered from the Atlantic. With Rodney's last victory the struggle of the Bourbons was really over, for no means remained of attacking their enemy save at Gibraltar, and here a last attack of the joint force gathered against it was repulsed by the heroism of Elliott. Nor would America wait any longer for the satisfaction of her allies. In November her commissioners signed the preliminaries of a peace in which Britain reserved to herself on the American continent only Canada and the island of Newfoundland; and acknowledged without reserve the independence of the United States. [Sidenote: England and the United States.]