In 1793, the French revolutionary government declared war on Great Britain, adding fear of foreign invasion to that of domestic insurrection and leading to near panic in London. The regular British Army, which had already deployed six brigades alongside the Austrian army in the Netherlands, was not sufficient to defend the country, and the main military reserve, the militia, was considered neither effective nor trustworthy. It had been demobilised at the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, and in the intervening decade it had been subject to cost-cutting measures that had left it deficient. It was embodied in 1792 as a precautionary measure against insurrection, but a body recruited predominantly from among the working class was itself suspect, to the extent that militia units were not trusted to be deployed in their own areas of recruitment until 1795. The government had previously resorted to volunteers to augment its forces in 1779, amid fears of a Franco-Spanish invasion, though this was short-lived and did not long survive the end of the war in the colonies. Considering that there was not enough time to address the militia's deficiencies, the government turned again to volunteers to bolster the nation's defences in 1794.