Britain's entry into the war on 1 February, 1793 presented the British government with the usual eighteenth-century problem of having rapidly to augment its armed forces from their low peacetime numbers, since– in peacetime– Britain maintained a very small military establishment by the standards of most contemporary European powers. In 1792, the strength of the British Army was in the region of 45,000 men, and there were fewer than 31,000 militiamen in England and Wales. No militia force existed in Scotland, and the Irish militia had been allowed to lapse. The Royal Navy was in better shape, having enjoyed substantial spending on ships-of-theline by the Pitt government following the American War of Independence and, although the majority of battleships were not in commission, the navy could be mobilised to full strength at relatively short notice. In addition to all the usual rigours of bringing the armed forces up to strength, however, the outbreak of war in 1793 also presented the British state with the new phenomenon of mass arming and a mass army, in the form of the introduction of conscription in France in the late summer of 1792, and the subsequent levée en masse in the autumn of the same year. Supposedly consisting of soldiers fighting for themselves and in their own interest, the new French mass armies which repulsed the allied counter-offensive in November 1792 opened up a whole new scenario of warfare where the old professional and relatively small armies of the eighteenth century would soon be rendered obsolete. The response of the British government was eventually to create– or at least to attempt to create– what J. E. Cookson has labelled an ‘armed nation’, in which the whole population would be drawn upon for defensive purposes. This strategy was not without its risks. As Linda Colley has argued: ‘to beat the French, the British had been required to imitate the French, and the challenge this presented to its old order was potentially corrosive’. Was copying the French the right way to defeat the French? The question facing the British authorities was in other words whether they could safely arm a large proportion of the British population, without running the risk of potentially creating an armed opposition. As we will see, the dire needs of war meant that they took the chance, and performed what Austin Gee has denoted a ‘leap in the dark’.