At the start of the 20th Century, there had been years of preparation. Adrienne du Motier, the French Marquise de la Fayette, had been preparing weapons, radicalising the populace, and drafting the battle lines for the beginning of an Anarchist revolution in Albion, with the help of the Scythian exile, Nestor Makhno.

The first shot of the war was fired outside the White Horse pub in Dover port. An officer of the Albian Constabulary, James Higgins, shot and killed the fifteen year old Pearl Cameron after a physical scuffle. Within an hour, nearly a hundred men were wounded, spread across both sides, and a dozen had died. From the shattered second-storey window of the White Horse, a flare was lit, the first spark of the Albian Revolution.

The revolution soon engulfed the rest of the country, from the southernmost ports to the former Pictish lands. Even to the west, the Eireann subjects rebelled. By 1905, a militia of men, demigods and demons stood united against the Constabulary. The Navy, Albion's biggest fighting force, was unable to reach the country, being caught in a war against the Songhai in Northern Africa.